Saturday, January 31, 2004

I am feeling so high tech today. After much travail (I didn't have the right size screwdriver and had to make a trip to the hardware store) I installed the airport card in my Powerbook this morning. Then my dearly beloved and I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with a very nice man from Apple Support because while all of the pieces were working on their own, they weren't talking to one another. After taking this poor man to the brink, he finally suggested we restart everything. Once all devices were back up they decided to recognize each other and our support guy's sanity was saved. And now I am happy because I have wireless internet. Woo hoo! I know this isn't officially about books, but it is my Powerbook I am talking about so technically... You may have heard about Bookcrossing on NPR or seen something about it on television, but if you're like me you thought "wow that's cool." You had a brief fantasy about finding one of the released books on a park bench and then forgot about the whole thing. But then I was flipping through the pages of mental _floss and lo and behold there was a full page ad for bookcrossing. So now I had no excuse not to go check them out. In case you haven't heard of bookcrossing, it is a website and community development program that encourages people to release books into the "wild." You register the book you are going to release, write the bookcrossing URL and registered id number in the book, and leave the book somewhere for someone to find. The person who finds it is then supposed to register their find on the website, read the book, and release it. It's kind of like a message in a bottle or the old postcard in a balloon experiment from elementary school. Currently, bookcrossing has over 200,000 members and more than 800,000 registered books. One of the niftiest things on the site is the ability to see the number of books registered in your city. You even have the opportunity to "hunt" for a book that has been released. Now, instead of hoping to find a book, I'm trying to figure out what book I'd be willing to give away.