Category Archives: Books & Movies

My sister forwarded me a link to the overview video for Wolfram|Alpha, a web site that bills itself as a computational knowledge engine. Both of us are always looking for sites that make doing research on the Internet easier. As a very simple example for using Wolfram|Alpha, you can enter any date and get back a wealth of information on it. When I tried that feature, a factoid popped up that coincided exactly with something unrelated I read yesterday.
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I started keeping track of the books I’ve read at the beginning of 1979. At first I used a simple 3 x 5 card file. In 1993 when my books database outgrew the largest file box I could find, I transferred it to Microsoft Access. The software has had a couple of upgrades since then, but the database design—a flat table along with some forms and queries—has remained essentially unchanged. This morning the database reached a milestone when I entered book number 1500.
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I met my friend R.B. today, just before noon, at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Silverdale to attend a book signing by J. A. Jance of her latest mystery, Fire and Ice. Neither of us bought the book and thus we didn’t stick around to get her autograph. But the brief talk she gave was well worth our time. For the record she looks just like her author photo on the dust jacket of Cruel Intent, minus the dogs of course.
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In the contest to write a woman-detective mystery for each letter of the alphabet (A to Z), it is pretty much a dead heat between Mary Daheim and Sue Grafton. Both women will publish a “U” entry (the 21st letter of the alphabet) this year: Daheim’s The Alpine Uproar is due out at mid-year, while Grafton’s U Is for Undertow is scheduled for December.
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