"Hey, I only want the same as anyone"

[hermionesviolin]

In an e-mail to Ari last night, I said I hoped that I would be an "optimally productive human being" this week. I knew that "optimal" was stretching it, but I wasn't expecting to be as obscenely unmotivated as I was today. Sigh.

My website is being a bitca. I create new html files, edit and save them, and then they're blank. This makes me nervous about editing existing files (like, y'know, recs updates). So I just did a del.icio.us update.

I'll be up for renewal in January. Any recommendations re: switching webhosting?

I talked to my brother, and he said I could probably use the USB cord from my printer or scanner for my external CD-burner. Lo, he was right. So this weekend will likely include a lot of CD burning so I can back everything up, upgrade to XP, and then do a proper back-up/storage on my external hard drive.

My HIMYM S2 DVD pre-order from Amazon shipped today. Now I just need a functional tv again.

***

Elliptical, interval:
1mi @ 11:24min
2mi @ 22:49min
2.60mi @ 30min

***

Introduction to the Classics of Western Thought I

Class #3 and we have dipped into the crazyflakes.

We read Plato's The Republic, and one of the students suggested that frequently Socrates is being sarcastic. Uh . . . NO!

***

Karabair comments: "From what I can tell this meme measures the books that people are most likely to own without having read."

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Man, "couldn't stand" is harsh. There are plenty of books on this list I wasn't fond of, but . . .

[addendum from versions seen on the flist: underline what you want to read but haven't yet, *asterisk* the ones you've read more than once]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
* Wuthering Heights (110) [I hated it less the second time through.]
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
* Pride and prejudice (83) [Still not a fan.]
Jane Eyre (80)
* A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67) [I got a few pages in and decided I really wasn't enjoying it nor would I.]
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64) [We were assigned selections in AP English, and I keep meaning to go back and read the whole thing.]
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62) [in the hopes that it'll be better than One Hundred Years of Solitude]
* Brave new world (61)
* The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
* Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
* Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
* 1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
* Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54) [My mom started to read this to me when I was a kid, but I got bored and made her stop. I keep meaning to back to it 'cause it's the one classic Dickens I haven't read.]
Gulliver's travels (53) [I think I read a kid's version of this when I was young. I started the real version at my grandparents' once, but I don't think I finished it.]
Les misérables (53) [We read an abridged version in 9th grade English, and I keep meaning to read the whole thing.]
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50) [I was assigned one short story in a class and have yet to get around to reading the whole collection.]
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
* The scarlet letter (48) [I liked it a lot more the second time.]
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)