guys like dolls

I’m so very excited.

Last week I purchased a puzzle, and not just any puzzle, but The World’s Largest Puzzle! (that’s commercially available) It’s called Life, the Greatest Puzzle (ha) and is 24,000 pieces. To put that in some context, the puzzle is 14 feet by 5 feet – it will barely fit inside our house!

It comes in 4 separate bags so you can do the puzzle one quarter at a time, but I’m strong, and will be mixing them all up from the beginning. Soon (well in approximately 300 puzzling hours depending on how good I am) you will know someone who has completed the most fantastically ultimate puzzle of all time! …until they come out with another one that is.

Wish me luck!

Awhile ago I volunteered to technically edit a book about building OpenSocial apps. I just received my copy in the mail and apparently my cheesy quote has been selected for the back cover:

The authors did a great job covering the various ins and outs of OpenSocial, and especially the specific MySpace quirks. If you are a new social networking application developer or even someone who just wants to write better OpenSocial Apps, then this book has what you are looking for.
–Cassandra Doll, Software Engineer, Google

Oh my. You can even check it out on Amazon.

I’ve been using Banshee for my music listening needs the past few months after using iTunes for a very, very long time. I never got around to importing my iTunes playlist, mainly because there weren’t any good solutions when I first looked into it a few months ago. This weekend I finally imported all of my iTunes info (play counts, playlists, ratings) using a great script found here.

However, it didn’t work for me right off the bat. For some reason, the file size in my iTunes library didn’t match the file size reported by Banshee. Also, the database format appears to have changed slightly since the script was originally written. Here is a copy of the modified script, which just has two changed lines of code. Hopefully this is helpful to somebody and be sure to thank the author of the original script if it is!

You can read about Ameet wrestling with monkeys, flesh-eating ants and two-ply toilet paper at his blog. Here’s a photo of him from cleaner days picking oranges at our place.