Reprise the Past

I was just reading a few of my past post and thought some updates were in order.

Television

Television has been called the "vast wasteland." I stated in a past post that I didn't watch much television. Well, I finally canceled my satellite TV service. $35 per month seemed to be an excessive expense for a couple of hours viewing per week. That works out to a trip a week to the local theaters except I don't do that. I signed up with Netflix and get three DVDs at a time delivered in the mail. Great service, so far, and at half the price of the satellite service.

Don't I miss television? I don't really think about it as the only thing I really watched was the local weather report and the SciFi channel. Since, SciFi dropped Stargate SG-1 and the Dresden Files there wasn't a whole lot I'm missing. I get the local weather off the internet now.

One interesting side benefit is that I don't have the temptation to watch any of "the lastest" from CNN, MSNBC or any of their brother networks. My blood pressure is down!

Site Updates

In June, I said that I'd be updating my sites by the end of August. Well things are running a bit late as I've changed some of the requirements. I've also taken on the task of upgrading and maintaining the family website. Yet more software and images to create and modify! Oh well, life isn't supposed to be easy.

Elections

I don't know about you but with over a year until the elections I have no interest. I don't care which politician is running around locally and I especially don't care for primaries and caucuses that start so early they may take place this year.

I'm beginning to think we need a constitutional amendment limiting national elections to a 90 day period before the general election. Hugh fines and prison terms against the political parties, PACs or individuals that violate the period would be effective in stopping early starts. My thinking is 5 to 10 times the cost of any ad, print or broadcast, with a five year minimum sentence for repeat offenders.

Mass Media

As I said, I don't watch TV anymore. I also don't take newspapers or news magazines. Why bother! You can do the same as I do and do a quick scan of news summaries on the internet. If anything interests you then research back to the primary sources and get the real facts! Bias in the mass media is endemic and you can't believe anything reporters or editors say.

Enjoy,

-phil

LibraryThing.com

There are many sites on the web some of them useful and some of them junk. I've run across a site that I consider very useful. That site is LibraryThing.

For a long time, I've been looking for someplace to catalog the thousands of books in my personal library. Finally, I've found it and surprise, surprise it's free for the first 200 books you catalog. Best of all it's only $25 for a lifetime membership with an unlimited catalog.

You may be asking, "Doesn't it take a long time to catalog a large library?" The short answer is no. Specifically, you can enter your books by hand, you can upload an spreadsheet with all of your ISBNs, or you can search by title or author from the Amazon.com catalog, Library of Congress, or 82 other library and business catalogs. The search and add function is fastest for those fiction series by the same author.

You can also add your own tags to books, make your library public or private, post reviews, keep track of favorite authors, and participate in discussions. In other words this is a great time waster of a site, if you allow it to become so.

One of the features that I like is the ability to download you library catalog. They also have widgets you can add to your website or blog to show and search your catalog. You can also get suggestions for books or authors based upon what you have in your library.

Privacy on this site seems to be of importance to the owners. They allow you to set up what you want to make public and what you'd prefer to keep private.

All in all, it is a site well worth checking out if you are a reader, author, librarian or publisher.

Enjoy,

-phil