• Wolfwalk (NC State): This one’s even better on your iPhone. It’s a georeferenced history of the N.C. State campus that also uses your phone’s GPS capabilities to provide a guided walking tour. It’s just cool.
• This is just one of those articles that makes me want to contact the author and offer to volunteer my labor just for a chance to play with  this collection. It makes me all giddy and warm just thinking about it.
• And this one, via Tame the Web, is just something I could have used earlier this week.

A great thing about having lots of credit at the local used book emporium is that you sometimes take a chance on a  book you might not have grabbed if you’d had to pay cash for it. This one is a good example that I picked up last night. Apparently, it even comes with its own website (one that really annoyingly tries to resize your browser window when you launch it).

Interestingly enough, I was reading coverage last year about the reopening of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Idlewild Kennedy and have really been itching to see it, even if the renovation was less than desirable, and also involved the demolition of an important part of the structure.

For example, last week I finally bought a copy of a long out of print book by Victor Gruen that I’d been wanting for quite some time. I’d never seen a decent used copy for less than forty or fifty bucks, but this one Amazon seller had one for about twenty. It had an intact dust cover, but the seller noted somewhat apologetically that there was writing inside the front cover from when someone had given the book as a a gift. I think that may be part of why it was priced so low.

As I looked at the book yesterday,  I noticed that the signature looked an awful lot like the name of the author, and that the inscription looked an awful lot like something an author would have written. After a quick Google search or two to verify the signature, I realized that I did in fact have a book signed by one of my favorite commercial architects of the 1950s (the designer of America’s first enclosed shopping mall, among other projects) and at a nice bargain price.

Excessive? You be the judge. I have too much reading to do. I have to admit that it disturbs me to find that these items are still in the library’s online catalogue, even though they are very much in my house and likely to stay there.

Speaking of libraries (which I do a lot of lately), I start work tomorrow as a volunteer on a digitization project at the Greensboro Public Library. I’ll be scanning and cataloguing newspaper microfilm on the Greensboro sit-ins and other civil rights era stories. Should be interesting, and it will make nice resume fodder as well.

There are still lots of tags to enter. And alas, Mark and I between us have over 150 titles without ISBNs, all of which will have to be entered manually rather than imported from our own book database.

Why, yes. Of course we have our own book database. Don’t you?