Enemy of Entropy

Books People Don’t Read

26 April 2008, 6:58 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Education, Memes, Reading.

Taken from

These are the 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-​​rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, under­line the ones you read for school, ital­i­cize the ones you started but didn’t fin­ish.
Read on…

Book Joy! And Stuff

29 March 2008, 10:32 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Art, Health, Reading.

I’m so tick­led! In the last two weeks, I’ve found not one, but two books that Sam and I have wanted for ages at good prices on eBay!

Seeing Red
First, I’ve been look­ing for
See­ing Red: The Rap­ture of Red­heads by Howard Schatz for years and years. Seri­ously, it has to be at least five years since Sam first men­tioned that he’d love to have it. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s out of print, and the only thing I found for the longest time were used copies for $150 or more. It’s a gor­geous book, but that’s far more than I could pay for it.

I had the book on my wish list at Half​.com, which is part of eBay, but for some rea­son I also set up an eBay search a few months back, and finally got found a copy going for $35.1 I didn’t hap­pen to see the email until a day later, and by then the seller had dropped the price fur­ther for some rea­son. It was more than I pay for most books, but after five years, it was more than worth it. We received it in the mail ear­lier this week, and it is just a beau­ti­ful as any new copy.

Your Guide to Metabolic Health
That gave me an idea, so I set up a search for another book I’ve wanted for a while, but couldn’t afford. John C. Lowe’s tome Your Guide to Meta­bolic Health came out in 2003, and I haven’t ever found it in stock any­where. It must have gone out of stock quickly, because Ama­zon has only ever had used copies that I’ve seen. And again, they were always pricey — $180 was the price I’d seen most recently.2

Today, eBay came through again! The “buy it now” price was very rea­son­able, so Sam encour­aged me to go ahead and get it instead of chanc­ing the auc­tion route.

Dr. Lowe has also writ­ten another book that’s specif­i­cally about the meta­bolic treat­ment of fibromyal­gia, but it runs over $500. Appar­ently, that one is intended for physi­cians, rather than laypeo­ple. I have an eBay search going, but I’m fairly cer­tain the book I bought today has the infor­ma­tion I need in it. From what I’ve heard, it’s mainly about fibromyal­gia and chronic fatigue syn­drome.3

Keep Working Girlfriend
I’m busily read­ing my ARC of Women, Work and Autoim­mune Dis­ease: Keep Work­ing, Girl­friend! It’s good stuff.

1 For what it’s worth, Half​.com still shows only the higher prices. Weird.

2 It’s avail­able more cheaply now, but I still got a deal.

3 Aha — the pub­lisher actu­ally sells the lat­est ver­sion of that one for $99.95. Why would any­body pay the used price? Why do the used sell­ers think they can demand so much?

Bookcase Bedroom!

5 March 2008, 11:32 pm. 5 Comments. Filed under Home, Reading.



New tiles for the Uroko house

Orig­i­nally uploaded by akamé

I sup­pose it could be called a Book­case Tree, because of its iasic deis­ngn. It wouldn’t be the best choice of design for sleep­ing quar­ters for a claus­tro­phone lke me, and pro­crati­na­tors wpuld find it even harder to quit read­ing and go to sleep. I would love to have this for a lit­tle one

Stairway to Heaven

20 February 2008, 11:10 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Home, Reading.

Warn­ing: The fol­low­ing photo may engen­der extreme reac­tions in bib­lio­philes. View with cau­tion.
Read on…

Sunday, T-​​a-​​Day3

3 February 2008, 11:29 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Blogging, College, Geekery, Reading.

I did more web­i­fy­ing today, and got all happy because I resolved a tem­plate prob­lem. I don’t “know” php, as in I don’t write my own scripts. I’m learn­ing more and more about it work­ing with other people’s tem­plates, and have got­ten to where I can mix and match from dif­fer­ent tem­plates to get the effects I want. I also spent some time in mysql, try­ing to clean up some of this site’s tables to make it load faster.

I also read a lit­tle, and I’m really, really try­ing to fin­ish the book I’m on before div­ing into the deli­cious stack of books my sweetie brought home from the library for me. I wrapped up the week’s class assign­ments, too. I wanted to stitch, but I was attacked by a rogue nap.

My project man­age­ment teacher released the study guide for the final, which is 3 – 4 weeks away (you can do it any time dur­ing week 8, and we just fin­ished week 4). Um, does any­body really study that far in advance? I’ve never been very dis­ci­plined about studying.

Sam is edit­ing a chap­ter of Fledg­ling, which he re-​​recorded because he was dis­pleased with the sound qual­ity. He edited Square One ear­lier. Sorry, Hope, but I don’t think he got to record the lat­est chap­ter of Heart of the Hunter :-(

It’s still Feb­ru­ary, right? The tem­per­a­ture was way up in the 70s today! It’s back down to 50 now — out­side. Inside, the temp is still too hot for sleep­ing com­fort­ably. Pout.

Are there any Word­Press geeks read­ing this? I could have sworn that I saw a plug-​​in that allowed com­menters to send a pri­vate mes­sage to a blog’s owner, sort of like hav­ing com­ments screened in LJ except that the owner doesn’t ever (couldn’t, as I under­stand it) make the “whis­per” pub­lic. I can’t find such a thing in the offi­cial plu­gin repos­i­tory at Word​Press​.org, though. Any­body know of such a thing? I don’t want to use a com­ment form, because of secu­rity con­cerns.1

1 All the com­ment plu­g­ins and forms I’ve seen use the web host to send the mes­sage, instead of the sender’s out­go­ing mail server, mak­ing it harder to get any­thing done about inap­pro­pri­ate messages.

 

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