I wouldn’t have thought I’d be a widget guy but my side bar is practically bristling with the little buggers. Okay, I’ve only got two. My beloved Google Shared Items and a little flickr badge.
Joining them is the My Library widget. It randomly pulls covers from My Library Thing. You are what you read.
This blog is first and foremost a personal journal. A place for notes on what I’m reading, watching and thinking. I took a few minutes to click and scroll back through 2006:
I posted on podcasting with some regularity and tried my hand at it with Dr. Domke’s Living Healthy Podcast.
I am more fascinated with blogging than ever and persuaded our company to start a blog. I’d like to think I played a small, behind-the-scenes role in the launch of the best veterinarian blog on the net.
We did some interviews: Ben Brogdon (Original cast of Best Little Whore House in Texas); Dan Shelley (Executive Editor of Digital Media for WCBS-TV); Dan Arnall (Business Editor, ABC News) and Kevin O’Keefe (Lex Blog).
Kasie had a birthday and I (almost) had my first cigarette.
I was overcome with Mac Lust and bought my first Mac and became a “slider” (someone that slides back and forth between PC and Mac).
I read, wrote and thought about radio. I discovered that politics matters to me more than I thought.
Blogging and surfing cut into my reading time. I only read 24 books. I came up with a couple of good ideas for screenplays that had everything but the ending. Fortunately, Kay was able to provide those.
I discovered the formula for The Perfect Day; I came to grips with the reality that I am not a team player; I worried about how much I worry; I watched two good friends build a tree house and concluded that work is your real life.
I’m blessed with a few good friends; one great partner; two sweet pups; the best job in the world and high-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes for 2007.
I just came across the coolest thing while reading the Library Thing blog:
“MothBoard allows you to create simple, private discussion boards for free, and without registration. Boards normally expire in two weeks, but you can extend their life indefinitely.”
I’m gonna try this here at smays.com as soon as I think of the right topic. Unlike complex, threaded forums, MothBoard just goes two deep (topic & reply). No endless replies-to-replies-to-replies. And if there isn’t sufficient interest to keep a topic alive, the board dies. As it should. Neat idea, stay tuned.
Most folks have a couple of John Grisham novels on the the shelf but what would it be like to chat for a couple of hours with someone who has read all or most of the same books that you have? The Library Thing lets you browse the libraries of others that share your taste in books. It’s cooler than I can describe.
More than 6,000 users have signed up since August 29, 2005. And some of them have catalogued thousands of books. Mary Elizabeth Burstein –an associate professor of English at the State University of New York– has 3,424 titles in her library.
I’m not even at the half-way mark of my 500 titles but I’m getting there. Once I’m caught up, it’ll be time to give a holler to some of the folks that share my taste in fiction.
Regular readers know I love lists. A couple of years ago I made a list of my books at the time, but it’s a paint in the ass to do without a database. Now, a clever guy named Tim Spalding (a web developer, web publisher and search-engine optimizer based in Portland, Maine) has solved this problem and the world is a better place for it.
LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid lifetime account allows you to catalog any number of books. I’m just getting started and it’s going to take me a bit to enter all of my titles but once it’s done I’ll have something so much more useful. Thank you, Tim.