Here’s the deal. Like good consumers, we have a lot of CDs, DVDs, and books. Especially books. We have books on the bookshelf in Baby TBA’s room. We have them under the bed in Baby TBA’s room. We have them in closets. Under end tables. If you open the pantry? Books spill out, a tide of literacy and potential paper cuts. What’s a family to do?

Get rid of some of those books? Ha, you clearly don’t know us. No, what we need to do is catalog it all. We tried this a few years ago using a combination of Python scripts and chutzpah, but the scripts needed too much hand-holding and in the end I would have still had to do something with the information that was being saved in big long text files. But I hear there are nifty packaged programs now available to do the job. Maybe we should buy something from SIRSI. Ha! Ha! Just kidding, dad!

Anyway, I took a look at several cataloging programs. Here are the things I’m looking for:

• Catalog books, DVDs, and CDs. The last is less important, since we’re about done with our year-long project to digitize all of our music, but I’d rather not have a program that just does books or just does CDs.
• Decent interface. What doomed the project last time was all of the fiddling I had to do to add books, and I had no good way of looking at the data once I’d entered it.
• Ease of data entry. Most of the software packages use barcode scanners, which is a fine way to read the UPC information. But it’s what the program does after that that is important. How much manual massage is required to turn that UPC information into bibliographic information?
• Tracks loans. We hand out books and CDs and all, and it’d be nice to keep track of who has what. Our current system of writing things down on post-it notes that then get lost or thrown away is not so ideal.
• Portable data format or good exporting tools. Any software package I buy today has no guarantee of being around in five or ten years. I need to be able to take the data elsewhere. Plain text is a bare minimum requirement, though export to something like XML or a CSV spreadsheet format would be nifty.
• Portable data. One thing I’d like to be able to do is have the data on a PDA when trolling used book stores to make sure I don’t buy duplicates unawares.
• Cross-platform. Ours is a house divided, with me using PCs and Misty using Macs.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our judging criteria. Bring in the candidates!

Collectorz.com

Collectorz is the goofy name for an umbrella of software designed to catalog media. You type in author and title information or ISBN data; alternatively, you scan the media’s UPC bar code with a barcode reader. The software then gathers full information about the book, movie or CD and populates its database with the results.

The good: Adding media to the database is simple. The program pulls information from the Library of Congress, the British Library, the various flavors of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, IMDB, and their own online databases. The program grabs cover images while it’s at it. You can create custom printed lists using XML/XSL, and can export to HTML, CSV, and XML. The software is available for Mac or PC, though you must buy one or the other.

The bad: Each and every type of media you want to catalog requires a separate software purchase at either $20 (standard version) or $30 (pro version) a pop. Music, movies, video games, books, comic books (!), mp3s (!!), all are separate programs. The standard version of the software has no exporting features, does “simple lists”, and will not track loans. You can buy “premium support” to get your support questions answered faster.

Summary: Collectorz feels like it was designed to extract as much money from me as possible. To cover both books and movies would cost $60; throw in CD cataloging and we’re up to $90. That’s before you buy a barcode scanner, too.

Readerware

Readerware is the granddaddy of these software packages. You type in a list of ISBNs or scan them in using a barcode scanner. Readerware then downloads the information including cover images. The data itself is stored in an SQL database, though it’s not clear to me whether or not you can do SQL searches directly.

The good: Like the Collectorz software, Readerware pulls information from many online sources and downloads cover images. It exports to tab-delimited files, CSVs, and UIEE. The software is available for Mac, PC, and Linux. It tracks loans. It has a built-in browser and integrates directly with sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble so you can purchase books through the program and enter them into your database at once.

The bad: Also like Collectorz, Readerware has separate programs for books, for CDs, and for movies. The programs are $40 apiece or $75 for all three. It’s a clunkier-looking program than the others reviewed here — it looks like one of those old Borland applications that companies use to keep track of items in their stockroom.

Summary: This has many of the same strengths and weaknesses of Collectorz, though you can get all three versions of Readerware for less than the three analogous Collectorz packages. On the other hand, Collectorz has a nicer-looking interface.

Delicious Library

Delicious Library, like the previous two programs, lets you scan your media and catalog them. It’s a Mac-only product that is tightly integrated with the OS and uses an iTunes-like interface.

The good: Delicious Library is extremely pretty. The iTunes-like interface has the benefit of familiarity. You can scan your books in by putting the barcode in front of an iSight camera. (How cool is that?) Your catalog is saved in XML format, and a number of pre-written scripts exist to take that data and export it as other things. It keeps track of loaned items. For $40 it will catalog books, movies and CDs.

The bad: It’s Mac only. The interface is only as good as the iTunes interface; you don’t have the flexibility of Collectorz in setting up views. It doesn’t pull data from as many sources.

Summary: Everything I’ve read has given a big thumbs-up to Delicious Library. I will admit my shallow outlook and say that the program’s look is just about enough to sell it to me. Plus the ability to read barcodes via a camera is genius. I’ve seen that application in industrial machine vision applications, but had never thought about applying it to the problem of cataloging media.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is an online book catalog site that collates its members’ catalogs into a collaborative social catalog. You type in a book’s title and author, import a list of ISBN codes from text files or web pages, or pull information directly from a CueCat scanner. LibraryThing then collates information about the books from various libraries and from Amazon.com.

The good: The del.icio.us-like social aspects are intriguing, and allows the site to provide recommendations. You can enter 200 books for free; for $10 a year or $25 lifetime you can add all the books you want. You can export your book information as tab-delimited text or as a CSV file. Playing with the website is fun. You can integrate your library into your blog easily. It’s clearly cross-platform, and it has an API you can use to get at its data.

The bad: It only does books. It doesn’t track loans per se, though you can tag books that you’ve loaned out as being on loan. You’re giving your library data to a business to hold, which may or may not bother you.

Summary: LibraryThing is a really fun site, and if we were only cataloging books, this is the way I’d go in a heartbeat.

The Summary

From where I’m sitting, Delicious Library is the way to go, even though we have a number of PCs in the house. It has a number of nifty features and has a lower price point for my needs. I may spring for a full LibraryThing account as well because it’s fun to play with. Were I going to limit myself to software that ran under Windows, it’d be a toss-up. Luckily, everything I’ve looked at in this article has trial versions or free-but-limited versions. Talk to me in a few months when I’ve tried using one of these programs in more depth.

Night before last, Stephen and I were reading in bed when I suddenly had an overwhelming craving for a donut. Now this is rare for me. I like donuts ok but while pregnant I don’t do too well with overly sugary foods. Then in the night I had a donut dream. I’m pretty sure that Homer Simpson was involved. I told Stephen about my dream yesterday morning and he laughed at me.

Yesterday afternoon I couldn’t stand it. I called Stephen at work and asked him please, please, please to stop and get me a donut and a bag of frozen mixed berries that my sister-in-law totally has me hooked on. Last night after dinner, I had a beautiful chocolate covered donut for desert.

Homer would be so proud.

1. This morning as I was checking my email, Eli climbed up into my lap and demanded to watch videos. He meant the videos that Stephen posted this past Friday. We always watch them at some point and he deemed this morning would be video morning. So we watched both of the “Such Great Heights” options and as he was sitting in my lap and bobbing his head in time to the music I thought to myself that there wasn’t many other things better than sharing something that you love with your kid. It was a really nice moment.

2. I got a letter this afternoon. An actual, in the mail, with a stamp, someone sat down and wrote to me long hand, kind of letter and it was great. A really thoughtful thing for a far off friend to do and I am very appreciative of it. Touched and feeling really blessed over it, actually.

3. Stephen got a phone call tonight from some friends in Durham. They are moving to AZ and wanted to know if we could see them when we come in January. Wow! A really nice surprise there. So when we go to Phoenix next month it will be non-stop friend visiting action. I’m pretty excited about that too.

So I’ve had a good day. I hope some good things happened to you today as well.

We have two trips planned after the first of the year. One to Phoenix to see some friends that used to live here. The other one to Boston to visit friends that we normally vacation with in the summer but because of Baby TBA won’t be able to see this next summer. I’m excited about both trips because I’ve not ever been to AZ and the time I’ve spent in Boston mostly consisted of the airport, the hotel, and the main office of the company I used to work for.

I haven’t gotten to travel a lot in my life. In fact the bulk of my travel has happened since I’ve been married to Stephen. (He is cosmopolitan in that way.) But when we do go places I always like to pick up a souvenir. When I was younger, I always got a t-shirt, even if I didn’t go on the trip. This accounts for the rather large number of Hard-Rock Café shirts I owned at one time.

These days my souvenirs typically take two forms. One is jewelry. I like to pick up stuff that is “native” if possible or at the very least, made by a local artist. If that’s not an option, I like to pick up something that I know I’ll wear a lot and when I do, remember the time I spent at Spot X.

My very favorite necklace came to me this way. The silver one with the colored beads that I wear all the time? I got that on Ocracoke Island when we went to the Outer Banks with Stephen’s parents. That was a fun trip. Stephen got to fly his kite A LOT. It was very cold but we got to ride the ferry to Ocracoke. (Ferry rides are another must have, if available option, for my travels.) And the fog was beautiful. We played a lot of games and in general had a great vacation. I think of those things or something from that trip, nearly every time I put it on.

The other thing I like to pick up on my travels is a squished penny. I don’t have many just because I only get one when I happen to be someplace and there is a machine handy. (I don’t seek them out. Although I just found a website that reports locations so that may change.) This is a nice souvenir option because they are so small. I even had them hot glued to my computer for a while so I could see them all the time.

Eli found my collection this morning and I decided that you, my friends, needed something to marvel at this cold morning. So here is my souvenir squished penny collection:

The Las Vegas coins that started it all.

Ocracoke Island (yes, that’s the same trip I got the necklace on) and Chicago, IL (Just this summer. Sam and Eli had a blast sleeping at the aquarium!)

Nashville and Little Rock. Easy ones to get, I know but the Little Rock Zoo one is the first zoo Eli’s ever been to.

You can visit the Squished Penny Museum Site to learn more about this hobby. By the way, it is legal. And then tell me how you celebrate your travels. I’m excited to hear so I have other things to collect!

It sucks my will to live.

Do not attempt to go there.

Order presents online.

You have been warned.

The Postal Service: Such Great Heights (2003)

You may be familiar with the Iron and Wine cover of this song that ended up on TV with M&Ms gracefully pirouetting about. What I love most about this video are the plaintive looks between the two workers in the Skyworks Solutions wafer fabrication plant.

Ben Folds: Such Great Heights (2006)

Ben Folds was on jTV in Australia and decided to cover the song. So he gathered up several drummers and some found percussion and this is what resulted.

I just made two birthday cards and when I finished I realized that I had put frogs on both of them. Some days are just like that, I guess.

If you see one of these cards in the next week or so, you’ll know I was thinking of you.

Bruce Baugh:

I’m catching up with Battlestar Galactica and Heroes from the last few weeks, and reading some weblog and forum comments on them. I’m struck by how disconnected I feel from what it is that seems to most concern the posting fans. Specifically, I find that I genuinely just don’t care how well some things hold up under an allegedly dispassionate logical analysis. I’m really interested in qualities of experience: fascinating places, intense emotions, struggles and epiphanies, the tangible world and the internal growth and changes of interesting characters thrust into the midst of it.

Yoon Ha Lee:

This explains why I have such a tumultuous relationship with Whedon’s creations:

From Angel, it’s all about the emotions, stupid. Joss just hammered into all of us that ultimately, if you had to choose between logic and emotion, then go with emotion. You want to build as logical a show as possible, but if there’s no emotion, people won’t care. That was a profound influence on me, and I’ve forced that on people I’ve been involved with since then.
from an interview with Jeff Bell [LA Times]

NO, KILLING THE LOGIC MERELY DRIVES SOME OF US SPORKRIFFIC AND WE THROW YOUR SHOW ACROSS THE ROOM AND STOMP ON IT WITH SPIKES OF PREDICATE LOGIC AND WE STOP CARING ANYWAY.

I’ve been noodling at this topic during my spare time today. For those of you who aren’t big fans of SF/fantasy, us fans have a habit of tearing apart the logic of shows and books and the like. Inside most every fan is the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, ready to point out minutiae and grumble about “obvious” plot holes.

TV shows are especially fertile ground for this sort of thing. As John Rogers says in explaining the term “fridge logic,”

TV is a very tight little medium time-wise, with an enormous amount of hand-waving to begin with. Often a logic problem that seems to smack you in the face because you’ve had the time to read the script, reread it, give notes, break it down, etc. is going to fly by your average — and hopefully emotionally engaged — viewer.

When a show engages me, I glide right past plot holes. I’m actively participating in keeping my belief suspended. As I stop being engaged, though, I become more and more annoyed by inconsistencies. Eventually I reach the point of kicking holes in the story’s walls out of frustration and grumbling about its physics.

Trouble arises when you get a bunch of fans like me together. We all have different set-points where we are no longer engaged. We have different buttons to be pushed or left alone. There is no consensus; there is only disharmony. And in such an atmosphere, negative comments tend to amplify each other until all you hear is a standing wave of disapproval.

And look! The Internet has a large population of SF/F fans, removes geographic barriers to discussion, and tends to archive discussions for posterity. The result is an environment that fosters the worst of our group’s tendencies.

Critical analysis can be fun. I’ve spent a lot of time teasing apart the threads of shows like Heroes with friends. “What do you think that meant?” “Who’s Claire’s dad taking orders from?” “I wonder what the extent of Peter’s powers are?” It can be instructive. It can even be entertaining in and of itself. In watching Jericho, I’ve enjoyed the ludicrousness of it all. But there’s a point where you cross over into bullying by way of snobbery. You actively look for reasons to be disappointed in a story, and can’t believe anyone actually enjoys that dreck. You elevate matters of opinion to statements of fact and use them as cudgels with which to smite the unbelievers.

There’s not a bright line dividing good from bad here. I enjoy Mystery Science Theater 3000, which has a nougaty center of mocking bad movies. I read recaps at Television Without Pity, most of which point out numerous plot holes. Negative criticism is not a priori bad criticism. But at some point it passes a nebulous threshold and the only solution is for all involved in the discussion to step back, take deep breaths, and move on to something else.

It took me a while to come up with my own coping mechanism for dealing with the dark side of SF/F Fandom. For works that I like, I’ll gladly obsess over tiny details with others and further my enjoyment through what amounts to collaborative study. For most any story or show I’ll discuss what I thought worked and what didn’t. But if Fans are carving up something I like and are throwing the leftover bits at people like me while hooting their derision, I will smile politely and walk away. You can shove your anger towards me all you want. I will not take it from your hand.

Bookslut has posted my review of The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor. Not to spoil you too much, but the book is as unwieldy as the subtitle.

Since several people had questions about Advent, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the Christian traditions and more specifically what we do to celebrate the birth of Christ.

Stephen and I both grew up Southern Baptist. Baptists tend to be a bit more low church than other strains of Protestantism, so in many cases they don’t follow the liturgical calendar. The church we belong to right now is the most Liturgy-minded church I’ve ever been a part of (our church is also dually aligned with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, so we tend to be a bit more liberal than a typical Southern Baptist church). I don’t know if this more liberal view is why our church is a bit more focused on Liturgy or if it’s our pastor but I do know that following the liturgical calendar produces a rhythm to life that I love. Geof will say that I’m secretly Methodist. I’m not sure that he’s too far wrong in that assumption.

Our two big events during the Christian year are, of course, Easter and Christmas. So just as Lent is the beginning of preparing for Easter, Advent is preparation for Christmas.

My Advent season starts in October. Advent is actually the period of time comprised of the four Sundays before Christmas. I start in October by helping Stephen’s father, Ray, put together his church’s Advent devotional booklet. People from his church write devotionals based on scripture passages (usually tied to the day’s liturgy but sometimes it’s scripture about the coming Christ child), he edits them, and I prepare them for printing. The books are passed out at the beginning of Advent and are a way for the congregation to spend some time every day focusing on anticipating the coming celebration of Christ’s birth and also as a time to anticipate the Second Coming. This year I helped prepare our church’s Advent booklet as well.

At our house, we tend to read them both during Advent. The scripture from each usually overlap but the stories that people tell are often vastly different. The one from Ray’s church is usually chock full of folks that Stephen grew up around, so I know for him, it’s a little piece of home to read from that booklet.

Some people celebrate Advent with an evergreen wreath and candles. (I say some people because I am lazy and have never taken the time to search for the correct colored candles to use. I know that’s a really lame excuse but there it is anyway.) There are four candles that sit on top of a circular evergreen wreath and one that sits in the middle. (More on evergreens in the next paragraph.) The four candles are tied to the four weeks. Usually before a family meal, a devotional and/or scripture is read or a hymn can be sung, a prayer is offered, and one or more candles are lit. The first week is a purple candle that stands for hope. The second candle is also purple and stands for love. The third week candle is either purple or pink and stands for joy. I’ve also heard this called the “Mary” candle but didn’t find any reference to it in my research. The fourth candle is purple and stands for peace. And the white candle in the middle is the Christ candle and is only lit on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The candles were originally just a way to count down the weeks before Christmas, but of course, in use, have developed a ton of meaning.

Early in the Advent season we have a church service that incorporates the “hanging of the green.” We hang evergreen bows and branches around the sanctuary. Evergreen branches are symbols of the unchanging nature of God and are a physical reminder of our everlasting life in Christ. In researching exactly what the hanging of the green stood for I ran across something that said early Christians put evergreens in their windows to indicate when Christ had entered their home. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s a really great story and I love the symbolism behind that. Also, our lovely secular Christmas tree that caused us so much trouble this past Saturday totally counts toward our Evergreen quotient.

We also have lots of extra music during this time. The choir usually has a big performance and the children and youth usually have a musical/drama program sometime during Advent. We sing all the Christmas hymns during the Advent season. My favorite is “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” but pretty much all of them make me cry.

We also have a service especially for the grieving. At our church we call it a “Service of Remembrance and Hope.” This is probably a celebration of All Souls Day which is traditionally December 2.

There is usually a Christmas Eve Communion Service which we unfortunately don’t ever get to attend as we are always traveling during the holidays. The Christmas Eve Communion Services I’ve attended are some of the most holy services I can remember.

When we gather on Christmas day we always start with a reading of the Christmas story from Luke 2. Nothing puts consumerism in perspective like a family having no place to go but a stable. We also talk about the things/events/people in our lives over the past year that we are thankful for.

Epiphany is usually the last thing celebrated during Christmas and we don’t do it very well. It is January 6 and commemorates the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem after the birth of Christ. We typically keep our wise men separated out from our nativity and then after Christmas, move them closer. But a lot of years we take our Christmas stuff down before January 6, so we don’t even do this small commemoration.

After Eli was born, we instituted a three gift rule for birthdays and Christmas at our house. If you want, you can tie that to the three gifts the wise men brought but really, for me, it’s just a reasonable number of toys for the grandparents to be giving. When Eli asks about it, I’ll totally be telling the wise men story. “If it’s good enough for Baby Jesus…”

We are also doing something new with Stephen’s family this year to try to stem the flood tide of stuff coming into our house. Instead of everybody buying gifts for everybody we are trading names and giving the money we would have otherwise spent to charity. The best part is we are going to tell who we gave money to and why when we get together to open gifts.

So that’s what we do during Advent and Christmas. A lot of it about building community, some of it is based on old traditions and all of it is about anticipating the coming of light into a very dark world. This is the second time I have been pregnant during Christmas. It is amazing how much extra anticipation I feel during this time, my eagerness and hopes for my own child tied up in the hope and anticipation of the Christ child. I hope you are anticipating Christmas as well. I hope you have family and friends to share it with. Merry Christmas.