Thursday, March 21, 2002

I've been wanting a new timbuk2 bag for a while now. My red and tan "El Ocho" model is getting a little worn down. Or perhaps more accurately my affections toward said bag are getting a little worn down. It's certainly served me well these past two and a half years, but I think I'm about due for an upgrade, and I want to do a custom model this time around. They actually have a Commuter Computer bag, but upon further review I lprefer the price and design of the classic messenger bag. 11:37:07 PM     I'm kind of chillin' on Escape Velocity Nova right now. I completed the Polaris plot line last night and I really enjoyed it. But with five more plot lines to go there's really no rush. At some point it'd be cool to create my own plugin as well, but that would require a level of motivation I probably can't count on for a while. 10:53:56 PM     Did a little research to start off my booklib (better name forthcoming someday) tool project and discovered a few interesting items (all vaguely related): ISBN information doesn't seem to be readily available in the form of a nice xml-rpc/soap service. isbn.nu is run (quite profitably it sounds like) by Glenn Fleishman. I'd never made the connection before today. Scraping the information I want (author, title, pages, publisher, publish date) from Amazon or Barnes & Noble given an ISBN is doable, but a bit kludgy and subject to future breakage. Documentation for the Frontier Regex DLL seems elusive at this point. 10:40:05 PM     Singlefile I found the coolest thing at kottke.org today. So what is Singlefile you ask? According to one blurb on the site, "Singlefile is an easy-to-use web-based service that helps you organize the books you own, the books you are reading, the books you've read and the books you want to read." The interface is really nice and there are a ton of different report options available and at only $19.95 a year the price is pretty groovy as well. Of course after playing with it for a bit, my first thought was that something like this would make an excellent Radio UserLand tool. So I'm going to fiddle around with this project for a while and see what happens. I've been looking for an excuse to brush up on UserTalk afterall. 10:27:09 PM

© Copyright 2002 Jason Gilman. Last update: 3/21/02; 10:27:11 PM.