Book Trading

I had a great idea for a web site awhile back.  I wanted to make a site where people could trade books.  I thought about it for awhile and eventually came up with a system where you would list the books you had to trade.  The other members would search for books and if they wanted one of your book, they could request it and you had to ship it to them (cheap, media rate shipping).  In doing this, you received a "book credit".  This credit would allow you to request a book from someone else.  So for each book you shipped off to someone, you received a credit and for each book you requested from someone, you were deducted a credit.  I figured the system could be "seeded" by provided a credit or two initially when someone signed up and listed a certain number of books.

 

I got pretty excited and was ready to get to work on this idea... then I did a few quick google searches and found out that my idea already existed pretty much exactly how I envisioned it.  The primary site is called www.paperbackswap.com

 

So I recently decided to sign up and at least try it out.  I immediately uploaded my 10 books to get 2 free credits.  Surprisingly, 7 of the books I uploaded were immediately snatched up.  Apparently you can search for books not listed on their web site and add them to your wish list.  Then you can setup the books on your wish list to automatically request the book as soon as anyone lists it.

 

I immediately realized that this site is probably loaded with not-so-great books with many more people requesting good books than providing good books.  It's too soon to draw hard conclusions, but I will continue to evaluate.  As for now, I have wrapped up 7 books to ship off.  This will give me 9 credits, so I will have to spend some time loading up my wish list to automatically request the books I'm interested in.  Hopefully some decent books show up within a reasonable timeframe. 

 

Tip from Dan:  If you are signing up for this site and listing book for the first time, don't list any books that may belong to your spouse.  If this book happens to be on someone's wish list it will automatically get requested and you will not have the option to easily remove it from your list - then your spouse will realize you 'gave away' her precious book and demand that it be replaced for an outrageous price on Amazon.com, thus defeating the entire purpose of the book swap concept.

 

 

 

Olympics or pre-season NFL?

Part of me feels guilty for having no desire to watch the olympics. My initial excuse was lack of time, but then I found myself with time to watch NFL preseason football. I was listening to one of the local sports stations the other day and they put up a poll asking people which sporting event they preferred to watch, the olympics or pre-season NFL football. The results at the time I heard about it was over 85% voting for pre-season football over the olympics.

So what makes the olympics so incredibly boring to watch? I think it's because you have no vested interest in the athletes or the team. The large majority of the time we are rooting for people we never even heard of until the start of the event. Sure, there's valid reason to feel compelled to root for your country's team... but when this only comes around once every 4 years and the team members are different every year, you just sort of lose any connection to the team that you may have developed during the previous olympics.

To contrast, a professional sports team maintains a consistent identity with a city for a very long time. The team owners, coaches, and players remain relatively consistent from year to year as well. Sure you get a few changes every year but the majority of the team remains in tact. Additionally, you get to see your team perform repeatedly over the course of an entire season. And when the season if over, the longest you have to wait is about 8 months (for nfl football) before the next season begins.

The other issue is that you never really know what sport your are going to get to watch when you tune in to the olympics. If I knew (without doing excessive research) when the mens open 100m and the 4x100m were going to be, I would sit down, tune in, crack a beer and watch the 10 second race. Instead, what acutally happens is that I see the olymics is on... I change to the channel, and I get two tiny sweaty guys in funny shirts in a vigorous badminton match. While I respect their passion for the sport of badminton, the world should respect my choice not to spend my time watching it.

No matter how much they ramp up the marketing efforts I really don't think the above obstacles can be overcome. I will be resigned to watching pre-season football over the summer olympics every 4 years. The only suggestion that I can give to the networks is to perhaps hire John Madden to cover a few events. It wouldn't change the sport, but I would certainly be inclined to watch Madden break down the replay of a winning curling toss.

Mosquitos

One of the worst things about living in New Orleans was the mosquitoes.  There were probably only 2 months out of the year when they weren't a big problem.  When I left New Orleans in 1994 I left behind the mosquitoes for good... or so I thought.

 

For some reason, in Auburn, when I am outside in the summer afternoons the mosquitoes are abound.  I don't know if they are just everywhere, or if there is something about my yard or my neighbors yards, or near by water features causing the problem. 

 

We noticed that there was a good bit of standing water after relocating some rocks to the landscape bed along the back of the house.  Apparently the condensation drain from the a/c was dripping in this areas and the rocks were preventing the water from immediately evaporating.  Thus over time it grew into a quasi, miniature marsh.  I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there was definitely some standing water at all times back there.

 

Being urged by Trina to take action, I came up with a plan involving PVC and Gorilla glue to take care of the problem.  Being the super intelligent engineer that I am, I happen to know things that the average person doesn't - like the first rule of civil engineering:  Water flows down hill.  Unfortunately, the discharge for the condensation pipe was at a relative low point in our entire back yard.  Not to be deterred, I surveyed the grades (using my highly-calibrated eyeball) and decided that I could route it around the north side of the house with enough fall keep the water moving. 

 

Two trips to home depot, two brief sessions of trenching and pipe laying, two days of procrastination, and the project is almost done.  Actually, I just need to cover the pipe back up.  It appears to be functioning as intended.  I guess I won't know if its truly working until enough head builds up to start overflowing from the condensation tray inside of our house.  But so far, so good.  The standing water is gone at least.

 

The mosquitoes haven't immediately disappeared.  I did some quick research online and realized that they really only need a moist environment and some tall grass to breed like crazy.  My ailing vegetable garden is now suspect number two.  I'll have to address this in the coming week.  The solution may be a god mowing and removal of the squash and zucchini plants (which seem to be past their productive stages).  I was tempted to use a healthy dose of one of those non discriminatory insecticides.  Allegedly some of them work very well for ridding mosquitoes.  However, apparently if I use those products I will kill all of the 'good' insects, I will destroy the local streams and lakes, my pets will have skin rashes and respiratory issues, and my entire family will get cancer.  I don't know if that is the exact working on the product label, but the critics on the internet forums seemed to be very educated on this...