Zeborah

I knew this would happen one day. In fact I suspected it would happen today.

Because a while ago when I came home there was a fence up around the house next door. And yesterday when I came home there was a bulldozer on the driveway beside the house next door. So today when I came home it wasn't terribly surprising that there was a bulldozer on the small pile of rubble that is all that remains of the house next door.

But I am disappointed that I can't share any photos, because it's winter and my commute is about 1h15 each way, so when I leave in the morning it's dark and when I get home at night it's dark.

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In related news, I got a surprise voicemail from EQC/Fletchers last Thursday and after a couple of rounds of voicemail tag they asked me if the repairs on my house had in fact been completed. No, I replied, in fact they had not. Much as I told you last time you asked me this five months ago. Oh, they said, and asked for details again, which I told them again. It's possible that this time they'll do something about it, but I'm not in a rush. (It's just aesthetics around my living room fireplace. It's serious aesthetics, so sometime in the next five years would be nice, but people are living in their cars and using bubblewrap for insulation, y'know?) Mostly I just want to know that their records reflect the fact that they haven't finished, so a call every several months suits me fine.

A few days later I got a further call from EQC related folks but in this case it was land assessment, wanting to check what damage my land sustained. I could have sworn they'd already assessed my land (you know, before spending all that time and money mostly-fixing my house 18 months ago) but I'm a librarian, not a geotechnical engineer so what do I know? I managed to get agreement that they don't need access to my house because, while they'd like to check the land underneath it, they respect my desire not to have my new insulation and plastic sheeting torn up for the purpose. Peering through the vents will apparently be fine. This means they can come and skulk around the property by themselves while I'm at work.

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In unrelated news, I've been baking a series of Herman the German Friendship Cakes, which involves keeping and feeding a yeast-based starter. Whether it's particularly warm of late, or the ingredients have got off-balance, or what, but the last several days he's really taken off with serious bubbling. He also smells increasingly alcoholic. :-D

I mentioned making curtains: I now have the three incorrect ones up and will make the fourth one correct in due course.

I may have also mentioned dehydrating fruit. When my trees are in fruit this is peaches and plums; right now it's mostly cheap apples and pears; but sometimes I have some persimmons or honeydew melon going soft. So I can come home of an evening and grab myself a slice of dried persimmon, and it is good.

And at work I have been making a javascript bookmarklet to provide a permalink to bibliographic database pages. This is more complex than one might expect if one doesn't know bibliographic databases; but it's also a lot simpler than I initially feared. Not that this cut down on any hours of debugging. (One of the most frustrating was a bug introduced only in IE when - as I eventually tracked down - the page's doctype is malformed, which happens on more databases than you might think.) But it's now good enough that I'm getting a colleague to send it to a couple of potential users for testing purposes. And it's so pretty.

Every now and then I have the urge to write up a short review of a movie the same way I write up short reviews of books on Goodreads. Problem is, I've never been able to find a satisfactory Goodreads-for-movies. Last time I searched, I ended up starting research on how I'd go about building my own.

(The answer is, with great difficulty. I don't have the knowledge or the skills and I particularly don't have the willpower necessary to put in the time to gain the knowledge and the skills.)

I did another hunt today and ended up creating accounts to further investigate:

• DVDCrate - makes a bad first impression with a random error prominently displayed on the main page; I suspect something wrong with a database query. Still, I'm easy, so looked further, but when I create reviews there's no page which lists my reviews. This is kind of a basic feature.
• DVD Aficionado - pretty but clunky. DVDs can only be in one collection at a time (eg it can be 'owned' or 'watched', but not both!). Again you can review items but there's no apparent listing of one's reviews.
• FilmCrave - looked decent considering the advertising and let me have my preferred password with non 0-9a-zA-Z characters. Allowed multiple custom lists to be created and lists all my reviews in one place; on the downside, I couldn't find an RSS feed for that list, the user interface is... frankly bizarre, I was automatically friended by the founder, which fine, but this made his face appear on the friends area of my profile without recourse; plus did I mention the advertising.
• Criticker - lets you create 'private lists' which can be used as tags, lists all reviews in one place and has an rss feed for them (though the item titles are ugly as heck). Downsides: terrible ads and reviews can only be up to 500 characters long.
• Oh, and iheartmovies.com which looks like it'd be exactly what I want if the website was actually up and running.

In the end I went with Criticker. But that 500-character limit is really going to bug me. It's almost tempting to just create a Dreamwidth account just for movie reviews. It's almost tempting to go back to researching how to build my own Goodreads-for-movies.

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills. Most importantly of all, I do not have the data.

--Oh dear. I just googled "open movie data" and discovered TMDb, "a free and open movie database" with an open API. (None of the services currently using it do what I want.)

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills....