I saw this on boingboing and couldn’t resist joining in with my own iBook. Pretty cool, eh?

What is it about used book stores that makes me love them so much? They’re full of already-read books, which are mostly like new ones, but dirtier and more beat up. So why are they so great? For me, I suppose it’s a combination of two things.

First, I’m a big fan of old sci-fi and fantasy novels, many of which are out of print, and a well-stocked used book store gives me a chance to pick some up that I might not otherwise have access to. And second, not only do I get to enjoy a story, not only do I get transported to another world bounded only by my imagination (am I starting to sound too much like Reading Rainbow here?) but there’s also a bit of mystery around the idea that this same book was in someone else’s hands. Where did they read it? What did it trigger in their imaginations? It’s the same kind of curiosity that fuels ideas like BookCrossing. Keeping these questions in the back of my mind adds something small but satisfying to the act of enjoying a story.

Having recently moved to within walking distance of a used book store, I find myself enjoying previously-read books much more often than I normally would, and I especially enjoyed my latest read: Stephen King’s On Writing. It’s nonfiction, half autobiography and half advice on writing, a fraction of the length of the average Stephen King book, and it might just be his best work yet.

It inspires me to write. Short stories, blog entries, a novel, whatever. Reading that book just made me want to write something. Of course, I have the attention span of a gust of wind, so by next week it might be back to woodworking or wire jewelry making. Who knows? That’s why my life is interesting.

In On Writing, Stephen King describes his working environment and habits, and his process of taking a book from an idea, through editing and rewriting, to publication. The care he takes when refining his work, his methods for working around the second-guessing every writer does. The personal problems he struggled with while writing some of the stories I have since enjoyed reading. To know something about the author’s state of mind sort of extends further the feeling of intimacy with a story that I get from reading previously read books.

If you like to write, or maybe just have enjoyed the occasional Stephen King book and want to understand something about the author’s motivation, you could do much worse than to read this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was talking to my friend/boss Gever this morning about how often small blogs go through “dry spells” where the only post is an apology for not posting more often. He mentioned that it would be funny to find the google query that would find all of them, and I thought that would make a great post. So here you go: Google for lame bloggers. Or try Technorati to see who hasn’t posted most recently.

I somehow manage to avoid showing up on the list. I’ll chalk it up to my refreshingly original writing style when posting my own lamer apology.

I’ve been pretty lax in posting here lately… but you can’t say you weren’t warned. It does say short-lived obsessions, after all. Still, this blog is something that I would like to continue doing, so I’ll be making a stronger effort to chronicle some of those million mini-obsessions that pass every day through the spot behind my eyes.

In that spirit, here’s one wacky but addictive flash game: Nanaca Crash. The goal is to get the maximum distance possible when you drive your bicycle into a guy and send him flying. The flying guy bounces off the ground, and gets different results depending on the various characters that you land on. Clicking at the right time (when the character you land on shows up in the “special” box) will get you specials, which are really cool.
Most of the instructions are in Japanese, and I don’t speak Japanese, but that doesn’t matter once you’ve played it a few times. Warning: this is (strangely) addictive.

I’ve been a little light with the posting lately (well, more than usual), but I’ve been working on a cool web-based project that will soon be ready for a public pre-alpha release. More details on that later.

For now, my new favorite use of Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mullet

An interesting series of posts over at Many-to-Many have been discussing Wikipedia and its relative merits as compared to traditional encyclopedias. Acting on the suggestion that the number of times a particular Wikipedia article has been edited is an indiciator of how reliable the information in that article might be, Clay Shirky demonstrated a script that aggregates that metadata and displays it prominently on the article. He also put out a call to convert that script into a bookmarklet. I find the idea intriguing, I have answered the call with this new bookmarklet.

Since the bookmarklet actually makes a behind-the-scenes HTTP call to wikipedia, it can be a little slow depending on the site’s response time. Maybe I’ll add some kind of “waiting…” indicator in the next rev, but for now, just hold on for a few seconds and you should see the information show up near the top of the screen.

It hasn’t yet been hammered in terms of testing, but it works for me in Firefox, Camino, and Safari on a Mac (sorry, no IE), and the numbers agree with those Clay’s script. Let me know via comments if it works for you if you try it out in any other browsers, or if you have any trouble.

To use, drag the link below onto your bookmarks or your bookmark toolbar. Then navigate to any normal Wikipedia article and click on it.

Wikipedia Edit Count

I love interactive fiction, or “IF” for the acronymically inclined. Or “text adventure” games if you’re less familiar with the Infocom of the 1980s. IF as a genre, fundamentally unchanged for more than twenty years, evolved in a world of gaming where graphics were non-existent and words were the sole medium of expression. The game described locations, objects, and actions in text, and the player controlled the story’s protagonist by typing commands in English (or any other natural language in which the story was written). As a player, you had to rely on your imagination to fill in the gaps.

In the time since, technology has allowed designers to create games that realize their visual ideals. And many of these games have captivating stories and excellent puzzles, just like good IF games. And there are entirely different styles of games whose pure entertainment value is graphics-based, like a first-person shooter or even a simple puzzle game like Tetris. And that’s great! But it’s also different, and IF still has something to offer today.

I like to think of the relationship between IF and popular modern games as analogous to the relationship between books and movies. It’s not much of a stretch. It’s words versus pictures. Both words and pictures have their place, both can be entertaining, educational, and otherwise enriching. But I personally prefer words.

If you’re a fan of words like me and you’ve never played interactive fiction, or perhaps if you played Infocom’s Zork back in the 80s and remember it fondly, you might be surprised to learn that the medium is far from extinct. An active hobbyist community continues to produce new titles, and as a result IF has grown tremendously, both technically (in terms of language parser sophistication, availability of IF writing/development tools, etc.) and as an art form. Now there are countless modern IF titles currently available for free, representing an amazing array of genres and story-telling styles. Erstwhile players of old-style text adventure games might, for instance, notice the trend toward emphasis on a game’s plot and story-telling as opposed to disjointed puzzle solving. That’s a severe generalization, as classic puzzle games are also certainly still developed — I just want to emphasize that the diversity of titles now available surpasses anything imagined in IF’s “heyday” of twenty plus years ago.

Playing them allows me to simultaneously experience three of my favorite things: reading, puzzle solving, and playing games (or four if I happen to play IF while eating peanut butter!). If you also enjoy the art of the crafted sentence, do yourself a favor and read this Beginner’s Guide to Interactive Fiction. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it has to be nice to know that people are telling stories in interesting new ways.

It seems like there are more and more social networking services popping up all the time, but many of them are no more than a rehash of what SixDegrees used to be — i.e., I know you, and you know somebody else, and we’re all connected. It was a brilliantly innovative idea, but unfortunately not extremely useful, which might explain why SixDegrees isn’t around any more.

Fortunately, the nature of innovation is such that people build on the ground-breaking ideas of others, and now we’re starting to see people come up with ways to actually do something, like share musical tastes or trade business contacts, with social networking services.

Well, here’s another one. 43 Things allows you to form networks based on common personal goals. If I want to learn Spanish, I can mark that as my goal and I’m instantly connected to everyone else with that interest. Each goal has a blog to which its participants can contribute, so you have people sharing their advice and experiences.

It’s pretty interesting so far, as I’ve been exploring and marking so many of those things that I’d love to do and never get around to. One small issue that, since the interests are user-contributed, I’ve noticed is that there multiple goals that basically mean the same thing, which could cause missed potential connections if the participants of one don’t know about the other. Still, having the possibility lends to the free-form spirit that allows interesting unexpected developments in group-based technology.

It’s in beta and is currently invitation-based, so if you want to give it a spin, send a comment with your email address (it won’t show up on the blog) and I’ll send you an invite!

As weblogs continue to grow as a medium, its enthusiasts are unfortunately faced with the dark side of that popularity. That’s right — spam. Now that only the most creatively-crafted spam makes it through the average mailbox’s filters, how ever is the more vapid virtual vendor to attract attention? Well, they apparently start taking advantage of less mature technology to make our lives miserable in a whole new way.

In a trend that extends their pattern that started with email of taking a new, exciting, open means of communication and trying to ruin it, spammers are forcing weblog authors to take action to prevent their pages becoming filled with crap. Comments add a unique flavor to blogs. They allow readers to participate and feel some ownership. Anonymous comments, where allowed, create still another dimension. But when you allow just anybody to add whatever text they want to a public forum, you’ll inevitably wind up, as I did this morning, with pages full of ads for free online poker.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good card game as much as the next guy, and heck, dealing with comment spam makes me feel like I’m one step further toward becoming a “legitimate” blogger! But this is the wrong forum for it. So what’s a guy to do? You can go the Slashdot route and simply allow anonymity but create a mechanism for self-regulation. Or you can go to the other extreme (a la boingboing) and disallow comments completely. In both of those examples, that choice largely defines the feel of the entire site. And neither really works well without a huge base of readers — let’s face it, my DSL provider’s not particularly nervous by the amount of traffic this weblog gets (who did that poker company think was going to see their spam anyway?).

So while I had tried for a short while to embrace the freedom that comes with anonymity, if you want to comment now you’ll have to register with typekey first. It’s not too tough — give it a try. If there are any real people reading this, I’d love for you to say hi and let me know you’re there! And if you’ve ever had to deal with the same problems, let me know how you solved it.

In February of this year I moved for my job, as do many in the software field, to the San Francisco Bay area. Coming from Rochester, NY, a medium-sized city, and having visited San Francisco on many previous occasions, there were a lot of changes I knew to expect. Public transportation, for one. I love not driving to work. If you do drive at all, even if it’s not to commute, the sheer volume of people mean that your life must be planned around traffic patterns. Rent, of course, is too depressing to talk about. And then there’s the weather–no rain and a little cooler in the summer, with no winter to speak of. It’s a mix of good and bad, but nothing particularly shocking.

// begin whine

For the past several months, though, I’ve been feeling the need to rant about the grocery stores here. It’s one of those things that nobody thinks about much when moving, but, assuming you eat, has a big effect on your day-to-day life. Sure, the prices are a little higher and it’s still a little weird seeing wine and liquor on the shelves, but that’s nothing unexpected. There are a few things, though, that really get on my nerves. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m just a big whiner. It’s likely I’ve been ruined by Wegman’s for the rest of my life. Oh well, you can decide for yourself.

First, the price of produce is crazy. Bananas are always more than 70 cents per pound. We couldn’t get tomatoes for less than four dollars a pound yesterday. A box of Clementine oranges is eight bucks. We’re talking double the price in New York. And this is where they grow the stuff!

Then there’s the feeling I get when I realize that half the dairy expires in two days, and maybe another quarter of it is already past its “sell by” date. It’s the feeling that I have to try to avoid a bait-and-switch more suited to a sleazy used car dealership than a grocery store. It seems like I never had to be so careful in the past. Wasn’t this supposed to be the land of ultra-regulation?

But that’s not nearly as bad as the shock you’ll get when you try to get in line. At the wrong time on a weekend, I’ve stood in lines fifteen carts long, stretching into the aisles. People still shopping have to turn around and go all the way back to get to the next aisle because there’s no room at the front near the registers.

Seriously, what is it with these grocery stores? Am I just in a particularly lousy area? The store I usually go to has ten registers, a few of which are usually not open, even during the busy times, plus four self-service checkout stands. The stores I’d grown accustomed to had, in about the same amount of space, about twice the number of registers. And we’re talking a much lower population density. How does that work?

Anyway, that’s enough moaning for now. I feel much better! I would be interested, though, in hearing about anyone else’s experiences to see if perhaps I’m just shopping in the wrong area or store.