LibraryThing has this funky “view all your covers” feature.

So I fired that up and then did a little screengrab of the complete page. The books that don’t have covers (out of print or foreign books) don’t get included, but still - you can see the covers of something close to 900 books in one image. It’s pretty sweet.

Check out an image of the covers.

(You’ll have to click to enlarge to full screen size, btw.)

Hot on the heels of my assertion that I would like a MacBook Air — eventually — here are some incredibly compelling reasons to rethink this decision and get it much, much sooner. You never know when a situation will arise, and I, for one, like to be prepared.

[joyoftech via newlaunches via gizmodo]

I understand the cracker concern.

Everything’s heading over to 3D again these days. Like TETRICAL - 3D Tetris!

I am not, by any means, a philatelist. However, I do get excited when the USPS drops some coolness into our US stamps. I bought a few sheets of the commemorative Audrey Hepburn stamp when that was out a few years ago and made sure I saved them to use on my holiday cards.

In 2008, the good ‘ol USPS is giving me a reason to break out the notecards and stationary again with these kick-ass Eames stamps:

Just lovely.

The Eames chair (second row, last column) is so sweet. My parents have one - old-school, from the 70s. It still sits in their living room, complete with the ottoman. I hope to acquire this chair. Perhaps when they decide it’s time to move to a sunnier clime and sort of scale down their house and possessions, I will make my move and kindly offer to take this chair so they don’t have to transport it to [Arizona? Florida?]

It beats paying $4000 to purchase one from the MoMA Design Store.

Since my personal library holdings recently crossed the 1,000 book threshold, I decided that it might be time to slow down the acquisition of new books and re-read some of the good ones that I haven’t touched in a while.*

I decided to start this re-reading with Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. I vividly remembered the beginning and had (as it turns out) a good grasp on the general story, though I’d forgotten some of the finer details. On the basis of this very positive recollection (and my enjoyment of Paul Auster’s work as a whole) I got it for a friend for Christmas since I thought he’d really enjoy it, too.

And having re-read it, two good things have happened. One, I enjoyed it tremendously this time around as well and, two, I’ll have it fresh in my mind if there is book discussion to be had. I even have Post-it® note flags marking certain sections of the book, two of which I will share here, with some set-up but not too much exposition.

The main character has found employment with a cranky, blind, paraplegic man; he works as his companion, reading to him, pushing his wheelchair around the Upper West Side of Manhattan, etc. One of his tasks is to describe their surroundings as accurately as possible while they walk. At this point in the story, he’s realized how difficult this task is:

Instead of doing it merely to discharge an obligation, I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. I began to appreciate how great that distance was, to understand how far a thing must travel in order to get from the one place to the other. In actual terms, it was no more than two or three inches, but considering how many accidents and losses could occur along the way, it might just as well have been a journey from the earth to the moon.

Then there’s a sort of story within a story - a narrative that the protagonist hears from another character. He’s just mentioned that the circumstances of their respective stories are similar, and that he understands the other man better than he perhaps thought he could/would:

… my situation had been far less desperate than his. When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream. The air bunches in his lungs, and he cannot breathe unless he pushes it out of him, unless he howls it forth with all his strength. Otherwise, he will choke on his own breath, the very sky will smother him.

It’s always gratifying to me to come across words or thoughts in a book that I can truly understand. Both of these bits fit the bill. I have struggled with the inadequacy of words for describing certain things and thought about how our individual perceptions of objects or feelings can never be accurately communicated to another person; we’re only ever talking in approximations since your vision of “robin’s egg blue” is going to be different from what I see in my mind’s eye. Even if we’re both looking at the same exact color swatch, there’s no way to tell that we’re perceiving that color the same way. The same goes for getting the description back out to someone.

It’s frustrating but wonderful at the same time; it’s a bit of semiotics. We’d like to think we understand one another or the people with whom we “click” or consider to be close to us, but on the most fundamental level, we never truly can because words are only signs—broad representations of ideas and thoughts. We can only ever approximate. I think the effort, though, is what forges relationships - how much time and energy we are willing to put into the attempt to bridge that gap.

And the screaming thing? I get it. For me, if often comes down to the choice between a scream or hysterical crying. I usually opt for the latter (suburbia is not hot on primal scream therapy), but the sensation is the same. Yes, the air bunches in my lungs and I feel like I’ll choke on my own breath if I don’t get it the hell out of me.

So. A good book. I might officially be on a Paul Auster kick after this because I can re-read “Book of Illusions”, “Mr. Vertigo” or “The New York Trilogy.” Yippee!

_________________________________

* Mind you, that didn’t stop me from ordering a used copy of “Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon”. The book’s premise is that “television heroine Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, has been an unlikely source of language change. In his book [the author] tells how this unconventional teen challenged linguistic taboos and introduced new words and phrases in nearly every show.” Furthemore, on PBS’s “Do You Speak American?” website, they featured the following excerpt:

Buffy has introduced new slang terms and phrases in nearly every episode, many of them formed in the usual ways, some of them at the crest of new formative tendencies… Besides contributing items to the slang lexicon, slayer slang intensifies current formative practices in slang: it glories in them, certainly, but it also constitutes, by exaggerating them, a critique of those practices. For instance, the writers acknowledge that slang increasingly trades on references to popular culture by shifting proper names into other parts of speech, both verbs and adjectives. Thus Xander asks in Puppet Show (5 May 1997), “Does anyone feel like we’ve been Keyser Sozed?” after the character in The Usual Suspects when he means ‘tricked, manipulated’. Afraid that Halloween will get out of hand, Xander remarks in Halloween (27 October 1997), “Halloween quiet? I figured it would have been a big ole vamp Scareapolooza,” from the alternative rock festival Lollapalooza; similarly he argues in The Wish (8 December 1998), “Look, you wanna do Guiltapalooza, fine, but I’m done with that.”

For those who aren’t grammar and punctuation nerds (albeit a bit free-thinking when it comes to blogging), here’s a definition of the Oxford comma from Wikipedia:

“The serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma or Harvard comma) is the comma used immediately before a grammatical conjunction (nearly always and or or; sometimes nor) that precedes the last item in a list of three or more items. The phrase “Portugal, Spain, and France”, for example, is written with the serial comma, while “Portugal, Spain and France”, identical in meaning, is written without it. There is no consensus among writers or editors on the use of the serial comma. It is closer to being standard use in American English than it is in British English.”

I don’t generally use the Oxford comma in a list of items, but I do before a grammatical conjunction. I need to deal with this inconsistency. It’s simply unacceptable.

In the meantime, though, there’s a good song by Vampire Weekend called “Oxford Comma.”And really, I think the first line of the song speaks for most people and their stance on the Oxford comma issue.

Vampire Weekend - “Oxford Comma”

Yesterday at work, I participated in a presentation about blogging. My portion was about using an RSS reader - why it’s handy and helpful, how to get yourself all set up with a slew of subscriptions, etc. During the presentation, I recommended that everyone install Mozilla Firefox just because it’s good - more secure, the original tabbed-browsing browser, and because it has the super handy live bookmarks feature and RSS feed options that make using a reader (like Google Reader or Bloglines) ridiculously easy.

Afterward, I got an email from someone telling me that she had been using Firefox at home for a couple of years, but was suffering through her work-day with IE because she thought that she’d get in trouble for installing it and using it - but that she was going to install it now since I’d “come out” about my Firefox use. Yay, evangelism!

The very first thing I did when I started at this job over two years ago - before I inquired about getting a nameplate for my cubicle - was to ask the IT guys if I could install Firefox. They said it wasn’t a problem, except that our corporate intranet/portal isn’t built for Firefox, so some features might be buggy. Eh, I thought - so I’ll use both: IE for intranet viewing only, Firefox for EVERYTHING else.

[Just so there's no confusion, I'm not a high-functioning computer geek (HFCG); I leave that distinction to people who do actual programming and engineering. Dude - I was an English major. The HFCGs are the people I call when I've tried (to the best of my ability) but can't figure out why the hell my redirect has turned into an infinite redirect, and when I realize that my limited knowledge of Linux commands (cd, mv, chmod, chkconfig, and, uh, exit) won't be enough to solve the problem at hand.]

Tonight I read about a cool new plugin for Firefox and thought, "Damn, there are lots of helpful ones." So here's my round-up of Firefox add-ons (or plugins or extensions - whatever you choose to call them) that I find really useful, handy or just nifty:

• Web Developer: If you’re a dabbler in web design, want to learn more about it or an intermediate user who sometimes sees a page with a really cool layout, tackling a problem you’ve been running into, or doing something that you totally want to jack and use on your own, the Web Developer plugin is invaluable. You can view the CSS for a page, but also highlight individual elements and see “how they did it” - like an amped up “view source.”- read more | install it
• AdBlock Plus: Right-click on a banner ad, choose “Adblock” from the menu and you never have to see it again. - read more | install it
• Forecastfox: If you (or a co-worker) ponder, “I wonder what the weather’s supposed to be like tomorrow…” you’ll have the answer right in your browser status bar. - read more | install it
• PDF Download: Checks if the page/file you’re about to open is a pdf. If so, it lets you choose whether you want to open it in your browser, download it or view as HTML. - read more | install it
• Greasemonkey: There are two ways of interacting with Greasemonkey - writing scripts for it or maintaining an ignorant stance and just running other people’s scripts. Essentially, Greasemonkey lets you adjust the way a webpage behaves and looks. There are over 11,000 user-created scripts out there. - read more | install it
• Google Preview: When you do a Google search, thumbnail images of the resulting pages will appear on your search results page - read more | install it
• URL Fixer: If you ever get sausage fingers when you’re typing too late or too fast, or suffer from that weird tic wherein you become incapable of typing without making tons of errors if someone’s watching you type, or if you just find yourself typing amazon.xom a lot… this is good. It will automatically correct “.con” to “.com”, and you can teach it to correct things that you do constantly and uniquely - esp. helpful if you visit a lot of non-US sites. - read more | install it
• Screengrab!: Sure, you can do the old Ctrl + PrtScn trick and then play in Photoshop or some other app, but this allows you to right-click on a webpage, and save either the entire page, the visible portion or a selection as a .jpg right there. The entire page feature is nice. - read more | install it
• Personas: This is the one I learned about today. It allows you to apply skins to Firefox (not to be confused with themes) without restarting the browser. You can skin Firefox with seasonal images (reindeer, snowflakes), sports images, or relaxing things like blades of grass or bamboo. It looks way cooler than I can make it sound. - read more | install it

So that’s my piece on Firefox and extensions/add-ons and how they make the internet a better place.