All the Amazon.com ads that appear throughout this site

Throughout this site are Amazon.com product ads that were hand chosen to be for favorite things I own and can recommend or that I have enough familiarity with to wish I owned and also recommend. The ads give the site some personality and add color to web pages that would have very little without them. 

This page, which takes a minute or two to load at dialup speed, is like the old "reader service" cards in computer magazines. It displays all the Amazon ads in one place, partly for anyone who wonders what the total ad inventory here is, why the ads were chosen, and why it is such an odd assortment. Commentary is being added as time permits.

The ads at the bottom of the page show things "recommended by Amazon" based on topic, or the content of this site, or what people have looked at or purchased after going to Amazon from here, or what are currently best selling items at Amazon.

As you can imagine, this isn't a heavily trafficked page, so I'm also using it to organize, discover if items have become unavailable, and verify that all the code is valid HTML that can be used on other pages without invalidating them. Welcome to the site's "back room", sort of.

If an ad looks interesting:

• Clicking the Image or the item's Title goes to the Amazon product description and customer reviews page. The reviews often are insightful and interesting, better than my short attempts at descriptions below.
   

• Clicking on the Best Price line goes to a list of New and Used copies for sale by non-Amazon sellers through Amazon's interface.
   

• Clicking on Buy from Amazon.com adds the item to your Amazon shopping cart immediately. I imagine that is most often done by mistake, which is how I did it. It is easily removed from your cart.
   

• Most of the books will also be available at your public library, where they're free. I recommend any of the items I selected, regardless of where you get them.

The book African Queen is better than the movie.		Good choice for 2 CDs of Jefferson Airplane music.
	Good choice for 1 CD of their music.	Albert King 1960's era classic.	The Albert King album I listen to most often.
			Before buying a product, I look at Amazon.com customer reviews to see what other people are saying about it.
		The Blues Don't Change was originally released as The Pinch. It has Stax / Memphis Horns sound like I Wanna Get Funky. Explores more lyrical song melodies, funkier rhythms. The Albert King album I listen to 2nd most often for enjoyment, as opposed to for study.
Amazon.com customer reviews of music CDs are mostly posted by fans and tend to be positive, but they are still useful.
	Annapurna has gripping adventure, triumph, tragedy.
The ARRL Handbook is an encyclopedic reference for analog and digital electronics.
	Like the original Star Trek, the improbable premise of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is only a backdrop for character development and human drama that is done well. This season had the best shows, especially the bizarre and hilarious musical episode.	Spectacularly energetic, inspired, and beautiful performance by Szeryng, Dorati, London Symphony Orchestra of the Brahms Violin Concerto. Won a Grand Prix du Disque in its day.	Yes, I like this Britney Spears CD. None of her others are represented here.
This ancient book, The Elements of Programming Style, still has good and relevant stylistic advice for developing good habits. A bit pricey for that purpose. Maybe not, though. I tend to forget that what is "obvious" to someone who's been programming for years isn't obvious to someone just starting.		The C Programming Language is also good and relevant, but pricey for a small book. It is not, and has never been, a good way to start learning C.
	Coupling is tied with Thin Blue Line as my favorite TV sitcom ever. American sitcoms tend to be collections of sometimes sorta-funny one-liners. British comedies start with a bizarre premise and progressively build on it throughout the show to a laugh-till-your-sides-hurt climax.	Disraeli Gears is my favorite Cream album.	I especially like the Only In My Dreams extended club mix of this Debbie Gibson album.
Dharma & Greg is among my favorite American sitcoms, this season has the most of my favorite episodes.
	I'm not likely to abandon FrontPage anytime soon, but if I do, Dreamweaver is currently my second choice.	Never forget the possibility of upgrade pricing on software.
		My favorite Bob Dylan whole-album. Great laid-back songs, piano and singing.	Love this album. It's the only Emerson, Lake & Palmer one I like.
Expression Web is the official upgrade path from FrontPage, which it replaces. Amazon customer reviews of Expression Web are very positive.	Expression Web is my first choice if I stop using FrontPage, although that's not likely anytime soon.	It would be wonderful to have the time and talent at composition that would justify the purchase of Finale. A download trial version is available from FinaleMusic.
	Getting Ready is a terrific high energy Freddie King album with Leon Russell on piano.		I saw Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders several times at the Keystone Berkeley. The album brings back memories.
Originally released as a vinyl double-album, it's too bad they split it up.
Fire by George R. Stewart is an exciting story about the start and spread of a forest fire.		The most valuable part of Gestalt Therapy by Fritz Perls is its interesting and useful exercises in self-discovery, which are presented in the context of a readable and engaging discussion of the principles of Gestalt Psychology.	Gestalt Therapy Verbatim presents transcripts of group therapy sessions conducted by Fritz Perls. Shows how the method leads to insights.
Blues For Allah may be the Grateful Dead's most technically ambitious and weirdly creative album. At the time, I would not have expected it to be among the ones I listen to most often today.	The Grateful Dead Live blue double-album has energetic dance songs and long jams from their early years. Feel good music.
			Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads has  memorable songs (I remember them all the time), effectively played and sung.
Axis: Bold As Love is my favorite Hendrix album. I appreciate Hendrix more for songs such as these than for his guitar playing, which wasn't really "revolutionary". He did have influences. He did not land on Earth in a spaceship from Mars, a hypothesis I heard enthusiastically "explained" by someone at a party in 1970.
		Herbie Mann's Memphis Underground: I particularly like Battle Hymn of the Republic.
		What? You never heard this? You must be young! (Iron Butterfly In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida)
High energy Carnegie Hall performances of some of It's A Beautiful Day's best songs.		It's A Beautiful Day: the most underappreciated group of the San Francisco Big Three (with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane), it's a shame they are only remembered for White Bird. With a classical background, their songs have a more carefully crafted structure than those of most bands, especially of that era.	A hypothesis of how people developed consciousness. The book is more remarkable for its writing style and how compellingly the case is built, drawing on diverse evidence including Greek myths, than for whether the hypothesis is correct, which I suspect it is not. If chimpanzees and gorillas are conscious in the same sense that humans are, which appears likely, it is not believable that humans only became conscious 2000 years ago.
Jethro Tull This Was: Still a favorite after all these years.	J. J. Cale's Naturally was the album that inspired me to take up guitar. Effective style of sparse notes with careful intonation.
Back in the day, Lee Michaels was held in low regard by some as a three chord one hit wonder. Check the price on this album! Who's laughing now? I was one of the early detractors, but really enjoy this album today. It is not great in its entirety, but enough of it is.		How To Lie With Statistics tells how to beware of statistical tricks that marketers use to convince you of things that are not true.
		Marguerite De La Roque: A Story of Survival, by Elizabeth Boyer is the exciting true story of a woman who was left to die on a Canadian island in the 1700's. After her husband and baby died, she survived alone in the wilderness for two years, was rescued, and returned to France. It's a mystery to me why this book has never been made into a movie.
			The Mouse That Roared is the funniest book I ever read. The two sequels are also good, clever but not as hilarious.
	Fast and quiet hard drive, Western Digital 320GB Caviar.
A Night To Remember reconstructs with gripping realism the story of the sinking of the Titanic. Unlike the movie, it is not a sappy love tale about imaginary characters.
My appreciation and enjoyment of the music of Otis Rush has endured even better than it has for Albert King. One of the greats. The songs I like appear to be ones that critics pan. I don't mind, and don't care.
		The Piglet Files is another very funny British sitcom that stands repeated viewings.
			I like the songs and I like the mood on Their Satanic Majesties Request. I still play it from start to finish a couple times a year. I haven't listened to Sgt. Pepper in decades. In the Beatles vs. Rolling Stones war, there's no question which side I was on.
			I like Saturday Night Fever, and disco, better now than I did then, even if the Bee Gees do sound like Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
			James Clavell's Shogun is an exciting adventure story. Tai-Pan is pretty good, too.
The early She Spies shows had a lot of humor, which is what appealed to me.	Sibelius is in 2nd place behind Finale on my list of notation software, but Sibelius is incredibly powerful, too, and it has some display features that Finale doesn't.	Sierra North is a reference for planning hikes in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains in California.	Sierra South is a reference for planning hikes in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains in California.
Midnight Son: Son Seals plays high energy electric blues guitar. Like Albert King, he has trademark licks that you can't mistake once you've heard them.	The Soul of a New Machine is a remarkably suspenseful adventure, considering that it's about the race to design a new computer system.		Statistical Reasoning in Psychology & Education (Edward W. Minium) is the best, most readable book to learn statistics. My copy is 30 years old. It's what I refer to when I forget something.
I love Swiss Movement, and am not even a jazz fan.	The Thin Blue Line is still hilarious after multiple viewings. Another British sitcom where the show taken as a whole is a long, building, joke with a punch line at the end. American sitcoms treat their viewers as though they have the attention span of a gnat, can't hold a thought for more than a few seconds, and now I can't remember what I was going to say.
This Naxos CD is a very good recording of my favorite musical work of all time (Vivaldi's Gloria RV589) and another (Beatus Vir) that I'd never heard before and like nearly as much. If I were going to a desert island with only one CD, this is the one I'd take. I'd want quite a few more, though, and preferably electricity, too.	When I again have the time to do a lot of C++ programming and the Express edition no longer meets my needs, I'll buy Microsoft Visual Studio without hesitation. This is great, and fun.	Upgrade pricing is always great if you can meet the criteria for it.	A general introduction to Complexity that follows the careers and discoveries of its early researchers and founders of the Santa Fe Institute.
Winesburg, Ohio is a highly engaging short literary work about idiosyncratic people living in a small town.	Zen koans and stories for contemplation that has been around for decades. For reading about zen, look for books by D. T. Suzuki.	Amazon selects the items displayed here based on page or site content.

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Copyright ©2010 Steven Whitney. Last modified Fri 10/22/2010 05:09:12 -0700.