Life Rebooted

I want an idiom etymology reference. Most dictionaries tell you the word and the the original language it came from as well as the date it first came into usage. Recently, I've been reading Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Well, actually Adams is reading it to me via the iPod and Audible.com). There's a scene where one eccentric character says he has a horse in his bathroom and the more sane character of the two goes to have a look. Adams describes the entire bathroom down to the most minute detail, and the reader is agonizing over whether the horse is there or not. Nice effect. He did all he could to dance around the fact that there was a "horse in the bathroom." A similar phrase, "ignoring the elephant in the living room" is in wide usage. A Google search yields a trunkload of AA material and various treatise on denial. Who came up with this phrase? Where did it originate? I must know! Like I said, I need an idiom dictionary.

I finally did it. I booted a "wiener boy" from my site's web board. I can't believe it took me this long. I have always had these ideals of free speech and anti-censorship, but there's a point when someone is just being a jerk and is not contributing to the dialogue. I'm sure he will feel cheated as he's skirted the edge of my tolerance for so long and thought he knew the boundaries. Today, the boundary moved and I feel free. Hopefully the civil members of that online community will feel an equal measure of new freedom.

This new iPod has been such a huge investment that I have the tendency to carry it everywhere with me. I believe it's equal parts assuring myself that it is safe and that it is useful. Shopping at the local used CD store for some gaps in my Beatle collection, I found myself wondering whether the red 2-CD set of Beatles hits which I own had everything on the Hard Day's Night soundtrack. For a second, I wondered and gave a mental shrug, "Oh well, I won't know until I get home and compare my memory with the back of the set." "But, wait! I have all that info right here on my hip!" I scanned the menu of songs from that CD and sure enough the Hard Day's Night CD was largely new to my collection. I got a rush from my newfound powers of information access. I wanted more! Mwah-ha-ha! Since this iPod is sure to be my constant companion, what if I also had a database of every DVD, comic book, and collectible. You name it! Download price guides from to net to carry along with you on trips to collectible shows. Instantly know whether it's a good deal without guesswork! Hmm, that's a lot of exclamation points and I'm beginning to sound like the "bald spot paint" guy, but I truly am excited by the possibilities of this little beaut. I'm sure folks out there with Palms and the like have had access to info like this for a long time, but they've been stuck in a world of meeting minutes and action items. The iPod is intended for personal use by design. I just wish I could do some iPod programming to get it to hold the information I want. I guess I'll have to wait for the next updater to see if my wish comes true.

A while back I said that classic rock is the cure for road rage. Well, I've recently kicked it up a notch. The new 20GB iPod is the ultimate in commuter entertainment. You can do the standard thing and store all your music on this little guy, plus with the help of audible.com you've got an audio book library as well. Right now I'm listening to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy read by the author himself. I read the book long ago, but hearing it with the inflections and tone that Douglas Adams intended is an entirely new experience.

Where did the saying, "I know this place like the back of my own hand," come from? Honestly, I don't know the back of my hand very well. Why invest time studying the various creases, moles and hairs when it's always there for easy reference?

In a recent NY Times article they are talking about the whole reason behind "Life Rebooted!" In one story of malicious Google-tampering, a CEO of a PR firm had her good name sullied by imposters posting racial slurs on a public forum.

Thanks to Dave's pointer on Scripting.com, I'm getting some helpful comments on my eBay wish. In particular Chris Woods in the comments to yesterday's post pointed me to the eBay developer page. There they describe a planned program for opening up their APIs to businesses. With the lowest class membership at $1000 annually with additional charges of $6.50 per 1000 API calls, my collecting hobby gets pretty expensive. I need something more in my price range to start up an index for particular types of collectibles. It's more of a curiousity than a moneymaker. I'm certainly not opposed to spending money for access, but after seeing the cost I definitely felt the sticker shock. They are clearly not pricing it for the hobbyist space. It appears that they've been planning this for a while. I wonder what their response to Amazon's latest move will be... Time to start composing my next eBay letter...

Back in August 1998, I wrote ebay about an idea I had for incorporating ebay data into my website. I still want to keep my own personal wiener boys (as Dave Winer calls them) away from this site, so you please forgive the ambiguity. Let's just say my site covers a certain movie property and one aspect to being a fan of said property is collecting. I've been frustrated for a long time with collector's guides which are generally disconnected from reality. The real action these days is on ebay and everything is public for the world to see, so why not create a stock market ticker of sorts for your favorite items? An index like this would be based on actual transactions and not what random dealers say things are worth. It would give buyers and sellers an idea of whether they are making a good deal, and collectors can watch their collection rise in value just for fun. My message to ebay included the following: First of all, is this legal? I want to do all this on the up-and-up. The information is your property and you have specific rights to it, so I assume I would need permission to do something of this nature. However, the situation is win-win, [withheld] fans would get a better handle on what their collectibles are worth and avoid getting ripped off, and ebay is represented as the auction site of record to those folks. Secondly, I believe I can write the script to make this work, but you will inevitably change the formatting or operation of your site, breaking it. I was wondering if you had ever heard an idea like this and perhaps have implemented something similar already, or perhaps provided some reporting method which would reduce it to simply parsing a list of items. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter. Thanks, (Shane) Their response: Thank you for your post and for your interest in eBay. We are currently considering creating a database for public use that would contain all past pricing information. Although we cannot prevent another party from collecting data from our site we would not endorse the activity and would never guarantee that changes in our site would be prewarned. The use of eBay data without express permission from eBay would not be allowed. I was disappointed with the response, and dropped the idea. Amazon, however, recently announced a new web services feature which reminded me of my old ebay idea. It doesn't look like Amazon has opened up their auction section to this possibility yet, however, with Amazon investing time and effort into forward-looking ideas like these, ebay may be forced to fulfill my four-year old wish just to stay competitive.