Leave unused cables in-place.  Do not use cable management.  Label no cables.

 

Use cables of inappropriate length (this is a SCSI cable!):

It all started with me wanting to find "Science Fiction books published last month that were not about vampires."

According to the Amazon Advanced Search page, the minus sign "-" is supposed to indicate a "NOT" search.  I started by searching the books section for "-vampires".  Amazon says:

Your search "-vampires" did not match any products in: Books

Now I know that vampire books are popular these days, but I'm fairly certain there are at least a few Fantasy/SciFi books at Amazon.com that are not about vampires.

I tried again using the Advanced Search book search page (http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=241582011), making sure that "-vampires" was in the keywords field.  Again, no matching results.

I tried the "books written by Malcolm X but not an autobiography" search listed on the Advanced Search page as a Real-world Example... again no matching results.  Clicking the link to "See the results" of the example Malcom X search finds no matching results.

I looked all over the Amazon.com site for a way to report a web site problem.  None of the information at http://www.amazon.com/help was useful to report this kind of issue, at least as far as I could tell.  I was unable to locate any email contacts or web forms to submit feedback on the site itself.  I googled for other reports of this issue and didn't find anything. 

I resorted to emailing the generic webmaster address.

Here is the reply I received from Amazon:

Thank you, IKEA (Poang chair and stool, Expedit book shelf).

It was a beautiful day to take the family to the Micanopy Fall Festival. I picked up a bottle of El Yucateco chipotle hot sauce from one of the booths selling bottled sauces and live pepper plants.

I mixed some of this hot sauce with regular bottled barbecue sauce. I just finished grilling (and eating!) chicken breasts and turkey kielbasa. Man, this made for some good and spicy grilling.

I am lucky to work a few blocks away from the Main Branch of the Florida Alachua County Library here in Gainesville. I am perhaps even more lucky to work right down the street from the Friends of the Library Book Sale.   The book sale is held twice a year and the fall sale just finished.  I managed to limit myself to buying only 10 books during the 3 days that I walked up the street to the sale from my office... and spent under $10 total.  The sale runs from Saturday - Wednesday and the weekdays are not nearly as crowded.

I am quite happy with my finds at the sale:

I've been on a bit of a reading binge this year.  I will talk about that more in a future post.

Below is a list of the fiction I have read during 2009 up thru today (70 books!).  I read mostly Speculative / Science Fiction.  In the future I hope to publish my reading list with sortable columns by title, author, rating, or whatever information might be useful.  

In the meantime, here is the plain old list of books (sorted by author):