I’ve noticed recently, after a spate of buying books from Amazon.ca, that their customized “Recommendations” page for me is getting better and better. Which got me thinking: to help recommend, they can use their knowledge of what books I’ve bought from them, and what books I search for, but what about books I already own that I didn’t buy from them? It turns out that you can “Rate Items You Own” on your “Recommendations” page and do exactly this.

By the way, if you have a secret burning desire to shower me with gifts, you can now use my Amazon.ca Wish List as a guide. Yes, this is a shameless ploy. I’ve got the flu; humour me.

We have consumed much facial tissue here on Prince St. this week, and have had a chance to experience it in its many brands and varieties. Although the ‘Scotties with Lotion’ are a nice tissue once you get them up to the nose, I recommend avoiding this brand as their “box exit” performance is sub-par: when you pull one out, you’re just as likely to get three or four or five. This has happened across multiple boxes. As an alternative, I recommend the ‘Puffs with Lotion.’

Of course both are evil in the eyes of Greenpeace.

The general consensus is that Catherine, Oliver and I are 3/4 of the way through “the flu.” And a strain thereof that wasn’t covered by the “flu shot” we all got back in the fall. We’ve had pretty well every symptom one can experience in the head/chest region — stuffy nose, cough, headache, sneezing, sore throat — along with a general feeling of malaise. We’re gradually hacking our way back to health — Oliver went to school this week after a full week off.

Other than watching enough television that I’ve started to lose my taste for the medium, I’ve learned a lot about the human body this week. Although sickness is hell, and not to be wished upon anyone, it does afford an opportunity to slow down and realize ones fragility.

Here are the “big three” takes on the flu:

• U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
• World Health Organization

See you on the other side.

Contrary to the fears of my friend Ann, I have not died. I caught the aforementioned sickness from Catherine and Oliver and we have spent the balance of the week in tissue-drenched low-level misery. We’ve still got runny noses and foggy heads, but the worst seems to be over. Kudos to the staff at Friendly Pharmacy in Charlottetown for their help in making it through.

CBC Television’s Marketplace aired a segment on Freecycle.org last week; you can watch it online. Amazingly, the Charlottetown Freecycle.org group has 161 members. Finally, a place, other than Steven Garrity’s vestibule, to re-home excess baggage.

Prince Edward Islanders with a library card now have access to Patron Books in Print courtesy of the Provincial Library.

I’ve written before about how much I like Amazon.ca, the Canadian arm of Amazon.com. Today they’ve blown my mind again.

On Sunday night I was finishing up the last couple of chapters of Long Way Round, a book by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman about a motorcycle trip around the world (it’s a very good read; they’re both entertaining writers, and they had an interesting adventure).

McGregor mentions a couple of times that the book Jupiter’s Travels was an inspiration for their trip. Being an afficianado of round-the-world travel tales, I decided to order a copy for myself. At 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning.

The book shipped on Monday. It arrived at my doorstep, via regular shipping, this morning. Just slightly more than a day after I placed the order.

Google Maps says it takes 18 hours to drive from Mississauga (where Amazon’s warehouse is) to Charlottetown. That leaves only about 15 hours for the “logistics” part of the transaction. That, to me, seems simply amazing. I can’t imagine how they would get the book to me any faster.

I’ve updated my system for uploading photos from iPhoto to a Drupal image gallery. The original script required both an AppleScript and a PHP script. The updated script does the same thing, but without the need for PHP; it also handles upload of multiple images at the same time.

To install the updated script, here’s what you need:

• The updated iPhotoToDrupal AppleScript. Save this, and then copy the text into Script Editor; set username, password and other variables to appropriate locations on your local system (including the edit[taxonomy][], which is admitedly kludgey), and then save the AppleScript in the Library:Scripts:iPhoto Scripts folder under your home directory. You can rename it something useful like “Upload to Drupal” if you like.
• As before, if you don’t have the Script Menu utility installed on your Mac, go and grab it; it lets you call the AppleScript from a pop-down menu in the menubar.

Assuming you’ve got everything configured properly, you should now be able to select one or more images in iPhoto, call the script (from the Script Menu under iPhoto Scripts) and the photos should appear shortly thereafter in the appropriate Drupal image gallery.

As always, comments and suggestions welcome.

I found that it’s relatively easy to login to Drupal from AppleScript by using cURL. I created a sample script to show how; grab DrupalFromAppleScript, load it into Script Editor, enter values for your username, password and Drupal URL, and you should be able to get it to login to your site.

This will only get you logged in of course — you’ll have to amplify the script to make it do anything useful (like uploading content, grabbing information, etc.)