Alas, we had a fairly busy weekend, so the writing I was planning on didn't eventuate. I've also been keeping myself occupied with various distractions :)

We went out to dinner at Red Lobster on Saturday night, followed by a trip to Barnes and Noble where we picked up copies of Weird U.S., and That's Deductible. After that we went clothes shopping, and to the sports store for two pairs of 10lb weights. I'm lifting heavier weights now, so I've been having to remove some from the leg lift part of the bench to add to the barbell. I won't have to worry about that again for a few months at least.

On Sunday we did tonnes of yard work, mowing the front and back lawns and pulling out as many weeds around the edges as we could stand. The yard looks rather neat now, or at least it will until the week after next when we get a chance to tend to it. I'm sure the lawn will shoot up another few inches while we're at Wiscon :)

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I was looking at all the books on shelves around here on Sunday night, and realized it's almost getting to the point where I've forgotten about some of the books I've bought! So I went hunting around online for trial versions of book collection software, since I couldn't see myself hand-entering all the details into an Access database (for several hundred books, too). I tried several, eventually coming across a nifty program called Readerware. It did everything I was expecting, plus it allowed me to automatically populate the database with about 100 books I've bought from Amazon over the past few years! That feature alone saved me a lot of time. In addition, there's no need to enter in the details manually--for most books you just need to enter the ISBN, and it scrapes the info together from various sites on the web (including cover art). I was so enamored with the program that I ordered the cdrom bundle of Readerware, along with the ReaderwareAW and ReaderwareVW applications for cataloguing CDs and DVDs, respectively. The CD version also comes with a bar code reader, so that ought to save me even more time once it arrives.

Also on the subject, some stuff I ordered online last week arrived over the past few days, including three SF/F art books (Spectrum 9, 10, and 11), and a signed, first-edition copy of Michael Bishop's The Secret Ascension (a book inspired by Philip K. Dick's work). I'm looking forward to getting stuck into that lot :)

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Last night I was disappointed to find my critique group's website down, so I immediately started thinking about alternatives to get us up and running again. I ended up ordering a hosting plan from where I have my existing domains (at GoDaddy), which included a decent amount of disk space and bandwidth, and also allowed for installation of phpbb, among other things. I was surprised to find how affordable web hosting is these days. While I was there, I took advantage of their domain name sale and snapped up a domain name for the critique group for a mere $3.99 for the first year (the 2nd year is their usual rate).

It looks like the whole site might've been wiped out, but we should be able to start from scratch once the existing host is setup again. If that doesn't work out, at least now we have a backup we could switch to. I've been thinking about attaching web hosting to one of my domains for awhile now, so I'll still be able to have a play with it even if the group sticks with the old host. It should be fun :)

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Only two days to Wiscon! We'll be spending Friday having a good look around at The House on the Rock, before driving into Madison for the convention. We're hoping the weather is a little better this year, but according to the latest forecast it looks like rain all weekend. Drat! We'll just need to make sure we keep ourselves busy indoors with plenty of panels and visits to the dealer's room ;)

If I don't get a chance to post another entry before then, I'll see you there! And if you can't make it, I'm sure I'll put together some sort of report when I get back. Just be sure to register for Wiscon next year ;)