A while back, I went looking for A5 paper (about half a "normal" American sheet in size if you didn't know) and came up empty. At the time, pretty much no one had a reasonably priced option. I have a hard time paying $20+ for 250 sheets of ordinary paper.

Anyway, one of the sites that came up as a decent source of A4 paper recently started stocking A5 and dropped me a note. It's still like $8 a ream, but, apparently, that dropped it below my unwillingness threshold because I ordered 3 reams.

They came today, which means that I'm pretty much equipped for the project I wanted the paper for in the first place. An article from back in May detailed how to do your own paperback book binding without the complicated equipment, sewing needles, etc. A similar article shows another simple setup (though with a simple jig instead of the basic clips).

Beyond the fact that I just like the idea of messing with bookbinding because I like books (even if I more aggressively use them than some others do), it's a handy way to put together little reference books, poetry, short stories, etc. I probably won't do any binding until this weekend, but I can think of a few things worth compiling into documents for printing this way.

Photo: Jim

At breakfast this morning, Aaron and I were talking again about software development as well as other functional design. A theme that's come up a bit in those discussions is how to determine exactly where the 20% in the 80/20 that ends up causing most of your work sits.

I think it boils down and applies outside of software and to lots of things like morality, law and politics. It reflects the overall theme of this site. Simply put, "always" and "never" are easy. Whenever you can put something or someone into either bucket, your efforts can be stopped. Once in either bucket, you can treat the contents universally, without any difficulty.

It's the exceptions that cause all fo the thinking, all of the planning and all of the effort. It's all that ambiguity that complicates things. All those "maybe's" and "sometime's" and "except for's" that get in the way of the nice clean world that seems to be so often what we're after.

Of course, that's all because those uncertainties are what life *is*. It's a really rare issue that can genuinely be treated with an "always" or a "never". Those pesky gray areas get in the way.

Photo: Zach

As with my music attention, I've been wanting a relatively easy way to share my book reading attention as well as other purchases. Given how I pretty much buy all of my books from Amazon and how much other stuff I buy from them, their wishlists seemed a reasonable way to semi-passively share a reading list, etc. When I buy a book, I can just also add it to a specific list and have that ripple out onto pages on this site.

The first thing to do is get a quick handle on all of your wishlists that Amazon has on file. The scratchpad for the ListSearch gives a handy way to build the URL. Set the ListType to WishList and the rest is fairly straightforward. Include the email and the subscription ID (get yours at http://aws.amazon.com).

I gave it my email address and got my URL, which I then ran through the following code.


$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
$lists = $xml->Lists;
foreach($lists->List as $list){
$ListURL = $list->ListURL;
$ListName = $list->ListName;
$TotalItems = $list->TotalItems;
$ListId = $list->ListId;
print("$ListName ($ListId) has $TotalItems items<br />");
}


That's useful if you want to find lists, for example to find the lists of family members, etc. However, for the next bit, I only really needed the $ListId, but who knows, the above might be useful and it got me the bit I needed.

So, we can do something very similar to get the URL to retrieve a list. The scratchpad for ListLookup gets the URL we need.

Again, using thhe SimpleXML functions is the quickest way to grab the data. Load your URL into a variable (it's a really long URL, so I'm not posting it to avoid messing the layout up). Anyway, when you run:

$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);


You have this object that represents what's in the XML. As such, it pretty much varies based on the XML you load. The easiest way to see what's inside is to do a print_r($xml) and you'll see a nicely nested object in the view source. Using the <pre> tag can make looking at the output easier.

In the case of a ListLookup, using this lookup gives you the actual details of the list:


$list = $xml->Lists->List;


Another quick print_r($list) and we can see that we're getting to the meat of what we're after. Depending on what properties you selected to build your URL, you may or may not have all of these, but for books and reasonable options, this little snippet:


$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
$list = $xml->Lists->List;
foreach($list->ListItem as $item){
$detailURL = $item->Item->DetailPageURL;
$title = $item->Item->ItemAttributes->Title;
$author = $item->Item->ItemAttributes->Author;
print("$title by $author<br>");
}


Which generates a nice little list like this:

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (P.S.) by Barry Schwartz
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

If you did much digging through the object that you get from Amazon, you saw just how much data there is, which would make for whatever kinds of customized pages you want.

A week or so ago, I noticed that Seven Cups Tea had some of the stuff I've grown to like, Rou Gui and I ordered some, along with a little bit of some other stuff I wanted to try. Fast forward to Tuesday, when a box arrived from them. I tore it open to find it full of the items that someone in Florida had ordered.

By the time I got around to contacting them yesterday, I had actually received the right order instead, with a note to not worry about the mixup. So, I now have 3 bags of green tea (which I don't typically enjoy: too grassy). I was sharing this dilemma with a tea-drinking friend and she mentioned cooking with it, which intrigued me. I've cooked lots of Coke/Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, coffee, etc. They are great ways to bring in complex flavors to both savory and sweet dishes.

She pointed me to a pretty cool site for cooking with tea, which looks like a really interesting starting point. It's also a great example of leveraging the web and engaging people with your product. Adagio Teas runs this tea recipe site, called TeaChef. Every month, they choose a tea out out of their catalog and ask participants to come up with recipes for it. They offer free samples to help in that endeavor. They collect the recipes and, after ranking them, etc. present them on the site.

It's a pretty innovative way to engage people and get them excited about a single product that they sell. I'd love to see the sales figures for the selected teas following their feature. I'd be really surprised if there's not a huge spike.

Now, which recipe to try first . . .

This morning, we celebrated the life of my grandmother before laying her remains to rest. I was honored to be one of the six casket bearers, as the eldest son of one of her 6 children. As I stood at the front of the church, I looked at the church full of people. Not just the large family (6 married children, 23 grandchildren (most married) and 44 great-grandchildren), but members of the community and the church. They came in from across the country to honor a woman who lived a long life before her body gave out.

Wilhelmina Zwart was born in 1916 and died, nearly 90 years later, on my 31st birthday. Though Wilhelmina is what her birth certificate says, pretty much everyone in the family called her Grandma. Everyone else called her Minnie. And, there were a lot of "everyone"s to call her that. Her house was a hub of activity every time I was ever there. Extended family, neighbors and friends were constantly dropping in for coffee and an occasional game of dominos (though good luck beating her).

The funeral, the meal afterward, and the 6 hour road trip each way has given me ample opportunity to bring back memories of Grandma.

Of course, I only knew her in the last 30 or so of her 90 years, which meant that most of her life preceded mine. That included the entirety of her 33 year marriage to my grandfather Edward (thus my middle name), who died 2 years before I was born. That also included her life actively running the household of a busy farming family and the era before she learned to drive at the age of 57.

By the time I met her, she lived in town in a house built for entertaining, with my farming uncles renting the farm from her. She drove a Chevy Citation (the only car I ever remember her owning - my sister has it now) all over the place, making up for lost time. She cooked for those visiting her home as well as those in the community, helping the "elderly" when she was, herself, nearly 80.

For many years, Sunday dinner was a weekly ritual, drifting toward biweekly as time went on and people got busier and older. Being a state away, my family didn't get to participate in that many of them, but I remember those I was part of vividly. Grandma had a basement "hall" pretty much designed to be able to handle setting up one long table for 25+ people to eat.

After church, the adults would gather in the parlor, eating cookies and drinking coffee. The kids were all in the basement until the meal began. The food was served buffet style with Grandma's rules in strict effect for the order in which you ate. Age and being female got you to the front of the line, which meant I was usually toward the back.

A ritual prayer was said by the grandchildren prior to forks being lifted and loud conversation and laughter ensued once the utinsils started. Visitors who ate with my family for the first time always commented on how much active conversation and laughing happened at meals.

Once the main meal was completed, there was ALWAYS dessert. Everyone got a plate, but taking a bite before Grandma took her first bite was a cardinal sin. Cleanup was a communal affair, with everyone, from the oldest to the youngest pitching in to bring items up to the kitchen. Those dinners will stick in my memory forever.

So will the house itself. It was built specifically for her by my Uncle Mer and was decorated to her individual taste. Lots of people do that, but very few do it with the flair that ends up with a master suite decorated in white and bright red. The crown jewel of this design was a huge, red clawfoot tub on a raised platform. This was in the 70's before houses started coming regularly featuring spa tubs. That tub is featured in at least one baby picture for each of my siblings.

I'm sure the memories will keep flooding back over the weeks and months to come and, while some make me sad, almost every one of them also makes me smile.

Grandma, you will be missed.