MCOQueen's Ramblings

For the past month, I have been re-reading over and over again the first 3 books in J.R. Ward's "Black Dagger Brotherhood" Series.  The fourth book is due out March 6th.  I can't wait!!!!  I never get tired of reading this series.  I honestly think it is #1 in my favorites of Vampire Series books.  I just love J.R. Ward's style. 

I managed to put in all the books that I have in my room in my book collector software.  I think I'm addicted to scanning.  Quite a few of my books are being loaned to friends right now (Void and Eclipse).  I can remember some of them, but the rest will have to wait to be scanned until I get them back eventually.  Since I had no more books to scan, I decided to scan in all my Manga under a separate database in Book Collector.  I thought I might as well categorize them differently. I've almost got all of them scanned in right now. 

After I'm done with that, I'm going to go put in all my personal details for each book and manga or I might just start scanning my movies and games in with my Movie Collector and Game Collector software. 

Work went well yesterday.  No problems at all which leads me to believe that today is going to be a huge pain in the kiester due to that it's raining and the damn network satellites are really touchy when it rains.  I hate seeing network glitch and freeze for a half a second frequently.   I'm hoping that the rain won't be a problem and that the race will end on time.  A girl can always hope.

Well, I'm off to clean the kitchen.  Later.

I watched the results show for American Idol yesterday.  I'm happy to see that Blake Lewis and Chris Sligh made it through to the next show.  I was also very happy to see that Jordin, Sabrina, and Lakisha made it through as well.  I was kind of hoping that Antonella would get voted off.  I do not like her at all every since she was mean to Baylie during Hollywood week.  There's no way she's making it to the top 12. 

I also watched Grey's Anatomy.  It was a good episode though thoroughly predictable.  I am so behind on watching "The Dresden Files".  I have the episodes. I just haven't gotten around to watching the last few recently.  I had wanted to win tickets so my dad and I could go to the Raleigh Blues Festival.  Alas, I did not win tickets.  However, I did pick my dad up from work and made my homemade lasagna for my parents.  They enjoyed it immensely, especially since they rarely ever eat pasta due to their strict diet.

I checked the mail before getting home last night, and lo and behold, my scanner from Collectorz.com had arrived.  Wheeeeeeeeeee!  I was so excited.  I opened the package and set it all up and then realized that the scanner needs 3 AAA batteries.  Triple A?  I have a lot of AA batteries, but not AAA batteries.  Luckily, my neighborhood is across the street from a Food Lion and a Hardware store.  Of course, I went out and bought some batteries.  The scanner is awesome and easy to use!  I did get thrown for a loop though with some of the books I was scanning.  I was scanning the bar code on the back of the books and some of them would not scan an ISBN # like it should, instead it would scan the bar code #.  Of course, Book Collector couldn't find these books with the Bar code #.  It needs the ISBN #.  So, I thought I would have to manually type these ones in.  Except, later on, I realized that the ones that had this problem had a bar code on the inside of the front cover.  When I scanned that Bar code, the ISBN # would pop up in the program.  Hooray for me!  Of course, then I remembered seeing the cashier at Barnes and Noble scan the inside cover bar code for several of my books every time I check out.  Anyway, I managed to scan in one of my bookshelves containing 261 books.

Now, I just need to scan in my other bookshelf of books.  Then, I can get started on doing all the details for each of my books such as Date of Purchase, Store Purchased in, whether or not I've read the book, Book rating, Reading Date, and etc.  All of this is going to be very time consuming.  I can even write some notes about the book itself as well.  I love that the software will automatically download the cover and summary and other information automatically.  Have I mentioned how much I love this program?  I feel like a librarian every time I use it.  I can even Loan books out with my program that way I can keep track of who has my books. 

Well, I've got some more scanning to do before going to work.  I hope this weekend won't be too eventful, although I do have to deal with a Nascar race on Sunday.  Later.

I will refrain from going into too much detail as to what happened last night at work. First, the analog alarm was going off continuously throughout the entire night. Transmitter took a power hit during network and we were off the air, though for just two minutes on analog and five minutes on our digital channels. Had to turn on the Transmitter Generator. Brother calls me right when I've just counted the news in at 10pm. He was with my cousin trying to find the bus station in northern Durham in order to pick up my cousin's girlfriend. 20 seconds after he calls to ask for directions, he finds the correct street. Meanwhile, M.B. is having a rough night in Satellite. Some dubs, but mainly, just lots and lots of feeds and some editing to do. By 9pm, we both were like, "Is it over yet?" Oh, yeah, had to dump out of our kids programming at 8:30 on the weather channel, because the weather was more important and RAL asked for it to be switched back and etc.

The weather was really crappy yesterday and it's even more crappy today. I had a hard time getting the door open to leave the building last night. The wind was really strong. Weather people are saying that there are going to be 40-50 mph gusts of wind today. Ugh! Our power keeps surging in the apartment. Thank Goodness I have a ups for my computer. It's so getting its money's worth of use right now.

Yesterday evening at work, I decided that I needed a better way to keep track of the many books that I have right now. What I have, how many I have, and which ones I've lent out and who has them? I found this awesome software that does just that. It's called Book Collector.
http://www.collectorz.com/ It's amazing. I can either type in the title and author to find the book (it automatically searches the sites you specify) in order to find the book or you can type in the isbn # of the book and it automatically finds it, downloads all it's information (cover, pages, publication date, title, author and etc). It gives you many options. You can select whether or not you've read the book, when you read it, and you can also rate the book. They do offer a scanner that will scan the isbn # for you if you don't want to type it in. It costs over a hundred bucks, so I'll just type it in for now. I put in about 71 books last night. I still have many more to go. They have a free trial version that will only allow you to put in a 100 books. I already went and bought the software. It doesn't cost very much at all. They send you a license key to unlock the full unlimited version of the free trial software. I can put in an unlimited # of books now. This site also has software for other types of collections as well (music, dvds, comics, games, and etc.) It will even let me export the list in several ways one of which is to my i-pod video. That way I can go to a book store and know exactly if I already have the book or not.

Well, seeing how my guests are sleeping, I think I'll stay in my room and continue to catalog my library of books. I will even put in my manga! Cool, huh? Later.