i must not buy any more books.
there's no one word for that monstrous sequence of events in which a) you buy something and subsequently b) find it selling at a much lower price elsewhere. the amount of time elapsing between (a) and (b) is inversely proportional to the amount of RAGE INCURRED ARGH (i.e. if you find out a year later, you can shrug it off, but if you find out in the very next shop you walk into, your spleen will implode).
this is bad enough when it happens for clothing and groceries, but when it happens for BOOKS, my agony knows no limits. this is why I am positively dissolving with happiness from discovering booksprice.com, which is a sort of froogle, but exclusively for books. I just love metadata -- web 2.0 is going to be all about smart filtering and organizing the seething chaos the internet is decentralizing into -- and booksprice is totally on the right track. perfect knowledge. slick, unintrusive design. literary quotes while you wait. it even has shipping prices.
the hotness is killing me. must. buy. books. now. asdf;lkj
in other news, the next update might well come from prague, where I'll be for the next few days.