I've just finished reading "The Bourne Identity" by Robert Ludlum. I've seen the movie which pro ports to be based on this book several times and found very little similarity. I guess both the book and the movie center around an assassin with amnesia and a girl, but little else seems familiar. The book is engaging but a little mindless.

Which, I guess, makes it a good counterpoint for Dune, which I'm still reading. What I'm finding most interesting about Dune is Frank Herbert's imagining of what it might be like to be able to see the future...to be so aware of every single little detail and how they interact that one can infer how those interactions will combine to create future possibilities, kind of like the butterfly effect. The question here is what role does free will play?

Today I wanted to print out the entire Volume Shadow Copy topic from MSDN. With a web-browser alone this would be a lot of work. Luckily I found that MSDN documents are exposed by a web service. After finding the web service I was thinking to write up a little utility to retrieve each page and print it to a pdf document but then I found this nifty open source utility which allows you to easily export MSDN documentation to a help (chm) file. The help file in turn can be printed.

While looking for the MSDN web service, I happened upon the ProgrammableWeb web site. This web site has a large collection of links to various web services. It's amazing what's out there.