“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.”
Here’s a walkthrough of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water done in the game Half Life 2. They could have chosen a better walking path - they missed the outside brook at the entrance passing under a glass wall. Even with low-quality YouTube video this is impressive and immersive. The water effects and doors opening make it seem real.
Sketchup produces walkthroughs, but they seem dead and lifeless compared to this.
Bookmooch is a non-commercial site to exchange used books. Every book is worth a point regardless of weight/cost. There are no transaction fees from the site, and the site peformance is very snappy. I’m going to give it a try - rack up some points by getting rid of old books.
I’ve installed the MoochBar - a bookmarklet which does a lookup on any page with an ISBN.
There’s a glut Dan of Brown books, especially Da Vinci Code. Blink from Malcolm Gladwell is the opposite - 1 copy available, 13 want it. There are 2 possibilities for this - people are holding onto their copies to 1) reread, or 2) impress visitors. I suspect #2
I’m pretty lazy when it comes to the analog world; I’ll have to work hard to be a good shipper. The preferred shipping method is Media Mail $1.59 for one pound. Shipping tips are in this thread - bookbear suggests:
Wrap the book in plastic wrap or a clean plastic grocery bag
Wrap printer paper with address around the book
Tape well with transparent shipping tape - covering the entire book helps it “slide through the sorting machines better”.
Put postage outside the tape.
Finally, the idea of MoochFests is brilliant. I’ve had this idea for several years, hope it catches on:
Q. This sounds somewhat like a peer-to-peer network (though without any copying). Do you think P2P is a useful analogy? Do you see any benefit to creating BookMooch-funded ’supernodes’ in different countries which provide a large repository of books?
A. Yes! That’s exactly right, it was inspired by Bittorrent. Instead of funded SuperNodes, I was thinking of “MoochFests” where a group of people meet physically, say at a cafe, to exchange a pile of books they’ve all decided to mooch from each other. That would be a way to avoid postage, but more importantly, meet people with similar book tastes and possibly make friends.
So, here’s the deal. AMD is offering 25gigs of online storage for free.
The catch? With the free account, you are limited to 1gig of download
per month from your files. If you want to download the whole 25gigs at
once, you’ll need to upgrade and pay $9.95/month.
I feel terrible when I come across a good blog dripping in spam — the time wasted moderating all that crap! I installed Akismet (free) a while back, and spam hasn’t been a problem since.
Akismet is a centralized service to recognize blog comment spam. It works beautifully - you just never see spam comments. Akismet stats say 92% of comments are spam. I use the Wordpress plugin - they have API’s and plugins for most blog engines and languages (Java,Python,etc).
Update: FoxiPod is a Mac OS X app.. that’s why I wasn’t able to install If anyone knows a Windows equivalent, please leave a comment. FoxiPod uses Greasemonkey with Firefox to make downloading MP3s and music files and adding them to iTunes a single-click process.
This will help with one-off podcasts (or music) which I usually save to the Desktop - and then forget.
“…yet those annoying Centrino & XP stickers wouldn’t come off!”
This really sucks for Dell — when it’s Sony’s screwup as the battery manufacturer. Betcha Dell’s lawyers are hard at work drafting language to pass on the liability in the future - though the damage must be hard to quantify.
