As stated earlier, not all books can be loaned, but you can check whether the book can be loaned before purchasing, by looking in the product details section. It lists a lending attribute and will state whether lending is enabled.

Lastly, this is truly great because of all of the different Kindle readers. You need not have a Kindle to read a loaned book, just any device that supports one of the Kindle reader applications.

Full details on the loaning process can be found on Amazon’s web site. Lending your Kindle Books.

I recently watch part of a webcast with Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose. Tim Ferriss  is hard to define, but dynamic is certainly a good adjective. Kevin Rose, is the founder of Digg.com and is currently the CEO. In this webcast, Kevin quickly pushed the book, REWORK. I had heard of 37 Signals, the company of the authors, but I had not heard of the book itself. I put it on reserve in my local library and waited, and waited. Here in Columbus Ohio, I was 43rd on the reserve list. Luckily, my number was up and I got the book yesterday.

I inhaled the book in less than a couple of hours. Such an easy read and truly enjoyable. First, I can say that the book doesn’t suffer from the more is better type of philosophy. They get straight to the point. If they can fully illustrate their point in one sentence, then that is all you are likely to get. How refreshing. Actually, this ends up being a constant theme throughout the book.

The book is broken up into not so much chapters, but thoughts. Two in particular caught my attention.

1. Customer feedback. Where to store it? Their answer, overly simplified, is don’t. The logic here is that it isn’t necessary, anything worth hearing will be repeated over and over again by your customers.

2. Writing. What we learned in college is crap. Some of education’s misguided lessons.

1. The longer a document is, the more it matters.
2. Stiff, formal tone is better than being conversational.
3. …
4. The format matters as much (or more) than the content of what you write.

Just simply a great read. There really is no reason not to read it. The book covers many topics in business but can be easily applied to many situations in life. Like the tidal wave of movement behind agile programming in software development, 37 Signals embraces quick, shorter, being direct and honest. Don’t create a task list with a thousand items on it. There isn’t a good way to prioritize. Start a new list and put “Read REWORK” at the top.

Wowbrary – Newest Books, Movies, and Music at your Library.

This morning I went to search for the Rosetta Stone link so that I could pass it along to Kathy. Unfortunately, I came up empty in my search. I did notice Mango which is another language program but no Rosetta Stone.

I emailed one of the librarians inquiring about the missing link. He quickly returned my email saying that Rosetta had changed their business model and was no longer offering access through libraries. The library has tried to fill the gap with an agreement with Mango after they were unable to reach an agreement with Rosetta.

The Worthington and Columbus libraries still exceed at being one of our city’s greatest resources. You have to question the business logic of Rosetta in preventing access to their materials through the library system.

If you want to give Mango a try, simply point your web browser to http://www.columbuslibrary.org/ebranch/index.cfm?pageid=18&parentid=855 or search for Mango under premium resources on the library’s home page at http://www.columbuslibrary.org

All resources are available to all of Ohio’s K-12 students and faculty. Parents, please take the time to look at the available resources. After all, it is your tax dollars at work. Take advantage of this resource.

http://infohio.org/ 

More on that pesky little web browser.

I got tired of going to the Columbus Library’s web page to check if they had a book I was looking for. So I thought I would write a search engine for Firefox’s search box. Writing the little scripts that provide this functionality is really straight forward. Unfortunately, the Columbus Library’s web site was a little harder to find a good method to hook into their catalog. I luckily did find a solution.

I also was having so much fun at the time that I wrote one for the Mansfield Richland County library. I thought this might be helpful for mom and dad living within walking distance of the Plymouth branch.

You can find all search engines at http://mycroft.mozdev.org

The search engines for the Columbus library is here
Note: The one with Glenn Welker as the author is built on the new catalog system, the aquabrowser.

The Mansfield Richland County library is here