I Loves Me Some Books

I'm right in to some Neil Gaiman at the moment. Having bought Anansi Boys for a pound in Hay-on-Wye I just had to grab Fragile Things at the local Waterstones, which in turn drove me to find a copy of American Gods -- which I did at a tiny second hand book store in Notting Hill while on my way to buy cake.

Of course, everyone in the know has assured me that American Gods pales in comparison to his masterpiece, The Sandman. So, never one to go half way when I could instead go completely over the top instead, I've just purchased this baby from Amazon.

Oh yes, that's an over sized, leather bound, slip cased, re-coloured, special edition of the first quarter of the Sandman graphic novels all in one enormous tome. The good news? It looks spectacular on my shelf. The bad news? It's book 1 of 4. There's some slight guilt associated with the fact the this comes mere months after I indulged on US firsts of the entire Dark Tower series.


I fear my natural proclivities as an obsessive collector may be coming to the fore. I'm really not sure how I'm supposed to ship all this back to Perth, but damn it, I'll find a way. My current best option is wrapping them all in a great deal of bubble-wrap and constructing some sort of raft…

Save a Few Bucks on Petrol

You might already know that FuelWatch (the WA Department of Consumer and Employment Protection no less) publishes petrol prices for every petrol station in WA every day. If you *do* know this, you've probably noticed

• How crap their website is (particularly the 'map'), and
• How useless the paper and TV news bulletin FuelWatch alerts are (cheapest northern suburbs price? I care about this why? I'm driving in to Hay Street or up to Currumbine to save a couple cents a litre? Ah, no.).

The data's good, it just needs to be displayed in a more useful way. Ergo, for all your thrifty petrol buying needs:

The WA Petrol Price Mapplet (for Google Maps)
(Here's a post on how to set up and use the mapplet)

and

The WA Petrol Price Mashup

Find the cheapest petrol in the suburbs you normally fill up in. 'Cause nothing's more annoying than paying 133 a litre when the servo up the street is selling it for 119.

*If you're interested in the technology, check out these posts on the making of the Mapplet and the Mashup.