But it seems that aside from reminding myself of what I’d like to be doing, there’s always these tiny little things that motivate me right then. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, I suppose, since the whole point of the book is motivation and Covey is a motivational speaker, but it’s nice that it happens. I never post about those little things because they’re usually really obvious, and sometimes the impact of really obvious things doesn’t come across well online.

This time around it was this:

What one thing could you do (you aren’t doing now) that if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?

The first implication, of course, is “Then why aren’t you doing it?” — but the central thesis of the entire book is that there are many usual reasons that you’re not, and that it’s a lot of work to develop such that you can get past those. The second implication is that once you’re doing that, you’ll find another One Thing. And Covey’s explanation for why you’re not doing it is that it’s always a Quadrant II activity — “important but not urgent” — and the Quadrant I and III activities (“important and urgent” and “urgent but not important”) crowd out Quadrant II without effort to the contrary — but that’s detail. Just the seed of the idea is enough for now. If I’m not working towards finding and doing it, what am I waiting for?

(And while digging up the exact quote I thought of another three or four ideas I want to write about, but I know people can only take so much of Seven Habits, so you’re safe for now.)

Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on items you purchased or told us you own.

In this message:

• Perl Best Practices
• Essential System Administration
• Curling For Dummies
• How to Be a Canadian
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
• Motorcycle Electrical Systems: Troubleshooting and Repair (Motorbooks Workshop)

Ages ago I told Amazon about every book I owned, to get better recommendations (didn’t work very well), and recently I copied my Ottawa Library holds list into a wishlist so I had a record of it somewhere (seems to have worked better). Usually the recommendations are along the lines of “Here are ten Perl books we know about”, but today they’ve decided to diversify.

Which reminds me: I need to start exploring GoodReads. I’m right over here if you want to add me to your listything.

And if that’s not Web 2.0 enough for you, you can experience my tag cloud or author cloud instead! (Boy, I sure read a lot of dead white men. Much of that is thanks to a sociology degree, though.)

One nice thing about LibraryThing is that it has a librarian on staff, so the organizing concepts have all been thought through well. For instance, acknowledging that a book will have multiple editions and multiple countries of publication and multiple formats — and thus dozens of ISBNs — but still be the “same book”, it tracks your collection both at the book level (this particular edition and ISBN) and the “work” level (all of the published copies of the same book). And all of the metadata about the books is already there, imported from Amazon, LC, and other library catalogues. So once you enter your books (by ISBN, by CueCat scanner, by importing lists from elsewhere, or by searching titles one at a time).

Ages and ages ago, I decided that I needed book recommendations, and decided to find all of the books I own on Amazon and add them to my “I own this” list which it uses to come up with new recommendations. The results were uninspiring — its recommendations rarely strayed from “You have five books by author X, so we recommend this book by the same author” or “I see you have a few books on motorcycle safety, here are two more.” (That’s why I had a big Amazon “I own this” list to begin with.)

But that’s one thing that looks promising on LibraryThing: you can get recommendations based on your entire library from four heuristics: books owned by people who own lots of books that you own; books that have tags similar to those that you used; the most popular books on the site that you don’t have; and “special-sauce” recommendations using LibraryThing’s proprietary recommendation algorithm. All of them have their flaws (and the geek-heavy userbase doesn’t help things, either), but together I think they’ll be useful in tracking down good reads. The rating and review system won’t hurt either, and if I want to bother there’s a big community on there in its forums — sort of a “FaceBook for bibliophiles”.

The only real problem with the recommendations is that they’re based on your entire library. I have a lot of computer reference books that I don’t care much about anymore, but I have a lot of computer-related recommendations. Yes, I have half an O’Reilly Perl library; no, I don’t program in Perl beyond quick hacks anymore; no, I don’t want the other half of that library.

It’s no killer app, but for $10/year or $25/forever to list over 200 books (and free for under 200), it’s a neat toy.

And then there’s magazines. I don’t subscribe to many because of laziness, but I likes my magazines, I do. I regularly read the Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, Details, Fortune, Business 2.0, Road and Track, Magnet, Men’s Health, Dwell, the Economist, Geist, Maisonneuve, Scientific American, Seed… You get the idea.

This strategy is inefficient.

And somehow I managed to forget about libraries until a few months ago. Even then I was just taking out books that I knew I didn’t need to own until very recently.

So I’ve got a new process: Books that I want to read go on my “bookmarks” list in the Ottawa Public Library’s OPAC, unless there’s a giant request queue for them, in which case I request them right away to get my place in line. After I’ve read it, I decide whether or not it’s worth owning a copy. I suspect for a lot of them I still will want to own a copy, but it’ll let me screen out the rest.

For some books the request queue is ridiculous, so those ones I’ll just have to decide whether to buy or wait.

One lunch-hour later, and I’ve got eight requests in and another thirty or so books bookmarked. I feel silly for having waited this long to figure this out!

(I’m not sure how to solve the similar problem with magazines. One step would be to subscribe to the ones I buy monthly, but that feels like a step in the wrong direction somehow.)

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased books by Alan H. Strahler, you might like to know that “Wiley Plus/Blackboard Stand-alone to accompany Introducing Physical Geography (Wiley Plus Products)” is now available in paperback.

To learn more about Wiley Plus/Blackboard Stand-alone to accompany Introducing Physical Geography (Wiley Plus Products), please visit the
following page at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0470077573/ref=pe_snp_573

Uh, thanks, Amazon. (I wonder what a Blackboard Stand-alone is?)