Even though that third button on the left makes reference to a bookshelf, this is one of our real bookshelves. There is another one just like it on the other side of the room. The button just tracks what books we are reading and have read - But you probably knew that, right?

Anyway, just picture the floor in rich, dark wood, and the walls in a soft garden green.. This room just might end up looking pretty damn good… Earnest thinks so…

Image by solitarysmagick on deviantART

Left work early today and napped. Woke up with a ton of energy and decided to get some actual house work done. First thing was to install the new garage door sensors. Did I mention the garage door hasn’t worked properly since the flood? I forgot how wonderful it is to not have to get out of the car in the morning before driving off… Also managed to partially clean the garage and mow the front lawn… Ah, domesticity… Er…

Anyway, read my quick review of Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking…

Many many moons ago and in less moldy times, we pulled up the carpeting in the living room with plans of refinishing the floor. Between floods, weeklong power outages, and multi-week colds, we never really got around to doing that.

Now, as part of the floods repairs, we are getting new bedroom carpeting, new bathroom flooring and new kitchen flooring. We recently went to the flooring company that our contractor is using to supply the materials to pick out colors and styles.

While there, we were hoping to buy a floor for the living room (re-finishing turned out not to be an option) with some money we had left over from our income tax refund.

It turns out labor adds a ton of costs. To the point that we were being shown the ugliest flooring imaginable to try to fit into our budget. I went home that night and dropped one thousand dollars sight unseen on flooring from simplefloors.com. Even with having to install it ourselves, I feel we still came out way ahead. The sample has arrived in the mail, and it’s quite nice. Plus, we saved a minimum of one thousand five hundred dollars…

Varnished Walnut Hand-Scraped Style Wood Floor

• Leona Rostenberg and Madelein Stern, Old Books, Rare Friends, (Doubleday, 1998) Snippets of the lives of two great friends and antiquarian book sellers/enthusiasts. (Hoping that this is less dry than some of the Basbanes books…)

• Eugene Field, Second Book of Verse, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898)

• Eugene Field, Loves Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896) Eugene Field was an American poet known for his children’s verses. Also a great book lover, this book delves into the beginnings of his love affair with books and provides several stories of his adventures and often humorous takes on bibliomaniacs. This volume, published after his death in 1895 and compiled by his sister, contains the following from “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”:

“But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee
To keep me in temptation’s way,
I humbly ask that I may be
Most notably beset to-day;
Let my temptation be a book,
Which I shall purchase, hold and keep,
Whereon, when other men shall look,
They’ll wail to know I got it cheap.”

(Fitting given that I paid only six dollars.)

(photo from VampHunter777 on deviantART)

Read my quick review on the book’s detail page here…

I was On-Call all last week and therefore earned this Monday, the 19th off.  Think I might use it to go to the bookstore and get something from a radically different genre.  Especially considering I have Dead Witch Walking on deck to read…

• William Canton (Editor), The True Annals of Fairy Land: The Reign of King Herla, (J.M. Dent & Co, ND[1900]) Book of fairy tales beautifully illustrated by Charles Robinson.
• Grimm, Lucy Crane (Translator), Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, (Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, ND[ca 1900]) A small collection of fairy tales from the famous Grimm brothers, illustrated by Walter Crane.
• Currer Bell/Charlotte Bronte, Villette, (William Whiteley, ND[ca 1900]) A favorite novel, of particular interest as I have been told I am related to William Whiteley.

In our noses… We both have come down with a cold. Not radically severe, per se, but tedious and draining.  On top of that we have a noon appointment to pick our flooring for the last of the flood repairs.

Neither of us is in the mood to giddily fawn over linoleum… Or whatever normal people do near linoleum.. Ug… more snot… Pass the tissue…

Finally was able to hack the “Now Reading” code to work properly.

I’ll discuss it in case anybody googles this page. I’m not positive if it was a bug in the “have_books” not taking the $nr_id correctly, or the “the_book” not globalizing correctly, and frankly, I didn’t bother once I saw that the meat of the call was to “get_book” anyway. Even with that call, the “The_book()” call didn’t work, which is only three lines of code forcing the return into a global variable. I then simply globaled it myself locally, and the rest of the page worked perfectly.

I replaced this:

<?php if( have_books(intval($nr_id)) ) : ?>
<?php while ( have_books(intval(nr_id)) ) : the_book(); ?>

With this:

<?php
$book=get_book(”$nr_id”);
$GLOBALS[’book’] = $book;
?>

What this means for you non-coders is simply that we have a working library plugin again, and will be keeping our current reading materials up to date.

Remember that you can click the books on the right to see a larger size picture of the book, with a link to Amazon.com to read the reviews or buy it directly.  Another great feature is the tags area, that once our collection grows, will allow you to easily link to other related books.  Finally, if you click the recent books section, you’ll (shortly) start seeing a rating system for the books along with a short review.

Well, I at least got the “Now Reading” plugin to not destroy the site when you click a book.  I basically did that by making it just pop back to the front page.  Not pretty, but prettier than a trashed page.

I don’t count myself a programmer, but if I’m not mistaken, throwing every effing variable around globally in PHP is the single most asinine thing you can do.  And that’s exactly what “Now Reading” does.  ON top of that, the API docs suck, and a simple single book pull I do doesn’t work after 50 tries at it… Garbage… All garbage..

At the completely opposite side of the spectrum, I installed a Netflix plugin, that along with it’s widget, made it butter to install and a snap to config.  Both Sarah and I, (and you people), can now see Sarah’s Netflix Queue… Neato…

AAAAHHHHH…

Trying to put the “Now Reading” plugin back up. I’m ready to throw something. The damn “Library” page (when you click one of the books on the right) has NEVER worked through 6 upgrades of the plugin and three different themes…