Busy Busy Busy

That's what it has been for me this past week. To kick off my week, I had a fantastic haircut and now I am feeling so much better without long trains behind my ears and on my neck. I guess the only time that I deliberately wanted to keep my hair long was back in 1993 - pre-enlistment times. Ya know... would you?

Anyway, I have been busy trying to grapple with some new stuff, geeky stuff. Ya, and I had fun. So here's a gist of what I have been toying around with the whole week:

• Longwell - a software written by the good people at MIT for browsing RDF data.
  
• Freebase - a collaborative effort to compile knowledge similar to Wikipedia, but with greater structure.
  
• Freebase-suggest - is an AJAX library for auto-completion using the Freebase dataset.
  

And for this weekend, I need to work on a PHP-based search engine for an intranet portal. Remnants of a past project that urgently needs some upgrade. So that will occupy my weekends. And yes, I need to work on my website too. I spent some lunch time today brushing up on my CSS, at the same time, working out a skeletal view of my website. And I should think it will be ready in a few weeks time. It better!

Train rides have been rather fruitful for me this past week. Last Friday, I picked up two books from Chapters: Dangerous Ground and First Team: Fires of War. Both authored by Larry Bond. I have a few other novels published by him, and I really enjoyed reading them. I guess I really like fictitious full-blown war scenarios such as Red Phoenix and Vortex. Larry also co-authored Red Storm Rising with Tom Clancy. If I remember correctly, I read this novel over 3 times. The other books that I have are Cauldron, Day of Wrath and The Enemy Within. Only when composing this post did I find out that Larry has his own series called "First Team". Well it seems I bought the 3rd part of the series and might have to source the other 2 and the 4th to be published soon. If you have read Red Storm Rising and you haven't read Larry's books, then I'd suggest that you start. ;)