etc.

Dancing in my Nuddy Pants: Further Confessions of Georgia Nicholson, Louise Rennison
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

This was a very difficult book to listen to. In fact, I’d venture to recommend that if you enjoyed the first two Georgia Nicholson books, you should do yourself a favour and read this book in print and give the recorded version a miss. I did enjoy the first two and feel somewhat regretful that I opted for the audiobook for this installment because the clunky teenager-isms that made the books funny just makes the audiobook spectacularly annoying. What a shame.

The domain registrant transfer worked, and all very seamlessly too. I’m pleased.

It looks like Bloglines takes the prize for most-used and -loved by etc. readers. This disappointed me somewhat. Not for any other reason than the fact that I’ve used Bloglines too and while I liked it just fine, I was hoping to be introduced to some brand-spanking-new-wow aggregator that I hadn’t heard of/used yet. My first impulse was a resigned “oh well, I tried. Guess that means RSS is not for me.” But, if I was smart, I’d realize now that the daily developments in RSS mean that I shouldn’t write anything off just yet. If I was smart.

And it looks like Walt Crawford is responsible for another goofy grin on my face this month. He read my LISCareer article and liked it (pdf, page 15). Thanks, Walt.

if you’re into book arts, you’ll want to read this article in this month’s C&RL News.

punctuation nazi? 100% guilty.

here’s something kinda neat: a session about bloggers and their impact on the book industry at this year’s BookExpo.

A few longtime readers might remember the Feature Price debacle from approximately one year ago. For those not inclined to follow the links and fill in the backstory, I’ll summarize: about two years ago, I registered this domain and signed up for a hosting package with Feature Price. It was one of the most poorly-researched purchases of my life, I was completely inexperienced with the world of hosting, the extent of my research was price-comparison, and I made the decision to go with FP based on what I thought was a rock-bottom deal ($5 a month for a little plan, which I can now assure you is not rock-bottom at all). I cower in shame when I think of it but I’ve come a long way since then so I’ve stopped beating myself up about it.

So, since it’s often when things go wrong that you realize the folly of your decisions, I only realized what a bad decision FP was when they went into receivership or some such thing, and were eventually taken over by another big company. Their customer support went from being satisfactory 10% of the time, to being satisfactory 0% of the time. And since I was on the bottom of the customer-base totem pole (they were getting a slim $5 per month out of me), there was zero telephone support and when all accounts were transferred over to the new company I had no access to the control panel and all mail was shut down.

After a few weeks of wrangling and very stern e-mail messages, I managed to get my DNS switched to DreamHost (who I love dearly because they are dependable, reachable, and their admin messages make me laugh) and all my web services have been operating at 100% since.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, for starters, Andrea brought up the fact that she had trouble finding good, solid, firsthand accounts of hosting woes/victories, so I’m doing my bit to fill the void. Of more immediate importance is the fact that I am finally working on getting this domain registration transferred to DreamHost so that I can control absolutely everything from one panel and not ever have to worry about dealing with the FP/Atlantic/dotRegistrar people again. There should be no visible sign of this change on the site, it’s just some admin stuff that should be working behind the scenes, but you never know. If, in the next couple of days, you come by and find a “page cannot be displayed” message, hang tight and think of it as preventive maintenance now so that etches-johnson.com will always be here for you in the future. Sort of like highway repairs in the summer.

Librarians Say No to Occupation! sign the petition.

it’s a rare summer blockbuster i get excited about but this film makes the lapsed Medievalist in me somewhat excited [link via rawbrick].

make your own Bayeux tapestry [link via mgk].

Gnooks. taking the librarian out of readers advisory. in fairness, i gave Gnooks’ suggestions a go (where you enter three of your favourite authors and it spits out another you’d like using a neat literature map and likely some sort of algorithm) and was generally pleased with the results. [link via LiB]