BookX 0.1 is finally released.  BookX creates an easy way to give your site visitors a peek at your recommended books.  Using only ISBN numbers, it gets the information from Barnes and Noble (http://www.bn.com) and stores the information locally to both speed up the response time, but also to not bog down their servers with repetetive requests.  BookX creates a widget for your sidebar, a list view, and detail view, all customizable from the easy to use admin interface.

Features

◊ Uses only ISBN to fill in all the important information about your books
◊ Creates a Detail Page View, List View, and a Widget all from the same plugin
◊ Each view is totally customizable from an easy to use admin interface
◊ Lots of controls over the look and feel of the generated code through the admin interface
◊ Stores most (just not the image) of the data on your server for fast results and better control

          

We noticed tonight that we recently had some traffic to the site from the google search ‘missy moo’. This peaked our curiosity. What other missy moos are out there?

Well, it’s a popular name for a cat. Missy moo is Oober Yuckems ‘ not so secret admirer. Somewhere along the lines we ended up buying a bib from Australia (fyi-delivery by sea takes 2-3 months! we opted for air). We found some cute onesies (Link Removed on Remote Site) for identical twins, and the true meaning of missy moo.

gotta love the net

          

I thought I’d share a few of my favorite things.

          

We love to read. From day one we’ve read to Illianna. One of her favorite books is Peek-A-Zoo. It’s been a great book that’s grown with her. It’s more of an activity book. Dr Seuss has been great as well. My Many Colored Days is not a well known Dr. Seuss. Illianna has loved Oh The Places You’ll Go from when she was little. I think the illustrations catch her eye. It plays with black and white and bold patterns, which is good for babies. Recently Horton Hears A Who was turned into a movie. I haven’t seen the movie, but the book has a great message. Your tounge will get twisted when you read Double Trouble in Walla Walla, and The Cranky Sun has beautiful artwork. A Day With No Crayons is very creative and helps encourage children to see art in everyday things.

          

We live in a fairly new neighborhood with all the amenities we could want. We have a water park, lots of trails to walk, play grounds, a spray park, good schools, and freaking paper hanging doorbell ringing sales folk. More than once in the last couple of weeks, Illi was down for less than 15 minutes when the doorbell rings, Mydrinn goes crazy, and it is just some moron selling something stupid with the same pitch everyone else uses. “I was just over at __________ (some generic name)’s house, and she loved this and bought a ton. But first, let me bore you about my company and other crap you don’t care about.” I mean really, we don’t give a rat’s who bought what, assuming the rather dubious assertion is even true. They never take no for an answer, and just keep talking (I assume) after the door is closed.

So, we researched the laws of Fort Worth, and found out that putting up a “No Soliciting” sign means that anyone that puts anything on our door, or petitions us for any reason can incur a $500 dollar, per incident fine. The only people exempt are government officials. We looked around online for something tasteful (and affordable), couldn’t find one (this one came up on our search many times - yuck), so we just put up a paper sign in the window with the following:

No Soliciting
Violation of this notice may result in a $500 per incident fine.
City of Fort Worth (Ord. No. 15245, § 1, 9-17-02) & (Ord. No. 17829, § 1, 10-9-07)
This includes Handbills and Religious Petitioning

Hopefully that will get the point across. If not, I will just start turning everyone into to the City for code violations. We like our sleep around here, and our “guard dog” Mydrinn will not be deterred from his solemn duty, so do us all a favor, just go away, we aren’t buying anything from you anyways.

There were several good stories around on the net about this topic, but one of my favorites was this girl’s. Her blog name and motto are just so good, I had to link back.

          

http://www.unityfortworth.org/

          

A few weekends ago Ryan suggested we attended our first ‘but not last’ comic book convention. He’d heard on the radio that Wizard World was going to be in town and found out Top Cow was going to be in attendance. Our $20.00 admission bought us 3-4 hours of fun and we could have stayed longer if Illianna wasn’t getting fussy.

There were so many cool vendors, the people watching was great ‘yes there were people in tights and capes’, and I had flashbacks to my teen years. Ryan and I both were on the look for old friends, but never came across any. It was great to see how the typical social misfit was totally in their element at the convention. I think everyone has a place in this world and figuring out where that is is a continuous process.

We found lots of goodies. Pawstar was one of the first. They have all sorts of cool things, but what really caught my attention was the cute bear hats. I recently had one of my coworkers pick me up the original Japanese version from Miki House when he was back in Tokyo for a visit. ‘I’ve got the shopping site bookmarked at work because it took me hours of randomly clicking around seeing as how I don’t read or speak Japanese- so good luck.’ Pawstar is much more reasonably priced and available in the US. Ryan was excited to come across Uberclok. ‘I think he goes to their website regularly and drools.’ We’ve got a pile of anime we need to watch and now we’re adding another movie to it.

The biggest find was some artwork by Dirk Strangely.

His name seemed very familiar to me and I thought I might have seen something of his at Hot Topic, but it was determined I’ve come across him from my shopping on ebay. He has a unique blend of dark and light. It reminds me of Mirror Mask.

All and all we had a great time being nerds and I can’t wait until next time.

          

Interesting article

          

It goes so wrong, right from the start….