Book Obsession Online

Andy Ihnatko points me to the Bookshelf Project group on Flickr. A group with the highly entertaining purpose of collecting pictures of people’s bookshelves. As one of those types who always ends up scanning the shelves in whatever home he is visiting, I find this idea to be absolutely fantastic. I do not yet have a Flickr account, but I am tempted to start one for the expresss purpose of joining this group. Of course, that would lead to the question of which bookshelf I should photograph. We could begin with the overloaded wall shelf over my computer, the stuffed vertical shelf beside the bed, the stacks of books on my closet shelf, the piles of books upon my desk, or any of the three (or is it five?) bookshelves downstairs.

Enjoy.
-Otto

Free Book

Just a quick note to point you in the direction of Neil Gaiman’s blog where, in honor of its 7th anniversary, he intends to post the entire text of one of his novels… for free! Full details are available on the site. This week he is holding a vote to determine which novel will be released. Personally, I am rooting for Anansi Boys or Neverwhere… but right now it looks like American Gods might win out.

Go. Vote. And get yourself a free book.

-otto

Flocking

I have decided to try out Flock, a variant on Firefox that focuses on blogging and social networking.
Not sure about it yet… While I like the built-in blogging and think that the RSS support is equal to that in Safari (and far better than in Firefox), we’ll have to see if I stick with it.

Three things stand against Flock from the outset:

1. Built on Firefox.
   Now don’t get me wrong: I love Firefox. Back in the Beta and 1.5 days, Firefox was my favorite browser, mainly because it was so fast. Sadly, ever since Firefox2 came out the memory leak “feature” makes the whole browser run so darn slow and bog down the whole system after about 2 hours or when I have about a dozen tabs open.
2. Social Networking.
   Frankly, I don’t do much “social networking.” I do not like myspace at all, only use Facebook to track college friends, and don’t share photos or videos on public sites.
3. Not Safari.
   OK, this is both good and bad. I really like the speed of Safari, and with the Inquisitor
   plugin, it has the best search of all web browsers. That said, I am looking around because Safari and WordPress do not get along well.

I’ll let you know how things go.

EDIT: OK, issue number 1 found… the “tags” link to technorati, not the wordpress tagging system.

Free Music!

Just thought it was worthwhile to point out that last.fm has an entire page dedicated to free music. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that most of the music on this page is… simply terrible… but if you have a few minutes it is certainly worth the time to take a quick listen and see if you like any of it.

Last.FM Tag Cloud of Free Downloads
Click a tag to see what they have.

80s   90s   acoustic   alternative   alternative rock   ambient   avantgarde   black metal   breakcore   british   california   canadian   chill   chillout   classic   classical   club   composers   dance   dark ambient   darkwave   death metal   downtempo   dub   ebm   electro   electronic   electronica   emo   ethereal   ethnic   experimental   female vocalists   finnish   folk   french   game music   german   glitch   goa   golden arrows   gothic   guitar   hard rock   hardcore   heavy metal   hip hop   hip-hop   house   idm   indie   indie pop   indie rock   industrial   instrumental   japanese   jazz   lesser known yet streamable artists   mellow   metal   metalcore   minimal   minimal techno   new age   noise   piano   polish   pop   post rock   post-hardcore   post-rock   progressive rock   psychedelic   psytrance   punk   punk rock   rap   remix   rnb   rock   romantic   russian   russian rock   scottish   screamo   seen live   sid metal   singer-songwriter   soundtrack   swedish   synthpop   techno   throat singing   trance   trip-hop   twee   ukrainian   uplifto   video game music   world