There was a liquidation book sale over at the Lincholn Heights mall. For $20, they let you fill up a plastic bag with as many books as you could fit in one bag. For $40, they’d let you fill a box. We headed over a little late, but I still managed to make some great finds. It was a lot of scanning the areas for titles I recognized - some are a little dated, but most of the principles remain relevant. I picked up:

• Bricks to Clicks, Ed McMahon
• Creative Strategy in Direct Marketing
• The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, Douglas Atkin
• The Value Profit Chain, James L. Heskit et al.
• The Cluetrain Manifesto, Rick Levine, Chirtopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

Now I just need to find the time to read them.

It’s still unofficial (Donncha hasn’t posted an announcement yet) but Wordpress MU 1.0 has been released. So far, I’ve noticed a marked increase in stability, less annoying bugs, and some snazzy new CSS and UI improvements.

If you’re looking to launch your own multi-blog platform, make sure to take a look at Wordpress MU.

David Peraulty was looking for someone to take over his OttawaBloggers.com site after his recent move to London. I suppose it is hard to be an Ottawa Blogger when you’re living in London. In any case, I offered to take the site over, and almost have everything running smoothly in such a way that allows me to upgrade and do what I’d like to do with it. There still seem to be a couple performance issues, so hopefully I can figure those out soon enough. Wordpress MU has come a long way, but its still far from bug-free.

An interesting followup to my post on the electricity pricing API, Washington-based GridPoint just announced $21M backing from Goldman Sachs for their energy storage appliances - devices that draw and store electricity during off-peak hours for use during peak hours. The VentureWire article talks about how Gridpoint is changing their focus from consumer devices to working directly with the utilities allowing the utilities to draw from the households’ stored capacity - up to 500 megawatts from 100,000 households.

The focus could easily be shifted back to savings for the consumer by integrating a Gridpoint device with the ‘current rate’ API allowing the Gridpoint device to store electricity during off-peak hours and kicking in either during peak hours (saving the consumer money) or during critical peaks. The downside to this approach, of course, is that consumer behaviour isn’t affected as there’s no incentive to conserve electricity during peak hours unless they go over over their Gridpoint device’s capacity.

I’m sure there must be some technical issue with this thought, but I was thinking these GridPoint devices could be outfitted with some form of input whereby they could also be used to charge the device by other means (windmills on farms, solar, whatnot) which could then be drawn upon by the utility as it would be under high loads but rather than being charged entirely by the grid, it could draw upon offgrid power, crediting the consumer for their contribution.