Hand Coding

I had a team lunch at Cafe Brazil today (the one off 75 & Campbell in Richardson) and I planned on stopping by NerdBooks afterwards since they’re on the way back to the office. NerdBooks, for those who haven’t heard of them, is a bookstore specializing in computer and technology books. They have an online store (with discounts in line with other online bookstores), but they also have a physical store as well.

Up until recently, I couldn’t have recommended them highly enough. In some ways, it was the best of both worlds — you could get significant discounts on computer books (like an online store) but you could stop by the store to get it the same day (like a brick-and-mortar store). For instance, I was going there today to pick up O’Reilly’s Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger (just to get a better feel for the command line). It has a list price of $19.95, but NerdBooks was selling it for $11.57. And, with no shipping charges, I thought that was a pretty good deal.

Anyhow, I drove there after lunch, parked my car and walked up to the main entrance. As I opened the door, a Marmaduke-looking dog came jogging towards me. (To be sure, I’ve never had a dog, so it might not have been the same breed as Marmaduke.) The door didn’t have a self-closing mechanism, so it took me a second to realize that I needed to close it manually. As I did, the dog slowly approached the doorway and poked his head out.

“Is he an outside dog?”, I asked, attempting to project my voice into the store. Not more than a few seconds later, a man wearing nylon track pants and a fitted long-sleeved ribbed shirt came running along. He was apparently the owner of the store and, judging by the size of his neck, I was guessing that he lifted more than just books in his spare time. He then reached down and tugged the dog away from the entranceway and finished closing the door. You might think that he’d proceed to needlessly apologize for his playful dog as he welcomed me to his store. That was not the case.

Rather, he took this opportunity to berate me for the next two to three minutes about how I treated his dog. Most of it was a blur of grimacing and hand waving, but a few of his phrases included these tidbits:

• “How could you let him get out? […] ”
• “People open this door all the way and it hits the side of the building! […]” [I guess this was in reference to the non-self-closing door which, though it threw me off at first, I didn’t run into this issue.]
• “I don't mean to be an asshole, but I gotta protect my dog! […]”
• “This isn’t Nordstrom’s, you know. […]” [I’m not sure what he was getting at on this one.]

I was taken aback by these words being shouted in my general direction. All I had planned on doing was walking in, buying the book, and walking out. Instead, my perception of NerdBooks dropped like a stone. After the blowhard stopped talking, I simply turned around and walked out. I will not be shopping there again.

Lynne Truss has a new book out about punctuation — and it’s a #1 best seller in Britain. The initial printing was 15,000, but “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is now up to 510,000 in print. I enjoy language in any case, but the book looks appealing on its own:

There are many possible reasons for the tremendous success of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a spritely volume that leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as “our long-suffering little friend”; makes a rousing case for the semicolon's usefulness in, among other things, “calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention”; and describes Woodrow Wilson's inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen, which he called � spectacularly undermining his own argument — “the most un-American thing in the world.” […]

And, if you haven’t heard the joke about the panda going into a bar (from where the book got its title), it's explained at the end of the article ;).

(Due credit: Media Bistro’s Daily Media News newsletter)

I heard about Gnod through a post on Slashdot from a story on discovering new music. You tell it some of your favorite bands (or favorite books, or favorite movies), it asks you some questions, and then recommends some new bands (or books, or whatever).

Gnod is a self-adapting system that learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don't like. In this instance of gnod all is about music. Gnod is kind of a search engine for music you don't know about. It will ask you what music you like and then think about what you might like too. When I set gnod online its database was completely empty. Now it contains thousands of bands and quite some knowledge about who likes what. […]

I entered a few obscure band names (well, highly successful in the metal scene, but not something you’d ever hear on the radio), and its picks were surprisingly accurate (it picked Iced Earth, Dark Tranquillity, and a few I hadn’t yet heard, for those wondering).

My Internet connection was down today (though it’s fine now), so I decided to make a trip down to Borders. I had photography on the mind (more on that later), so I headed for the photography section and selected a book on portrait photography.

I located one of their comfy chairs and just sat down and read it. Skipping over the boring parts (“how to buy a camera”, “glossary”, and so on), I read just about read the book cover-to-cover over a few hours.

With the rain softly falling outside and the store bustling with eager Christmas shoppers, it was really pleasant to be able to relax with a good book for a while. Still, as I put the book back on the shelf at the end of the afternoon, I realized that it would be handy to buy some photography books as well sometime.

Just as I was sitting down, the coffeeshop/bakery almost got the best of me. There’s nothing quite like a slice of German chocolate cake and a cup of Earl Grey to go along with a book. But, I’m trying to save some money these days.

On photography: I’d been thinking about buying a digital camera for some time now. In fact, as of last week, I was all set to buy one early this coming week (perhaps Tuesday or Wednesday). I had the store all picked out, and I had jotted in my Palm about what accessories I intended to buy. Of course, my income was pulled out from under me on Friday, and my camera plans evaporated. Bah.

As you may be aware, Project Gutenberg is an effort to provide free ASCII copies of out-of-copyright works. Run by volunteers, they hunt down out-of-copyright works, scan them, apply OCR, and proofread them (OCR isn’t perfect, after all).

Project Gutenberg started in 1971 — long before the web — and it becomes more modern as technology advances. It used to be that proofreading was done “by hand”. However, there’s now a Distributed Proofreading effort:

This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the creation of Project Gutenberg E-Texts. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/E-Text creation process.

When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back to the site via the same webpage that it was edited on. […]

So, now anyone can become a volunteer proofreader. And, I’m considering helping out. Sure, I may not have time to go through many pages, but those would be pages that someone else wouldn’t have to proofread.

Fictionwise has now released six 2002 Hugo nominated works as free eBooks (for your Palm or other PDA). And, each link link below includes a book-excerpt, so you can get a feel for the book before downloading it. The free eBooks include:

• “Fast Times at Fairmont High” by Vernor Vinge
• “May Be Some Time” by Brenda Clough
• “Lobsters” by Charlie Stross
• “The Curse of Chalion” (Extended Excerpt) by Lois McMaster Bujold
• “Hell is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang
• “Old MacDonald had a Farm” by Mike Resnick
• “Undone” by James Patrick Kelly
• “The Return of Spring” by Shane Tourtellotte
• “The Days Between” by Allen Steele

“The Hugo Awards are among the most prestigious literary awards available and are presented annually by the World Science Fiction Society”. Thanks to PalmStation for the heads-up on this one.

And, if Josh reads this, hopefully he can enlighten me as to the proper means of citing books. For instance, I used double-quotes around the titles, but that was mostly an educated guess ;).

From The Register, Lloyd Webber web hoaxer unmasked. Apparently, some guy was writing book reviews on Amazon.com posing as Lloyd-Webber:

“Other false Lloyd Webber endorsements went to guidebooks on combating halitosis and premature ejaculation,” noted the Times. “Lord Lloyd Webber was not available for comment.” [...]

Through the Symphony X mailing list, of all places, I've discovered the used bookseller Abe. Just doing a cursory check, their prices aren't bad and shipping is also fairly reasonable ($2/first book, $0.75 each additional).

Though books are good for gifts, I try to buy new books in those cases. All the same, Abe could be handy for when I buy books for myself.