Miscellaneously

[msmemory_archive]

For the latest news :( on our house hunt, see jducoeur's post from 9/25. The inspectors are faboo, the news they gave us was not. Back to the drawing board - or at least the MLS system.

Sunday night after the inspection, we met up with my inlaws, who are in town for a conference on telemedicine. Sandy was feeling like Italian food, so we went to the North End to a restaurant called Carmen, recommended in the Zagat Guide. Sandy had roast pork, jducoeur had the steak with gorgonzola, Dave had mushroom crespelle with bolognese, and I had tagliatelle with shrimp in a basil cream sauce. All delicious, and mine was the best. D&S were surprised to learn that Carmen does not serve coffee and dessert - one is expected to join the throngs on Hanover St. for cannoli and espresso.
(Note to self: go back to Caffe Vittoria, and get the pistachio ice cream again.)

Dave and Sandy are getting seriously involved with the Democratic Party in their home town. How long til one of them is put forward for City Council? or National Convention representative?

My latest Internet discovery is a spiffy tool called LibraryThing, which allows you to catalog your own library by searching the Library of Congress and Amazon for copies of matching records. The interface could use some work - for instance, if you're working your way through all the works by a given author, Lois McMaster Bujold for example, you have to search individually on each book, you cannot select multiples from the list window. Which is painstaking. The owner of LibraryThing is making rapid advances in his under-the-hood tools and server power, which is a mercy because it's getting Discovered (I found it through a mention in Making Light). I hope LibraryThing survives to get out of beta. It's not clear what Tim has in mind for the future of the tool - we might yet find he sells it out to a marketing concern who wants to find users with strong collections in science fiction, writing, librarianship, and medieval history, and market to them (in which case, I'll toggle "on" the Privacy bit and stop adding records!).

Once we've moved and more of my books are out of their boxes, I'll really dig into the data entry stuff. Right now, it's just got books I can see from my desk chairs, or which I remember packing last weekend :) So if you go and look at my catalog you'll think it pretty unbalanced. Shrug.

Comments

[hungrytiger]

So what are the high-level things you're looking for in a house? M & I have allowed our hunt to stagnate, but we still get email updates of interesting houses in our area and I could send along something that I thought might catch your eye if I knew what you were looking for.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

A great room, and/or an open floor plan on the main level. Large kitchen. Inside 495 (ideally, on 128).
Meta: We expect to be in the $425K to $550K range, and want 2000 sq feet or more.

[laurion]

I've been writing back and forth with Tim on various improvements (I'm already a paid user). I've been a big user of Readerware in the past because it supports multiple import sources, where most of these tools just tap into Amazon because it's fairly comprehensive and has an easy API. But Amazon doesn't have a lot of older material listed, and tends to require the software to link to other things. LibraryThing is off to a good start by tapping into the LC and using the Z39 systems. and it has the advantage of being online so I can work with it anywhere. I've been discussing with him a bit about how to handle UPC EAN codes so those of us with barcode readers can just wand in the barcodes from the backs of our paperbacks, and how to do batch inputting so we don't have to do it one book at a time. There's a problem with that though in that Amazon doesn't want to do more than (n) lookups per second, plus they want you to refresh all your data once in a while to keep it 'up to date'. Meh.

Oh, and the solution I had for your problem was to find the library of someone who already has all the books by an author, and just click the little green pluses there. Faster than searching on each book, and it takes you back to the lis with a checkmark for the ones you already have in your collection.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

The other way to grab a whole series/author is to use your Back button (I just discovered accidentally). Click to enter one volume, then go Back to the screen with the list, click on the next volume, etc. It works nicely for smallish series (Stardoc) though it won't really help for, say, McCaffrey.