the pod bay door

:: Did you see School of Rock? I was pleased to learn that there is a real such movement, called Little Kids Rock. It was started in 1996 by David Wish, an elementary school teacher who at the time, was frustrated with the lack of funding for music education in his school.

:: Some of you may be familiar with This Modern World, by Tom Tomorrow, aka Dan Perkins. Mr Tom Tomorrow was interviewed in a recent issue of Time Out New York.

:: For dinner this evening, I had the first of four delicious Nova Scotia lobsters, flown in from Halifax yesterday. The lobsters were in the luggage of a friend I picked up at the airport, the second year in a row she has returned from her Christmas trip with this delicacy that is my favorite food. *sigh* Thank you, K!

:: Fans of Steve Earle will be interested in this new documentary, Steve Earle: Just an American Boy. Earle stirred up much controversy when his 2002 album, Jerusalem, featured a song called John Walker’s Blues, about the American Taliban fighter. A double-CD functioning as a companion piece to the movie has also been released. Time Out New York reviewed the movie favorably. I really like Jerusalem, and hope the film makes its way to Edmonton in 2004.

:: I’ve been very lazy the past few days. I was in Calgary on Christmas Day, visiting my brother Chris and his girlfriend, Debra, where they treated me to a fine Christmas dinner and great company. I returned on Boxing Day (Dec 26 for my non-Canadian friends), and have been doing a lot of nothing since then, except seeing movies.

:: I wanted to see at least 100 films this year, and reached that number yesterday. In the past few days, I’ve seen Peter Pan, Morvern Callar, Paycheck (ok, so I needed to see a fluff film), 21 Grams, House of Sand and Fog, The Barbarian Invasions, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and LOTR: TROTK. I’ll see Elf this afternoon with friends. Despite my best attempts to keep a master list of the films I see, I believe I always forget to list a title or two each year.

:: In the remaining week away from work, I hope to get some cleaning done in the house, but given how lazy I’m feeling, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll get anything done!

:: I wonder when I will learn that agonizing about money is a complete and utter waste of energy.

In November, I was driving in the parking lot of an abandoned mall, near my home. The only other car in the vicinity was approaching from the opposite direction on the same road. I realized too late that this car and I would arrive at the corner of this mall road at the same moment. It had snowed considerably the day before, and while the other car passed me at that corner without a problem, I couldn’t slow down enough to negotiate my left turn, and my car slid on an icy patch, into the curb. I knew immediately that I had a problem. When I drove on, I could feel the car leaning to the left. Back on the main streets, the steering wheel started to shake at 80+ kmh.

The car was in today for an oil change, and I reported the problem described above. I soon learned that the right front rim was bent. To replace it meant also replacing the front wheel bearing and necessary seals on the right side. Final damage: $491 and change. I also learned that the rotor run-out wasn’t damaged, which would’ve added another $200+ to this experience.

Party On!

:: Somedays you just don’t feel like writing stuff.

:: I’m off work this week, taking some holiday time. The weather has been cold, snowy and dull. I want to clean up my house, a task of major proportions at best. I started cleaning one room last night, so can report some progress. I’ve worked out in the morning the last two days, and it’s been a major struggle to get the body to accept this change, even for a few days. Normally I exercise after work. I don’t know how the morning people do it.

:: Derryl sent along this gem: examples of some of the worst album covers of all time.

:: You might think it odd to get upset over soup, but…Safeway sells hot soup every day, two varieties. All the soups sold are made by Campbell’s. My favorite is Italian-Style Wedding soup. I had never heard of it until Safeway started selling it in their deli. I haven’t been able to find it lately, so I spoke to someone there, who told me that a “new soup program” is imminent, so the other choices have been removed, permanently. The manager of my local store verified this, saying that it’s happening in all Safeway stores in Canada and the USA.

Italian-Style Wedding soup was one of Safeway’s most popular hot soups; the deli worker with whom I spoke confirmed this, noting that other customers have expressed their dismay as well. Why mess with success? It’s a decision made by suits in an office in a Big City somewhere far from here. Idiots.

:: If you are interested in the recent solar flare activity, check out the SOHO site: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. There are some great pics and mpegs of what the sun has been doing (blasting the Earth with ionizing radiation as a result of exploding superflares.) Here in the Great White North, we’ve been missing the spectacular aurora activity because it’s been cloudy for days.

:: My right shoulder and arm were examined today by a doctor with a specialty in sports medicine. Turns out my shoulder is somewhat out of whack – can’t give you much more of an explanation than that. My muscles, rotator cuff, and so on, are ok, but the shoulder blade is out of alignment, bulging a bit at my back. I will need physiotherapy. Unfortunately my first appointment is on November 12th, so in the meantime, I’m getting a massage and stocking up on pain killers.

:: Amazon.com announced last Thursday that it is making the full-text of ~120,000 books (>33,000,000 pages), searchable to its customers. The searching is done at the same level as a title or author search. So I took the book Moonwatcher’s Memoir by Dan Richter, flipped it open to a random page (116), read the phrase “some Velcro slipping” in a sentence, typed that phrase into the Amazon search window, and boom, the first item retrieved was Richter’s book, with a link to p116, where it found the phrase. What was interesting was how fast the results appeared, in less than five seconds. Given the size of the db, 33 million pages, never mind how many words, I was very impressed that it found the one book with the phrase so quickly. The search algorithm retrieved other books and pages with the words “some“, “Velcro“, and “slipping“, but not the phrase itself.

However, I tried three times to retrieve the text of the page, and finally received a response; I suspect Amazon’s servers are burning a lot of coal right now, trying to keep up with the new service. So to see the page that contained the phrase, I had to wait over 10 minutes. Once the page with the phrase you searched appears, you can browse two pages on either side of that page in the book.

This is an impressive feat on Amazon’s part. Within my profession, a growing number of full-text databases exists, mostly of primary and secondary journal literature, along side a smaller number of databases which offer the full-texts of monographs, such as books24x7. None of the book dbs remotely approach the content of Amazon’s 120,000 books. It’s a unique feature that will no doubt increase sales. Amazon’s customers now have another powerful search tool to retrieve books (and CDs, DVDs, etc) of interest to them while browsing and searching. The question is: how quickly will their competitors move to offer a similar feature to their web sites?