Oh Brother(s)
So my youngest brother, Jeff, is in a band and they call themselves Wifflebat. They've a MySpace page to which they've posted three songs recently recorded on some radio show in Boston. I'm excited for my brother. They plan on posting a song or three every month and sometime next year they'll get themselves into a proper studio to build an album.

My other brother, Sean, who more typically is extremely meditative, has been working on a body of work that is extremely happy—that is, really rocking synth-pop. As far as I know, he hasn't an online repository so I can't link to it. Perhaps I can get permission to post...
Old Volvos
On a slightly less geeky note, I saw this article which reminded me—I've let only a small amount of people know of my recent purchase: a 1967 Volvo 122S AKA the Volvo Amazon AKA my new-old car. It's a four-door sedan, basically what my S60 (AKA my old-new car) was 40 years ago. I don't really have any good pictures of it yet, but I will direct anybody reading to my Links page where you can find an Amazon Gallery link. The car is super-cool, super-fun and really helps me with my daily commute. As much as I enjoy my S60, the day-to-day drive to work was starting to bore me. By alternating weeks with the two cars I'm able to completely switch up the experience. Now it's actually kinda fun.
Amazon Web Services, Part II
So in general, the way the Amazon Web Services work is:
  1. I send a request to Amazon via a constructed URL with all my variables that does some action.
  2. Amazon returns to me and XML response containing the data I'm looking for.

Other bit of pertinent information: There are four types of lists. Ordered by what I think is their creation order.
  1. Wishlists: chances are I already have the product, so why would I want it again?
  2. Bridal Registry: I'm not getting married
  3. Baby Shower: I'm not having a baby
  4. ListMania: The general catch-all type of list--you decide!

Concept is reasonable simple. So it seems to me like what I want to do (and what I mentioned in previous posts), is to build a ListMania list in Amazon to which I add products I recommend. I've created the list, so I'm going through the documentation trying to find out how to get the list information from Amazon for my site. So it seems like what I want to do is first run a ListSearch for a ListMania lists under my email address, then for each returned list, run a ListLookup that will give me all items in that list. Based on the ListLookup results, I can print out the information to my website.

Well guess what: I can't run a ListSearch for ListMania lists. It seems like the only way for me to find my ListMania list is to run an ItemSearch for some product in my list, get all ListMania lists in which the product appears, and then find my ListMania list. It's completely backwards, and completely stupid as far as I can see. The ListMania list type is the only list type on which you cannot run a ListSearch.

Why? Beats the heck out of me. I've inquired. Perhaps I'll get an answer. >:-|
Amazon Web Services
Alright, so I've been working on the Store page here with the intent of embedding hand-selected Amazon.com products into my page. I've my basic example running; if you go to the Store page, you'll presented with a list of 10 design books.

I've found the literature on how to make the store list-oriented rather than search-oriented (I've hard-coded "Books" and "Design" in my example); I just need a list into which I can link. So I go over to Amazon.com and log in with my (new) ryan.a.price@gmail.com account and discover that I can't create a list unless I've actually purchased something from Amazon. 

Who hasn't purchased anything from Amazon? Well, me apparently. It makes sense. I've a brand new account. I understand that they only want real people creating lists rather than some crazy H4X0RBotz. It's just annoying. So I bought the Ruby book Rick recently picked up--I've the RoR sibling to it so I'm confident in its quality. But now it seems I have to wait 24 hours for the order to register before I can build my list, effectively nixing my free coding time. :(

UPDATE: Did I say 24 hours? I meant 3.
About My Personal Side
I first created this site in 2005 in preparation for a freelance career in design. Since then, I've become an owner of Seattle Publishing, effectively killing any free time I might have had to continue taking jobs outside of work. As a result, my site has long since stagnated.

This past week, one of our clients approached us about adding Amazon.com's aStore service to his website. After discovering that Amazon is surprising tight-lipped about dispensing information until you've signed up for a (free) Amazon Associates account, I decided to go ahead and sign myself up. I figured, as test, I could add an aStore to my site as a means pointing out media I'd personally recommend.

As I started to add the store to my site, I realized that my programming and markup weren't as hot as they could be. This weekend I've taken the time to completely retool my website, allowing for an actual personal side to the site. To fill in more on the personal side, I decided to use it as a testing grounds for all these new Web 2.0 services. I set up this journal through Blogger and worked at utilizing my Flickr account for my photo galleries. It still needs some work (e.g., tall pictures get smushed), but it's a good first pass.

Anyway, I haven't written a journal in years, so bear with me while I try to get back on the bandwagon.