the talk was at times irreverent and other times totally over my head. irreverent was amazon’s planning to deliver books to mars. and over my head was scalability and genetic algorithms/self-healing code/servers, etc. i’m not even sure.
so i’ve been listening to indie pop rocks on somafm since i started at o’reilly, and along side my work i’ve got a list of songs collecting that i particularly like. several songs by “the go! team” had collected in my list (huddle formation, get it together, the power is on) so last thursday i decided to check out their album on amazon.com. youch, $30.99 for an import that wasn’t going to be released until July 26th? that’s more than a month away.
hmm, “an import?” i thought. imported from where? turns out the uk. so i went straightaway to amazon.co.uk and looked up the go! team. their album cost £9.99 (about $18USD) and was usually dispatched within 24 hours. paydirt!
i was curious to see if they’d actually let me place an order. not only did it work, but since it was amazon (albeit the site design still a revision behind the current incarnation of amazon.com) they had all my info. the cheapest shipping option was airmail—made sense—for £3.08. and somehow the cd was discounted to £8.50 when i checked out, so all told i was charged £11.58 or $21USD to import the cd myself, save $10, and have it now.
placed the order on thursday, june 16 and it arrived today, june 21. how awesome is that? my only question for werner is, in his vision of interplanetary commerce, why did i have to go through the rigamarole of placing an order through amazon.co.uk to get a cd to californ.i.a?
update: some thoughts from tim on the legal entaglements of interplanetary commerce.
Everyone will love this delightful children’s Haggadah. Its beautiful illustrations and enchanting rhymes will transform your traditional Seder into a magical experience, while capturing the hearts and imagination of your children and sleepy relatives. Awaken the senses in every ho-humming child at the Seder table with Uncle Eli’s Passover Haggadah.
This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.
One of the perks of working for O’Reilly is that we get any of the O’Reilly books for free. For anyone into technology (like me), that’s pretty cool. I admit I had to think twice as I packed my books in North Carolina whether I should bother with all my animal-emblazoned tomes. They were heavy, but they came with.
For anyone who hasn’t made a pilgrimage out to O’Reilly World Headquarters in Sebastopol, California, the front lobby is a mini bookstore, with three walls of bookshelves filled top to bottom with O’Reilly titles. I feel like a kid in a candyshop every time I walk through there.
But I played it cool. I didn’t head home on my first day, arms all bulging with a stack of books. I waited until Thursday, and I picked up just one: Ben Hammersley’s new book on RSS and Atom. There is one great responsibility I should mention that comes with a perk like free and unlimited O’Reilly books. Don’t go out and try to sell them. Especially not online.
All that said, let me introduce myself. I’m Justin Watt, formerly of Carrboro, North Carolina, having recently relocated to Santa Rosa, California in order to take a position as a Senior Web Producer in O’Reilly’s Online Publishing Group (OPG). I have a blog outside the Belly of the Beasts at justinsomnia.org if you’re interested in checking up on my shenanigans outside of work.
This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.
there’s nothing like packing up all my earthly belongings to trigger an internal debate on my (and by extension humanity’s) relationship with stuff. there’s a lovely scene in fight club that i feel is pretty representative.
TYLER
Do you know what a duvet is?
JACK
Comforter.
TYLER
It’s a blanket, just a blanket. Now why guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival? In the hunter-gathered sense of the word? No. What are we then?
JACK
You know, consumers.
TYLER
Right. We’re consumers. We’re by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty — these things don’t concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
JACK
Martha Stewart.
TYLER
Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polished on the brass of the Titanic. It’s all going down, man! So fuck off, with your sofa units and your green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let’s evolve and let the chips fall where they may. But that’s me, I could be wrong, maybe it’s a terrible tragedy.
JACK
No, it’s just stuff.
TYLER
Well, you did lose a lot of versatile solutions for a modern life.
JACK
Fuck, you’re right.
Tyler offers Jack a cigarette.
JACK
No, I don’t smoke. My insurance will probably cover it, so…
Tyler stares at him
JACK
What?
TYLER
The things you own, end up owing you. But do what you like, man.
i’m very picky about the books i read, probably because each book requires so much time and mental investment. i like the books i read to be connected with my current interests or life. reading books is not entertainment or distraction for me, it is a substitute for experience. as a result i want to come away from a book knowing my life is changed forever. i am not a voracious reader.
i’ve often said that telling me “you should read this book” is the quickest way for me to put it on my list of books to never read. that’s probably just cause i don’t like people telling me what i should do.
i do have some favorite books. this is not a list of books i think you should read. these are books that seemed absolutely perfect to me at the time of my life that i happened to be reading them.
