And Yet ANOTHER Book Posting...

I've forgotten a few of the books I had read during this deployment and also I read a bunch more good books. Here's the latest...

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

I don't usually go for this type of book, but I'm really glad I read this. This book has quickly become reading in many economics classes and some other classes throughout the country. I simply read this book because it seemed interesting. It didn't dissappoint. Steven D. Levitt is one of America's brightest economists. In this book, he puts a new spin on the way we look at pretty much everything, mostly making us think a lot about the conventional wisdoms that society has taught us over the years and changing our thought process completely by pointing out some very obvious but probably never thought of ideas about the world. I mean, who would even think to find any similarities between a real estate agent and a sumo wrestler? I'm really glad that this has become required reading, and I probably wouldn't mind reading it for a class someday.

The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks

The Notebook has been one of my favorite and most memorable reads for a long time, and then when I saw the movie, I had never been so touched by just watching a movie before, nor cried so hard. The Wedding is a loose sequel to the Notebook, but from the point of Noah and Allie's son-in-law. After thirty years of marriage, he feels that his wife has fallen out of love with him, and he must figure out how to make themselves fall in love again. A very touching and heartwarming story. I will soon read Nights In Rodanthe. I doubt I will be disappointed.




The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory

This was a really good book and I learned a lot about the English monarchy during Queen Mary's (AKA "Bloody Mary") time. This is the story of Hannah the Fool, a young Jewish girl who had fled with her father from Spain when their mother was victimized by the Inquisition. Hannah helps her father work in his bookshop until a wealthy young Lord comes in and begs her for a fool for the King because of her ability to see into the future. From then on, she is entwined with the drama of the royal court and she witnesses treason, lies, heartbreak and intense rivalry between Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth. This book was definately very hard to put down.

Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

Between long books, I often like to take a break and read a quick book that's easy to read. When I was a kid, I found that the best books were always the books with the big Newberry Medal emblazoned on the cover. Even though these are technically children's books, I still love to read them now and then.
Kira-Kira is the story of a Japanese-American family that had to move from Iowa to Georgia when Katie, the narrator is only in kindergarten. She adores her sister and the family has a deeply loving relationship even though both parents must work very long hours. When Katie's older sister, Lynn, gets deathly ill, Katie takes care of her and decides to try and live up to her sister's dreams of college.


Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

Because of Winn-Dixie is also a Newberry Award Winner that has also made it to the big screen. It's the story of the new girl in town who finds a dog in the Winn-Dixie and takes him home, naming him after where she found him. She is a very lonely girl, and Winn-Dixie enriches her life and the lives around him by helping her make friends around her new neighborhood. This is a nice little story. I enjoyed it a lot.

The Summer I Dared by Barbara Delinsky

In this novel, Julia leaves her home in New York for the summer to spend time with her aunt on a small island off the coast of main. On the way to the island, she becomes one of the three survivors of a horrible boat accident, and this is a catalyst for her to seriously re-evaluate what is important to her and who she is. She feels strangely connected to the other two survivors of the crash and she feels more at home on the island than at home with her domineering husband that cares way too much for himself. This is a very good coming of age story, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.



In fact, I enjoyed reading all these books. I probably won't read so much when I get home, but I do love to read in bed before I go to sleep, so I hope I will continue reading such good books. I'm hoping to finish a couple more books before I go home.

The Wonder of Swapping and Searching for New Hobbies

In 2003, Sean and I read an article in the Monterey County Weekly (I think it was called something different then) about a neat sport called Geocaching. We got a GPS and got involved...I’m definitely going to do it a lot more when I get back from Iraq. I’ve promised myself that I’m going to have a whole bunch of cool hobbies when I get back, actually…Anyway, I was recently looking at the Geocaching website. There are numerous variations on the basic geocache, and I was looking at these different variations and I found the website, Bookcrossing.com.

Bookcrossing is defined as the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise. On Bookcrossing.com, you assign tracking numbers to your books and then leave them somewhere for someone else to find and read. The person who finds the book logs it on the website and then places it somewhere else…neat, huh? Kind of like a Travel Bug, if you’re familiar with Geocaching…

Just the other day, I was reading about this Bookcrossing when I came across several sites that offer various swapping services where you can get rid of your old books, CDs, DVDs and Video Games in exchange for some other things that you want. I was surprised by the amount of websites I found.

There are three main steps that all these websites have in common: 1. You must list things you have to trade and things you want to have 2. You send other members the things that they want, and 3. You get things that you want. The biggest rule on most of them is that you must give things to get things. Membership is usually free, and the sender is usually the one who gets stuck with the postage costs, but it usually works out in the end because whoever you requested from has to pay postage to send to you. Once you have the item you ordered, you can keep it forever or you can re-list it on the website so somebody else can get it.

Below are the swapping websites that I found. I read through each website and picked out the differences.

 

Service	Type of  Media	Cost	Shipping info
La La (Beta)	CDs	CDs received cost $1 plus $.75 for shipping	You are provided with shipping envelopes…kit sent after you agree to send your first CD
Switch Discs	CDs, DVDs and Video Games	One SwitchBuc is equal to $1. Members set a value to their discs, and you use these SwitchBucs like money.	Shipping envelopes are not provided. You get SwitchBucs in exchange for sending discs to cover postage.
Frugal Reader	Books (Hardback, Paperback, CD and Cassette Audiobooks)	You use credits to get books. Typically 1 credit for paperback and 2 credits for hardback. You get credits by listing books, sending books and referring people. (There is a premium membership for a yearly fee)	Printable Shipping Labels.
Title Trader	Books, DVDs, VHS, CDs, Video Games and Magazines	"Request Points"…you earn these by sending out stuff, referrals or you can even purchase them if you find something you want and don't have enough points for it. (There are Premium features for $19.95/year)	They provide USPS delivery confirmation labels, sender is responsible for shipping costs.
SwapSimple	Books, DVDs, Video Games and Audiobooks	Because they do not have ads on their website, they request $2.00 each titme you order an item…you can avoid the fee by referring a friend. You swap items using Trade Credits.	You can print out a pre-paid/pre-addressed shipping label. If you do not send the item requested, SwapSimple will send requester a new copy of whatever you had promised to send and then charge you for it.
The Book Cart	Paperback Books	Free except for postage and a handling charge. The site uses mainly Paypal to do their business. When you send a book, you get a $2 credit for postage for sending the book. Receivers get charged $2.50 for shipping and handling.	Shipping is "Free"
PaperBackSwap (PBS)	Books (Hardback, Paperback, CD and Cassette Audiobooks)	Free with a credit system	You pay for shipping, and you can print out a wrapper for your book that can wrap most regular-sized books.
Bookins Book Exchange	Books (Hardback, Paperback, CD and Cassette Audiobooks)	$3.99 flat rate for each book you receive. You earn points for books that you send which are used automatically to get books sent to you from your Wish list.	Print out pre-paid postage label.
Peerflix	DVDs	Free membership, you pay $.99 per DVD plus postage for DVDs you receive.	Print out a plain paper, postage-paid wrapper to send your DVD in.
BookMooch	Books	Free, you get points by adding books to your library, sending books and giving books to people's wishlist. You use points by getting requesting books and giving to charities. You must keep a ratio of getting one book for every five books sent.	Sender is responsible for all shipping costs and packaging

 I think this is a really neat idea. I have a bunch of DVDs, CDs and books that I would like to get rid of, and I usually end up just giving stuff away without getting anything in return. This way, you get stuff you want for things you already have and pretty much all you have to pay is minimal postage costs. I'm definitely going to get into this when I get back.

powered by performancing firefox

An Awesome Extension for Firefox
(Previously posted Thursday, March 16, 2006, on my now defunct Myspace blog)


18:52 - An Awesome Extension for Firefox
Current mood: creative
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

If you don't have Firefox, you need to get it...now. There's so many awesome extensions that make web-browsing (and myspaceing) SO much more useful!
The latest AWESOME extension that I've found is Greasemonkey. It's an extension that helps you customize the way you see webpages by adding some DHTML and AJAX scripts in. I found out about it by just browsing some people's blog comments. I like Google's Image Search, but I find that it's a little annoying that you have to open up a brand new webpage to actually see the actual photo. With the Greasemonkey extension and the Google Image Search specific script installed in your Greasemonkey, you can see the full-size image without messing about with the extra webpages.
Greasemonkey not only works with this, but there are a whole bunch of other cool scripts that you can load into Greasemonkey on Userscripts.org. I've even found some cool scripts for MySpace! I don't really spend too much time on MySpace, but it really seems that you're just not cool if you don't have a MySpace, but those songs and videos and crap are really kind of annoying to me when I look at someone's profile. Therefore, I have the Automatic MySpace Media Remover that automatically gets rid of that crap. However, if I really want to hear what people have on their MySpace, I can conveniently click on a link that restores the media. Another cool script I got for MySpace is MySpace CommentBox PLUS. It puts an awesome little comment box right there above the comments, so I don't have to go to a million other webpages just to post a comment on someone's profile. Cool, huh?

Like I said, you MUST get Firefox! It is AWESOME!

Well, have a nice day. :)

Love For Firefox, Originally posted on Wednesday, March 08, 2006 on my now defunct Myspace blog.

20:48 - Love for Firefox Current mood: accomplished Category: Web, HTML, Tech I just want to sing out some praise for my new favorite web browser, Mozilla Firefox. Now, until just a while ago, I was still gasping for air from the death grip of Microsoft Internet Explorer. I've had Firefox on my computer for maybe a month now, and I never had it set as my default browser until now. I kind of used Internet Explorer and Firefox equally up until yesterday, when I finally said "I do" to the Firefox bandwagon. I love the fact that Firefox has the tabbed browsing, because I like to look up various different things, and I usually have at least 3 webpages open at one time. With Internet Explorer, you can group the windows on the taskbar, but it's a lot more inconvenient than what Firefox has got going on with the tabbed browsing. I also like the download feature. With Internet Explorer, I'm half afraid that if I download more than one thing at a time, my downloads will mess up on me. Firefox conveniently lets you download various files at the same time, with little worry that your downloads will fail.However, the download window is sometimes annoying, so I downloaded the Download Statusbar extension for Firefox, and it shows all my downloads down near the status bar, so I can 1) keep an eye on the progress of the downloads and 2) not be bothered by the download window. By the way, I really love all these extensions for Firefox. There are really a lot of them, some of them not as useful as others, but here's a list of my favorites so far: 1. Foxytunes – I like to listen to music sometimes while I'm surfing the net, and this little app in my status bar allows me to control my favorite music player right when I'm browsing, so I don't have to have to maximize my player to change the track. 2. PDF Download – I hate it in Internet Explorer when I have to wait for it to load the PDF before I can download it. It's usually much better for me to just download the PDF instead of view it in the browser. This lets me choose what to do with it, whether I want to download it or look at it in the browser. I've been waiting for something like this to come along for a long time. 3. Firefox Showcase – This is a relatively new one for me, I just got it yesterday, but I kind of like it because I sometimes have more than one Firefox window open with a bunch of tabs in each window, and this lets you see which tabs you have all in one window, and then lets you choose which tab to jump to. This is extrememly helpful when you know you have a tab open but just can't remember where you put it. 4. Mouse Gestures – This is a neat extension, one that I'm still learning. It lets you make commands by using your mouse to "draw" the commands. It's kind of cumbersome at times, and I have trouble making the right strokes for some commands, but the "Open New Tab" command has been a lifesaver for me. I was almost always doing File>New Tab. This is so much quicker. They also have a helpful sidebar that gives an example of all the "gestures" that you can make with your mouse in Firefox. I have a bunch of other extensions, but I've kind of found that they're not very useful. I guess the coolest thing about Firefox is that it's so customizable. I'm not sure if it can be customized for a specific user, like if you share your computer with other users, because I don't really share my computer with anybody that would customize their Firefox, but I'm sure that if it's not possible, it will be pretty soon. There's always new things coming out for Firefox, so I make sure I check back often.

Update: August 11, 2006

Well, I'm really still loving Firefox, although I'm not using Firefox Showcase or Mouse Gestures anymore. Both were great extensions, they just didn't fit in with my websurfing style. Here's some of my current favorites:

1. Blogger Web Comments - This is neat if you want to see who's blogging about a page that you're on. It runs in your status bar and looks like a little cartoon talk bubble. If there are blog entrys about that page, then a list of those blogs and a snippet of the entry will come up on a neat little menu. This is a cool way to find interesting blogs.

2. Colorful tabs - Before I had Colorful Tabs, the only way I could tell the difference between my tabs was the favicon (if it even had one). This extension makes each tab a different color. Really useful!

3. Diigo Toolbar - I've gotten really into bookmarking websites, and this little tool is the ultimate companion to my Diigo account.

4. Firefox Menu Buttons - These are some extra buttons for you to customize your toolbars with.

5. Forecastfox - This is a neat extension that runs in your status bar that tells you the current weather for your area and even includes a radar map.

6. Greasemonkey - This is a really neat one. You use this extension to add bits of DHTML and AJAX to different webpages to modify the page's behavior to your liking. You can remove ads, make the background a different color...there's literally thousands of different scripts that you can use.

7. Morning Coffee - This useful extension is for websites that you habitually check. You add the websites to your Morning Coffee, and then all you have to do from then on is click the toolbar button and voila! All your websites come up in their own tabs. I have websites like my email, news and diigo in my Morning Coffee.

8. Restart Firefox - This is great for when you install new extensions and themes.

9. Tab Mix Plus - This is a really cool one that allows you to customize how your tabs work, and there is a built in session saver that can really be a life saver if you r browser or computer crashes or if you accidentally close your window. As for some of the things you can do with tabs, you can do pretty much anything from showing a close button on the tab itself to changing the way links are opened in the tabs. Really a must have for the tabbed-browsing lover.

Diigo: Social Bookmarking and Annotation (Originally posted on June 20, 2006 on my now defunct blog)

Okay, so sometimes I sign up for things without really knowing what they are or how to use them, and I subsequently delete them from my computer and my memory without a second thought until I get an email from the company thanking me for using their beta. This is how I discovered Diigo and social bookmarking.

Diggo is all about social annotation and bookmarking. I've been playing around with it for the past couple days, and I've discovered that it may be quite useful to me, and others. I've become very fond of bookmarking sites that I'd like to return to someday. I bookmark like crazy, and then I can't remember what I wanted to keep that site for in the first place. With Diigo, you can bookmark a site, give it a relevant tag, highlight the parts of the page that are of interest and make comments about the site. You can make your comments public, so everybody can see them or private, where only you can see them. The community feature is kind of neat...you can see what other people think about different webpages.

Of course, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, like del.icio.us and Kaboodle, but so far, the only one I've tried is this Diigo and I enjoy the interface and useability. Granted, it is still in the beta stages, so there's a few kinks, but those get worked out with time...

If you'd like to start using Diigo, because it is still in the beta stages, you must have an invite...kind of like Gmail...so if you'd like an invite, just let me know!

If you'd like more information on what Diigo is or how it works, check out www.diigo.com or click here for a good article all about it.

More Good Books I've Read Over Here

So, I finished Rachel's Holiday. It was pretty good...one of those books that leaves me bawling and with a headache, but I'd rather be crying over a book or movie than something more important, I guess. Some of my favorite and most memorable books and movies make me cry floods.
As I've promised, I will outline some of the other good books I've read during my deployment. In no way are they going to be in the order that I read them or am I going to order them at all. I really have no favorite out of these books, and I've certainly read a lot more than these while here, but these are the ones worth writing about.

Rosie Dunne by Cecilia Ahern

This is the second book I've read by Cecilia Ahern, and most likely not the last. I had been eyeing P.S. I Love You in the bookstores for months after it came out in hardback waiting for it to come out in paperback, so it'd be cheaper and a little easier to read because I prefer paperback. When I finally did read P.S. I Love You, there was a postcard inside advertising her new book, Rosie Dunne. P.S. I Love You was an AWESOME book, so of course I watched out on Amazon and such for Rosie Dunne to come out. Of course, I had hoped to get that in paperback also, but I ended up buying the hardback copy.
Rosie Dunne is about the title character and her best friend Alex, who just happens to be a guy. They're perfect for each other, but life gets in the way of things a bit. The whole story is told through emails, letters, cards and other correspondence, which puts a neat spin on it all and it makes me wish I was better about writing by keeping in touch with people. It's even hard for me to write emails most of the time, let alone snail mail!

The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve

These next two books are Oprah's Book Club books. One of my very first "adult books" was She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb in seventh grade, and just about every Oprah's Book Club book I've read since then has been really, really good.
The Pilot's Wife is about a woman who tries to find out what happened to her husband when his plane went down in the North Atlantic off the coast of Ireland on a flight from Ireland to the U.S., and her discoveries turn her world upside down. The story is shrouded in mystery and includes a lot of twists and turns and the end is quite surprising, making you ask yourself how well you actually know the people closest to you. Great read.

Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

As mentioned above, Icy Sparks in another Oprah's Book Club book. It's about an orphan girl named Icy Sparks who lives with her grandparents in Eastern Kentucky. Anyway, Icy Sparks is told in first person, and it tells the story of her struggle with Tourette Syndrome as a young girl. It takes place in the 1950's, and throughout her childhood, no one could diagnose her, and she was frequently the subject of ridicule. The story is narrated by the adult Icy and her story is extremely heart-wrenching and at the same time, heart-warming. Reading this book brought back memories of another fabulous book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.



Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan

Marley and Me was kind of a random book I ordered off of Amazon. I was buying some headphones for my mom and to get free shipping, I bought Marley and Me for myself. Sounded like a neat story, which it definitely was.
Marley and Me tells the story of the author and the antics of his hyperactive yellow Labrador retriever named Marley. When the author and his wife get married, they decide to get a puppy as a trial-run before parenthood, and Marley sure turns out to be a handful! He destroys their house, gets kicked out of obedience school, and defaces a pristine doggy beach. However, he is a loyal and trusted companion of the author and his wife throughout Marley's life and the growing of their family. This book had me alternating between laughing so hard I woke my roommates and bawling my eyes out. Very good book. Really made me miss having a pet.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Prep is about a girl from small-town Indiana who spends her high school years away from her family at an elite boarding school in Massachusetts. Lee Fiora was one of the top students in her class back in South Bend, but she becomes a little less than average when she goes to Ault. During her four years there, she doesn't really fit in, which makes life hard for her, but she eventually finds her place in the food chain. She feels distanced from her parents back in Indiana, makes and loses friends, and disgraces herself and her school in a very public way. Prep defines social classes extremely well and it makes us all remember the excruciating pain it is to be a teenager.
One of my roommates reccommended this book to me. It was hard to put down.


I'm A Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of today's favorite travel writers. I bought this book on October 10, 2002, the day I graduated from basic training, and it was kind of hard for me to get through because I had other things going on, but I finally finished it here on deployment. It's actually a really good book to just pick up and start reading from anywhere actually.
Bill Bryson lived for 25 years in England and then decided to move with his family back to his native America in 1995. The first few years of living in New Hampshire, he wrote a column in an English newspaper about his experiences and the differences between the two countries and his experiences with getting to know his own country again. I'm A Stranger Here Myself is pretty much a compilation of those columns. Some of his anecdotes will make you cry and other will make you laugh hysterically.

Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner

I read Good In Bed while I was in California, and that became one of my favorite books ever, so I've tried to read all of Jennifer Weiner's books so far. I read In Her Shoes while I was at JRTC, and that was a goodie too. I can't wait to see the movie and read her two newest books, Goodnight Nobody and The Guy Not Taken. She really has a knack for making interesting, multi-layered characters.
Little Earthquakes is about the trials and tribulations of first-time motherhood and trying to deal with family problems at the same time. It tells the stories of four very different women, all new mothers, who live very different lives but become good friends. One is a chef and can't stand her mother-in-law who dresses her new daughter in horrible clothes, another is an event planner whose husband lost his job right before the baby comes so she has to go back to work after her baby's born, there's a wife of a famous basketball player who had cheated on her. These three women met at a prenatal yoga class and became fast friends. Also entering their circle is a Hollywood starlet who comes back to her native Philadelphia to get over the shock of a terrible tragedy.


Like I said before, I've read a bunch of books while I've been over here, but these are the ones I remember most right off the top of my head, and these are the ones actually worth reading. I do have a weakness for trashy romance novels that I can get through in just a couple days, and I've read my fair share of those. Their pull kind of fascinates me, actually. The formula is basically the same for all of them, and they all end just about the same way, but I can't help but read them. Maybe it's the sense of accomplishment that I get from being able to read them so quickly? I don't know.

Tricking Out My Blog

Oh, man! I've really done it now...I've tricked out my blog with all kinds of cool stuff...so much in fact, that I have trouble remembering what I signed up for, and I probably won't use half of it...oh well. I'll figure out what is the most useful and keep it and probably get rid of the rest if it clutters up things too much.

Blog Starter Checklist helped me get to all this cool stuff. There's Feedburner, Technorati, Blogarama and a whole bunch of other things I put on here. If you're a starting blogger like I am, this is a good place to start getting bloggerized.

Cool sites and some other mindless chatter

Hey, everybody! I guess it's about time I wrote another blog entry…man, I'm so bad at keeping in touch...Actually though, I did write some stuff to put on here, but I had been procrastinating a bit about posting it, and I have some revisions to make. Will post soon.

A while ago, I had found meebo.com and thought it was a really cool idea. You can log in to your AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, MSN or Gtalk accounts through this website without having to download any programs. It's especially good if you are using a computer that is not your own to access the internet. I usually access the computer with my own computer, so it didn't seem much use to me, however, I logged on recently while I was using somebody else's computer and found that you can put little chat boxes on your website, so when you're online, and people come to your website, they can chat with you right away...neat, huh? My meebo box is on my myspace and this blog, so if you catch me online when you visit my page, be sure to let me know what you think!

Anyway, I've been doing some surfing, and I've found some cool sites of note. Three of them are blogs and the other is a "regular" website...

Cute Overload

So this is where it all started...I was looking through the Webby Award winners, and I found this neat little blog, where everything makes you go, "LOOK! IT'S SOOOOO CUTE!" and "AWWWW..." I love cute pictures, and this has some of the cutest. I had had some trouble viewing the pictures on the website, but all I had to do was subsribe to the RSS feed, and I was able to get my daily dose of cuteness.

Baruchito's Homecage

I found this delightful website through Cute Overload. The "author" of this blog is a hamster named Baruchito who lives in Japan. I've never had a hamster before, but Baruchito's stories about his life are really cute.

Hemmy.net

This blog is a little hard to descibe, but they say it's updated daily, so that's good. Each post is pretty much an interesting picture, video or a funny story. Definately a site to peruse when you're bored.

Dogster.com

I LOVE this website! I found it while flipping through Bark Magazine. It's kind of like myspace for dogs! You sign up and then post pictures of your dog and their bio, and you can write a diary for your dog. It's a whole big community of dog lovers. There are pup pals, groups and forums. I don't have a dog yet, but I miss the ones I have had. I love to just take random strolls on Dogster. There's another version of the website called Catster, but I'm more of a dog person.

*Yawn* I'm getting sleepy! I better go to bed now. See you next time!