Visited Fort Worden State Park over the memorial day weekend. It was a long drive back to Seattle, so I didn’t get a chance to wait for the sun to set fully and get a shot of the light itself.

As someone living with a serious book buying addiction, Paperspine’s beta launch caught my eye.

$15 a month gives you unlimited access to their 15,000 book selection, with free shipping and 2 books out at a time. I’m still debating whether I should jump in at this early stage. Things that are making me hesitate:

• 2 books out at a time with 5 days of media-mail-speed shipping doesn’t sound like a lot. Effectively you’re reading one book at a time and waiting for a week for the other book to get back to you.
• They only have paperback books in their catalog at the moment
• The site needs a lot of work - things I took for granted on Amazon.com and Netflix are missing, including: reviews, recommendations, cover images for every book, decent search, zeitgeist etc.
• No integration with Amazon.com / bookmooch / iRead etc. - I want to auto import existing wish lists, see what my friends are reading etc.

Of course this is a beta launch and I’m sure much of this will be released eventually. But the bar has been set high for other media lines and considering the price of entry here, I don’t feel like I’m getting a great value quite yet.

Testing while stuck in standstill traffic.

Found this to be a fairly interesting read. Harvard Business Review interviews Jeff Bezos and talks about strategic bets. I’m happy to see a shout-out for Tagging in 2007.

Choice tidbits: “I’ll tell you a story about an incident that I’m sure is part of the reason we are what we are. Sometime around May of 1997 we were put on a deathwatch by a well-known industry pundit. His argument was a simple one: Barnes & Noble had just launched their website, and we had only 125 employees at the time, and something like $60 million in annual sales… They had 30,000 employees at that time, and $3 billion in sales.”

The coolest community site I’ve seen in a while: trackitt. Green card applicants share data to figure out historic and current processing times at each service center.

Improve the prediction accuracy by entering your own data, watch similar cases or ask questions in the forums. Exactly everything that the official USCIS site would never provide.

Very happy to get a mention (two tiny ones actually) in the “favorites of the week” post on Epic Edits.

Las Ventas, Madrid, May 23, 2007. This was the debut fight for the young bullfighter facing the mortally wounded bull. He was understandably cocky. The bull keeled over a couple of minutes later and there wasn’t a single scratch on the matador.

I was fortunate enough to visit Madrid during Feria de San Isidro, which meant a bullfight every day, so it was easy to get seats even at the last moment. Legend has it that Saint Isidore (patron saint of Madrid) was an impoverished farm worker who, along with his wife Santa Maria de la Cabeza, became famous for giving food to the poor. Once during a drought, he broke the earth with a scythe which brought forth a spring of water which gave sufficient water to supply all of Madrid. On another occasion their son fell into a deep well and, at the prayers of his parents, the water of the well is said to have risen miraculously to the level of the ground, bringing the child with it, alive and well. Isidore and Maria then vowed continence and lived in separate houses.

Yachats, OR, September 1, 2007. The Oregon coast gets a bad rep for being fogged over most of the time. I was pretty lucky to catch it at its finest over the labor day weekend. My one takeaway from the entire trip: it’s about time I bought a tripod.