Out of the way

I am back... I spent ten days Marañando (just like a vaacation except for 40 hours spent to attend a meeting in the middle), and ten days in South Africa on a University tour.

(Which means I have been to more than one country in Africa. At last. See my updated visited countries map ... there is a bit of space to fill in still).

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It has been a while since I wrote, and a while since I wrote about books. I recently read a few that I enjoyed...

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So far this year has been about reading books. But for the second time in a year I received a package recently that had a book in it where I had written something. This one was "Knitting the Semantic Web" - a collection of papers edited by Jane Greenberg and Miel^H^H^H^H^ Eva Méndez, and Eva and I wrote one of them called "Library Cards for the 21st century".

It's a nice book - reasonable size for carrying around, hardback for hitting things, white and orange on the spine for simple recognition (and upsetting Moose's sense of æsthetics). You should all rush out and buy it - I am sure your bookshop has been stacking up advance copies in anticipation... (if you really want to buy it, drop me a message - I have some order forms).

The basic idea of our paper is that unlike normal XML, which is pretty much what library catalogues were since they started getting on computers, RDF gives you the ability to scribble more useful stuff on them or add a second or fifth card under a different category in the same way you could with an actual card catalogue. (When I started my university studies we atually had one of those - duplicated at different parts of the library. Sometimes cards from the 19th century are better than the computer records of the 21st). And the added bonus is being able to search it all electronicaly still, rather than fighting over the "PROM - PROT" box with the big guy with a bad reputation who doesn't much like you ...

Since my FileVault enryption failed and swallowed all my data, and sine it was non-critical, the book is probably the only copy I have handy of the paper, actually. Anyway, it is nice to see my name in a book even if it is only on the inside. And it was a fun artile to write - it was something I had been thinking for a while.

...but the journey continues.

I flew to Australia yesterday, and I finished my 52nd and 53rd books.

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It's been a while. I started reading a bunch of books that are going slowly, but in the middle I read some more...

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I was once likened to Genghis Khan. According to the book of that name, by John Man, this was definitely a great compliment. Part biography of the man who made an empire bigger than anyone had before him, and part historiographical journalism, I greatly enjoyed it, and learned some stuff about Mongolia as well as about Genghis Khan. (Sorry Mielina, this is where I got your cards for Kaja's game).

Book 42 was my third (and least complex) book in Norwegian. "Heksene" by Roald Dahl, is written for kids - kids under 10. Illustrated by Quentin Blake, it is about witches. Although it purports to be autobiographical, I am a little suspicious that it is not the entire truth...

Now I am re-reading a book about books. Although I only read it in english before. I am not about a quarter of the way through "Il Nome della Rosa", by Umberto Eco. And some easier books alongside, since I got to Jim's and found a pile of easy reading (I have had the Eco book for years, but never dared to try reading it before. I only backed myself into the corner by running out of books at a moment I was packing in a hurry).

A couple more books...

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I was a bit shy about having a birthday party when I had completed thirty years in my lifetime. So I went to a different party for something else.

Now I have completed thirty books in this year. No party, but here are reviews of the latest two...

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More books - half a dozen of them, taking me past the halfway mark. Religion, history, politics, fiction, psychology. Some of them I bought on purpose, some of them I would never have bought, and read because "they were there".

The good, the bad, and the really rather ugly (one of these books I would not buy on the prnciple that such authors should not be encouraged), some of the reviews are stretching out. Having accused an author of writing repetitive drivel, maybe I should spend more time editing these reviews - but here they are...

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I read some more books. So a few brief notes about them...

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