MoochStand Project

My friend Teresa had a terrific idea: what if there were a BookMooch table at local book fairs, festivals, and other events? That would be a great way to get people interested in mooching, as well as being pro-book and pro-reading.

All across the world, there are events like:

1) book sales by libraries, hospitals, churches and charities

2) festivals, especially in the summer

3) county fairs, and other events

We decided to give it a try at a local town festival in El Cerrito (the dancer on stilts is from that festival).

Tons and tons of people were interested, and talked to us at the festival. And who knew there were so many librarians in the world?

So… this seems like a good idea, and I’d like to invite other moochers to take part.

Teresa thought that a “MoochStand Kit” would help people out, so if you’re interested in having a table at some event local to you, email Teresa and mooch the MoochStand Kit.

Also, since Teresa has been attending these fairs and doing the booth herself, she’s a treasure-trove of information, and absolutely happy to chat with anyone who is interested in this idea. At some of these fairs, there is a modest fee (I think El Cerrito was something like $40) to have a table, and I’m happy to pay that to help promote mooching.

BM hard drive upgrade

BookMooch switched over to using an all-memory-based drive today, instead of the usual “hard drive”

Initial results look very promising….

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I’ll be taking BookMooch down wednesday night, from 4:30pm (Pacific time) onwards.

I’ll be installing a new server-class flash drive drive from Mtron.

I’m doing this, because the nightly tasks slow down each night that BookMooch is up, beginning at about 90 minutes, and after 3 weeks, taking 8 hours. A restart solves that problem. I’m curious to see if a flash drive solves that problem. And even if it doesn’t fix that problem, it should help BM reboot faster, since currently it takes about 40 minutes to restart BookMooch, loading 20GB of data into memory.

Currently, the hard drive only transfers about 5mb/second, even though it should be able to do 50mb/second. I *think* this is due to random-access drive seeks (ie, the data is all over the hard disk, so the drive head has to move a lot), and if so, a flash drive should speed that up hugely.

On wednesday, I’ll only be installing the drive into the machine, I won’t be switching BM to using it. That, I’ll probably do over the weekend.

-john

Chrysalis School of Madagascar

BookMooch user Kirsten, writing to me on behalf of the Chrysalis School of Madagascar (a BookMooch charity), had this to day:

I just wanted to pass on some praise from the director of the Chrysalis School in Madagascar. She told me today that bookmooch is one of the best things that has ever happened to her! The school has been able to collect more than 100 books already from bookmooch users, and we’re on our way to 200. For a library that started out with under 20 books, this is a huge improvement. Thanks again for your support, and for the great site!

Thanks to everyone who has given this charity their points. They are now fully funded with enough points to get the books they need.

You can read more about them at the Chrysalis web site.

If you would like to help out with this sort of charity, please consider giving some of your BookMooch points to one of the charitable funds I run. That’s how I initially help these charitable causes get started, and fund them with enough BookMooch points to get the points they need.