malvasia bianca

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a trip soon, and will want a car adapter for my iPod; that seemed as good an excuse as any to sign up for the service. It comes free for the first three months; we’ll see how I like it.

It’s kind of scary, actually: now, whenever I visit any page on Amazon, there’s this button on the page, and if I click on the button, the item will appear on my doorstep in a couple of days. I’m really not sure what to think about that – I’m much more in the habit of building up a little shopping cart full of stuff, thinking about it for a while. Which I can still do if I want to, but I don’t think I will want to.

While I was there, I ordered a CD. (Taverner’s Lament for Jerusalem, which I learned about from the Naxos podcast. I suspect that podcast is going to turn into a very effective way for them to advertise to me.) And I successfully resisted the urge to order two CD’s: when I finish that one, maybe I’ll order another. (Would Amazon make money if I ordered one CD a week with two-day shipping? Hmm.)

I almost resisted the urge to buy any books. But then I saw that I could pre-order the seventh volume of Hikaru No Go, and I couldn’t resist that, either. In general, I don’t approve of pre-orders, but I’m completely sure that I’ll want to read that book, and in fact will be happy to drop whatever other book I’m in the middle of reading for the thirty minutes or so that it will take me to read it.

Speaking of books, anybody know of any good TCL books? At work, we write our acceptance tests in TCL, and most of us are far from TCL experts; I certainly feel that my lack of TCL knowledge makes me inappropriately frightened of the larguage, and hurts my refactoring. I’m reading the Ruby book right now, but I should probably put some sort of TCL book next on my work reading list.

(Random coment: I just clicked on my current Amazon book recommendations, and they seem to have changed drastically – All Quiet on the Western Front is number two on the list, because I own The Communist Manifesto. Weird for a few reasons.)