I stopped using OpenDB media database for a few reasons, the chief ones being that it is ugly and barely usable. In its place I’m now using Listal to keep track of my books and my DVDs. Listal is a pretty great site, immature as it is. It does its basic job — tracking and sharing your collections — really well, and there are some neat features like tagging and importing data from Amazon. Sometimes, though, it can be awkward to use and you wonder to yourself why it doesn’t do something in a more friendly or intuitive way. I believe that will change in time as they sort things out over there, continue to add new features, and get more feedback from demanding users such as myself. Even now, though, I highly recommend the site.

One cool feature is that you get your very own “sharing” URL for your collection. So, here’s mine:

• My books and DVDs on Listal

I’ve changed the link on the right-hand sidebar to reflect this. Also, for now I’ve taken down the link to my BlogLines OPML file. That’s because I recently stopped using BlogLines in favor of NewsAlloy. Unfortunately, NewsAlloy doesn’t have an OPML export yet, but as soon as they do I will post the link. That way, people can use the file as an OPML reading list once their reader supports it.

For the past few days I’ve been working on a small project to document the trip I took to Ireland a few years ago. Ever since the trip I’ve had a ton of pictures sitting on my computer waiting to be categorized, tagged, and captioned. Along with those I had the trip itinerary that I wanted to cross-reference with those pictures and a few comments of my own. Well, I finally got up the motivation to do it and you can now see the results on the following pages:

You can also get there any time by clicking the “Ireland Trip 2003″ link on the sidebar.

I’ve recently posted a few more photo galleries to the site:

This past weekend Sarah and I went down to New York City to watch the US Open men’s semi finals and women’s final. It was the first time I’ve ever been to a professional tennis match, and all I can say is WOW. The atmosphere was fantastic, the weather was beautiful, and these players are good. I mean, they are not of this planet. I will definitely be going to every tennis match that I can possibly attend. I’ve posted a photo gallery from the trip that includes some pictures from the Open. Here’s the view from where we sat. We were actually not as far away as the picture makes us look.

We also fell into some weird luck on the trip. Turns out our hotel was directly across the street from Ground Zero and our room was on the 18th floor directly overlooking the site. Kind of spooky considering we were there on September 11th. Here’s a four picture panoramic I took from our hotel room. You can see all the people milling about as the city held various memorial services for the victims.

You can get the full size versions of both panoramics in the picture galleries.

Speaking of picture galleries, I’ve recently added a new feature to them called Fotobuzz, which is a little Flash applet that allows people to comment on pictures the way it works on Flickr. Specifically, it will let you draw little boxes on the picture preview and then attach comments to the boxes. You can still get the normal sized version of each picture by clicking the link directly about the Fotobuzz window. Try it, you’ll like it!