Introduction

What Is This Place?

This entire website is dedicated to the books I know and love (and covet).  To a lesser extent, it is dedicated to the perseverance of learning to build a meaningful, aesthetically pleasing website from scratch.  To an even lesser extent, it is my virtual self, the online Lucy Day.

Incidentally, this site is best viewed using Internet Explorer 6 on a Windows XP operating system, since that's how I usually see it, and since I use Microsoft FrontPage (or rather, Expression Web) to edit it.  If you're on some other platform, my site may look a little icky. Or really icky, maybe. I know that a well designed site shouldn't need a disclaimer. Well, so much for version 2 of my site! Enjoy it while you can, though I don't imagine version 3 will spring from my head as fully formed as Athena, in spite of any splitting headaches I may experience.

News and Updates about Website, Books, & Other Stuff:

6/26/08
The new website is, if not progressing much itself, teaching me new things. Such as how easy it is to write a PHP program with a security hole big enough to drive a truck through. In fact, it's hard *not* to write that kind of PHP code, if you don't know what you're doing. However, the Chilean hackers, having poked and prodded my calendar script a couple hundred times, don't seem to have been able to do any damage to my account. So I'm sitting on my hands waiting for a book on security from Amazon.

I am tempted to believe, and in fact I usually assume, that books can solve any problem, answer any question, and teach any skill. Secure PHP applications? Yep. Swimming? Well, perhaps not. Mixing drinks? Oh yeah. Now I have a book on that too. Because who'd go to an actual bar with actual friends to learn more about tasty alcohol-y drinks, when obviously you could just read about them instead?
5/29/08
My husband is planning to complete his PhD program this summer, and is applying to post-doctoral research jobs in several countries. We are excited about the prospect of living abroad starting sometime in the fall, but we don't know where we'll go yet.

Meanwhile, you can, if you want, check out the mostly incomplete site I've put up at www.spjg.com.
4/27/08
I attended the Hunterdon County Library Book Sale at the Flemington Armory yesterday. I bought a dozen or so Disney VHS tapes as well as some kids' novels and some humor books. Non-fiction selection was only so-so. I accidentally bought two books I already had. (There goes $1.00. Oops.) And I bought three books I already had on purpose. (Because they were nicer. Or at least potentially nicer. Dang perfectionist streak.)

The bigger news is that I have bought the full versions of three Collectorz.com programs (for books, movies, and music), and the Flic Barcode Scanner that can be used to enter data fast. I had spent a lot of time learning about barcode scanners online, trying to find a way to buy one for under $100. But what I eventually did was buy the software and scanner package (at a discount) from a guy on eBay who bought it from Collectorz.com and then decided he wasn't going to use it after all. Lucky me.

I have now scanned in over 1000 books. That's all the books of mine that are scannable. (Some are too old or have damaged or stickered barcodes. Or are foreign and can be scanned but not looked up.) I haven't scanned any of my husband's books. His collection is heavy on cooking, mysteries, math & computer science, personal finance, Go, history, and travel, in addition to some novels.

Data cleanup and augmentation will take forever, but at least now I don't have to start from scratch.

Meanwhile, I've been playing an online game called Puzzle Pirates. I found it by clicking an online banner ad. You might see this as evidence that there is such a thing as advertising revenue online, but first consider that I haven't given Puzzle Pirates any real money; all I've done is use the free options... and tied up a bit of their server bandwidth.
3/29/08
I scored two books of Sidney Harris cartoons and a Madeleine L'Engle box set (among other things) at this year's Bryn Mawr book sale. I saw an astounding number of Wizard of Oz books.
2/26/08
I flattened out the edges of my page elements; they were TABLE borders; now they're DIV borders, and they look much better. I also got rid of some of the space between my page elements. The menu is now closer to the page title panel and the content panel, and the page title panel is now closer to the content panel. (The footer was, sadly, overlooked, and looks farther away by comparison.) I also got rid of a phantom black box in the title panel that was only, I think, showing up in Safari. This sort of stuff is not fun, since my pages aren't made with a dynamic template! Yes, it's dumb, but don't shoot me, I'm already suffering enough doing manual search-and-replace followed by manual QA to catch the boo-boos.
2/14/08
Happy Valentine's Day!

I attended the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in NYC this week. It was fascinating.

A thought on why I haven't launched a new website at the new (well, not so new, actually) domain:

Much work remains to be done before we can announce our total failure to make any progress.
definition of "planning" from www.despair.com

1/28/08
Martin Luther King weekend was less fruitful than I'd hoped. I was trying to get my new web development platform up and running.

I spent many hours discovering that (1) I probably don't want to have to install and configure Apache on my computer, that (2) I could install and configure XAMPP on my computer instead, which is, arguably but not obviously, less complicated, and that (3) I should probably just develop on the remote server, which, because my web host doesn't offer certain capabilities *period,* I can't make the necessary connections, so that (4) I urgently need to switch web hosts. (It's now a chicken-and-egg problem: I don't want to switch until I have something that needs to be hosted, but I can't really do any development until I have a host I can connect to.)

Then followed several hours which revealed to me that (5) my new software, NuSphere's PhpED, does not have a built-in system akin to the FrontPage / Expression Web dynamic web template system, that (6) it instead supports a clever, server-side, database-enabled, php-friendly php/html code separation template engine called Smarty, and that (7) actually, you don't have to use Smarty, you can just use php itself as a template system.

It all seems obvious in retrospect, so I don't even feel as if I actually learned anything, and I'm upset that I didn't have time to make any visible progress or create any new content.

I am toying with the idea of creating content via some book-collecting software by collectorz.com. I am thinking I can input books via ISBN, retrieve data from Amazon and the Library of Congress, and export data in CSV files which I can then feed into my MySQL tables. It may or may not be worthwhile for me to purchase a CueCat barcode scanner to facilitate this process; it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the keypad. If the CueCat were wireless, I could carry it around to my books and then download multiple ISBNs at once, but only the expensive scanners have that functionality.

There's a saying: "Easy, fast, cheap. Pick two." I'm beginning to believe I'm destined to wind up with none of the above. On the bright side, however, CSS doesn't seem all that hard anymore.
1/4/08
Happy New Year! I am back from a long holiday in Chicago. I have new books, new software, and (as always) new ideas for the new website.
12/4/07
This past weekend, I attended the American Anthropological Association conference in Washington DC to staff the Princeton University Press book exhibit. I am always intrigued by the change in point of view that I experience at academic conferences. I often lose sight of the fact that book-making is, as we claim, the propagation of knowledge. Going to a conference means I see where the knowledge originates, how it is formulated and transmitted, and how it is received. Humans are odd creatures, to be sure.

On the way back from DC, Aquinas and I stopped at two bookstores and a book... thing. The first of the two bookstores was Second Story Books, clearly a well-entrenched used-book store, complete with quirky section labels, decorations hanging from the ceiling, and bookly quotations taped to unpainted shelves. The second was a fundraising store called Books for America. The space was full, but didn't have the same inhabited feel. We ate at the nearby corner cafe, which was very thoroughly inhabited with laptop users taking advantage of the free wireless service.

In Baltimore, we stopped at The Book Thing. It is a place where books are donated, and then given away. In anticipation of visiting The Book Thing, I had stashed some inscrutable foreign books in my trunk. They were happily received. If you're in the mood to read some dinosaur or cell-biology textbooks in Danish, head over to The Book Thing fast before someone else gets them!

11/25/07
I have now developed a menu that knows what page you're on, displays the appropriate submenu, and deactivates the link to the page that you're on. It turns out that once I phrased the question the right way (i.e., can I embed a script in the template that is aware of the page's filepath) I pretty much already had the answer.
11/13/07
Yesterday I made a gecko. Not easy.

Today I watched a short film of Flatland. I thought it was great! What more could a person ask for in a short film than clever animation, mathematical theory, and political philosophy? After all, Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land only covers two of the three.

Christmas lists are here.

I am trying to think of a way to create a site from one template file, and yet have each main category have its own left-hand navigational menu. Alas, nested templates don't seem to be possible. I don't want silly JavaScript menu trees that you can expand and collapse by clicking. I don't want to be told that CSS is the answer to everything, or shown how to make a dropdown or "fly out" menu. I want different subcategories to be visible depending on which folder you're in on the site. Without creating a template for each folder. This is not the sort of thing that's easy to look up. (Cursor tail? Easy to look up, but no more desirable than a skunk in a submarine.) I'm not even sure how to approach this problem, but there has to be a way to avoid doing it by hand, which leads to mistakes. I don't want mistakes in my menus! Can I embed a script in the template that is aware of the page's filepath and have it output HTML code for the relevant submenu? How?

10/26/07
Yesterday I went to the grocery store and bought some things in the health and beauty aisle. This morning in the shower, I realized that there were no less than FOUR orange items in the shower, three of them new, out of a total of eight items present. In a department full of pastel stuff, how did I manage to select three new orange items by accident? My theory is that I was responding subliminally to the approach of the end of October.

Meanwhile this month, I have been to visit family in Atlanta, attempted (with some success) to sew polyhedra, joined Facebook, started to build a quotation database with php/MySql, discovered that self-reference is probably my favorite form of humor, and become fascinated with pachinko balls, other manufactured spheres, and plush dragons. I also sold some legacy Apple hardware for $100 on eBay. (I love it when someone else's trash becomes my cash.)

9/8/07
My computer is happy! It has three times the memory it had this morning. I ordered 1GB from TigerDirect, and it came yesterday. Today Aquinas and I opened up my computer case (fished out a pound of dust) and inserted the memory. Aquinas also fixed my CD drive, which has been unresponsive for months.
8/31/07
I found I didn't need to buy more software or sign up with a different webhost. Using the tools I already have, I have made some more progress learning PHP/MySQL. I didn't anticipate having to learn JavaScript, but it turns out that it's useful for making interactive forms, which is what I'm building now. I've also had to go back and learn all about HTML forms; my website has never incorporated any, so I never knew how to set them up. Forms are how I'll insert book data into the database; I haven't gotten to the point where I'm actually inserting anything. All the data entry is still to come (hundreds and hundreds of books), as is the design and implementation of the site structure, and the retrieval of the data via the site... But any progress is better than none, and I'm fascinated with the power of HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP/MySQL. I feel as though I could do anything, given enough time in front of a keyboard.

Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone. (I'm not going anywhere; good luck to those traveling.)

8/15/07
Laugh if you want, but now I'm really studying Chinese. I've started to try to learn to write 5 characters every weekday. Pronunciation, however, is lagging behind.

Aquinas's birthday is coming up, so go get him stuff.

I'm making some headway with PHP/MySQL, but am having trouble finding a tool that can talk to my database on the remote webhost. I'm beginning to think I need a new webhost. I want to use NuSphere's PhpEd (I think), but 1&1 blocks direct connections to MySQL databases and disables port forwarding. I just don't want to (a) pay a lot of money to a webhost or (b) become a webhost myself.

7/14/07
Let the Harry Potter marathon begin! Yes, I know, it's past time to start re-reading books 1-6. I was too busy finishing the Ramayana, which I started about a year ago. FYI, it was worth finishing. Just think, there are, I dunno, a billion people on the planet more likely to know the story of the death of Ravana than the story of the crucifixion of Christ.

I did not manage to successfully travel to Atlanta for the 4th of July. I was thwarted by weather and a bankrupt, uncaring bureaucracy (Continental Airlines--not that any other airline would have been better). It's a funny story now. Wasn't then.

Aquinas is still in France developing proof code for a paper, though I hear it's reached a draft stage.

Another fiscal book year has ended; my very own personal book purchasing quantity went up while price-per-unit went down. Again. This is not good for the bookshelf situation, which isn't changing at all.

6/2/07
Long day yesterday in New York City at Book Expo America 2007. After 8 hours of what amounts to trick-or-treating, I was carrying 41 books (30 of them signed) weighing 35 pounds in total. I cannot think of a trade show I would rather go to.

Apparently, the popular way to make a database-driven website is with PHP and MySQL. I'm going to attempt to learn how to do this. Stay tuned.

Want your immediate environment to smell better? Try using Fresh Wave! Available through a PayPal store I made at www.thebarkingtomato.com.

5/20/07
Bits of news: I visited Atlanta for my brother's graduation last weekend. I placed an expensive order on Amazon for some web design books I think will be useful. I went to another great Ewing Library sale, and a lousy one in Bridgewater. I've updated the Things I Want list a little, and also the Movies pages. I'm almost done re-reading the Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. I really enjoyed Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones. I'm looking forward to Towel Day on Friday.
4/14/07
My husband and I went to India for three weeks in February. We took 1200 photos, which I suppose I will sort through, develop, and share. Eventually. Don't hold your breath.

In March I went to the Bryn Mawr Book Sale again, and this year found a lot of great books on language usage, word histories, and writing. The book I'm happiest about, though, is a hard-to-find paperback copy of Edith Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet.

My job gave me the opportunity to tour the facilities of Lehigh Lithographers. Basically, they manufacture fancy book covers (and transparencies, and board game lids, and some other similar things). I saw---and heard---many things: some *huge* German printing presses, some that print up to six colors (rather than one, two, or four) and use UV light to dry the ink; machines that etch printing plates; machines that emboss; machines that foil-stamp; machines that laminate; machines that collate (the biggest in the country, in fact); and stacks and stacks of finished and partly-finished book covers. Being that I know almost nothing about it, manufacturing seems to me to have a certain aura, particularly when the end product (book covers) is something I care about. Come to think of it, the raw materials (paper, paper, and more paper, plus graphic design) are pretty fascinating too.

I got some nice birthday presents this week. Thanks to those who remembered!

My various hobbies are competing wildly: my interest in coins has been recently reawakened (last week I spent $50 on coin storage objects and old pennies); to my mother's delight, I have a new fascination with sewing (I made a pair of beanie-baby-like dragons from decrepit clothing); I learned some new kumihimo patterns; I attended an origami gathering and ordered a new origami book; I ordered a crewel-embroidery book (huh?); I started working through a book on how to draw; and I now have new web development software (Expression Web), along with some books on web graphics, and a burning desire to learn more about user interface design and information architecture. Oh, and I'm trying to go ice skating on Sundays. It's like inline skating but not. (I learned the hard way that one needs to wear layers at an ice rink.)

In the spare cash department, I've been tutoring regularly, babysitting intermittently and regularly, selling books online (and in person, but with less success), and having my brain scanned by Princeton post-docs.

In short, never a dull moment.

1/2/07
Choose an option to complete the sentence:

"We stand before the dawn of a new _____."
(a) world
(b) year
(c) website
(d) all of the above.

The answer is (d) all of the above. "Dawn over a New World" is an awesome song by a band called Dragonforce. They play "power metal" (?!). Though technically we're standing *after* the dawn of January 1, we're *mostly* looking ahead to 2007 at this point. And, I am pleased to announce (drumroll. . . .) that I'm finally launching a new site design. Nope, just kidding. Not ready yet.

Hey, where'd the other stuff go?  I've archived it.  ARCHIVE 3

ARCHIVE 2

ARCHIVE 1

 

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Site last updated: July 1, 2008