Towse: views from the hill

Abebooks.com news

(Victoria, BC – November 7, 2005) Abebooks.com, the world’s largest online marketplace for new and used books, has acquired BookFinder.com – the leading price comparison shopping service dedicated to books.

Berkeley-based BookFinder.com and its staff will join the Abebooks family but operate independently, remain unchanged and continue to be located in California. BookFinder.com will receive immediate access to Abebooks’ resources to fuel growth.

[...]

Abebooks is great.

This acquisition of BookFinder should have interesting results, eventually.

(“BookFinder.com and its staff will … remain unchanged” … really?)

[Hattip to W. Frederick Zimmerman at What’s New for Book-Lovers]

A note on Bogger Blog

Blogger Status
Saturday, November 05, 2005

One of the Blogger databases is down that causes some blogs to be unaccessible and general slowness on the site. We are working on resolving the problem and apologize for the inconvenience.

Maybe if it read, “One of the Blogger databases is down. That causes some blogs to be unaccessible…” ??

I read this note as saying one of the databases that causes some blogs to be unaccessible is down. Well, if you know one of the databases does that, why don’t you just replace it?

Next up: unaccessible or inaccessible?

“Parrots have flown the coop,” the headline in today’s Chron said. “After cypress felled, colorful birds are roosting on wires,” it continued.

Cecilia M. Vega, Chronicle Staff Writer, wrote,

If a sequel is made about the famous wild parrots of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, there’s a chance it may not have a happy ending.

Since one of their favorite trees was chopped down Monday, and two others may also share the same destiny, the roosting patterns of those feathered stars of a best-selling book and acclaimed documentary have been disrupted, and life just hasn’t been the same.

[...]

All of which is a bunch of horse hooey, of course.

When the huge cypress came down last fall, the parrots stayed away for a while and then resumed flocking to the remaining cypresses when they weren’t flocking to other trees on the Hill.

This time? I wasn’t home during the day yesterday to check out where they were hanging (they go home somewhere — the Presidio, I think — to tuck in every afternoon), but parrots roosting on wires is not news. They roost on wires every day. Today? Well, I just heard them squawking outside and went to see where these poor psychologically-damaged birds were gathering, and spotted them …

… in the remaining cypresses!

They’re fine and not permanently psychologically damaged by it all after all.

Who could’ve guessed?!??

Daniel Lazar got a nice mention over at galleycat today.

galleycat said It’s easy to see why [he got promoted], as well as why he’s continually one of the most clicked-on agents over at Publishers Marketplace. I, of course, immediately scurried over Publishers Marketplace to read said listing.

After all the who-I-am and what-I’ve-represented, Lazar writes:

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
I am actively seeking new clients.
** Queries by regular mail or e-mail are fine. Include 3 – 5 sample pages (the first pages, not pages 45-50).
** If you’re emailing: a) NO ATTACHMENTS; b) if you copy me and every other agent in the industry, save us the time and reject yourself.
** For regular mail, please include a SASE.
** Also, no need to send your materials double sealed in bubble wrap. It’s paper, not anthrax.
** My response time is 1 minute to several weeks.
I look forward to hearing from you.

I like this guy’s attitude.

Paula tagged me with the 23rd-post-5th-sentence meme.

I rarely do the tagging/meme biz. Seems akin to chain letters.

However, just this once …

The fifth sentence of the twenty-third post ever on this blog:

Monday, February 25, 2002

I sent a note John Paczkowski at the Merc to find a link to the 9-11 blog that was also referenced in the article. John sez they’re moving the archival stuff over to the new Web location and it should be available in a few days. (sorry! one sentence too many!)

In those days I oft times used the blog to reference the URLs I was using in my column and to make some use of the (usually huge) batch of URLs that didn’t make the cut. In this case, between the time I’d submitted the February 2002 column and it had come out in print, several URLs had changed and I was updating the info.

The February 2002 column began thusly,

Blogs
Indecent exposures and passions on the Web … by Sal Towse

Weblogs (aka “blogs,” to spare fast talkers and slow typers that extra syllable) are Web-based collections of short snippets of content arranged in reverse chronological order. Sometimes they’re stand-alone ‘zine-like collections of articles by multiple authors or collections of annotated links giving in-depth coverage of a given subject. Whether the product of an individual or a group, whether standalone or chronological, they chronicle deep interests and passions.

Some claim that although WWW News had hypertext links to other WWW sites it wasn’t really a blog. They point to Mosaic’s What’s New page, which burst on the scene the following year and listed all the cool new sites that were popping up like California mushrooms after a November rain.

The thing I really liked about that column was the way it almost wrote itself.

Hey. THAT must be the reason why …

Web logs (aka “blogs” to spare all us fast talkers and slow typers that extra syllable) have been around since Tim Berners-Lee was a pup.

Was WWW News an online newsletter or blog? Hard to say, but because Tim BL was keeping it, the bloggers tend to point to his work as the granddaddy of blogging.

Was neither the first time nor the last that I’d taken something I was rambling on about on Usenet and turned it into something that paid.

[Yes, I am way behind with uploading all my Computer Bits columns and articles to towse.com — now that the Computer Bits Web site archive is no more. Two down, a few score or more to go.]

Article in today’s Chron.

A major tree was down by the end of yesterday. We see more of Piers 27-29 than we used to. Not something I’m happy with. Two smaller trees remain for now while the neighbors try to sort things out with the owner. The neighbors who object to the tree removal, knowing that it’s perfectly legal, are media savvy enough to call in the journalists and try to raise a public hue and cry.

Without the trees, the birds could end up perched on some other limbs on Telegraph Hill, but not even Bittner knows exactly what would happen.

“I can’t predict it,” he said.

The birds would probably perch on the trees they perch on when they aren’t perching on the cypresses. Unfortunately for Bittner, who loves the parrots, those trees aren’t just outside his door.

My views on the disagreement are influenced by an uproar in Carmel, CA, some years back. A resident went through all sorts of grief to get permission to remove a Monterey pine that was growing too close to his house and forceably lifting the roof off the walls. The house predated the tree, but the tree huggers were out in force arguing that the tree should have precedence.

In the neighborhood case, the property owner has valid concerns about liability should one of the aging cypresses come down on a neighbor’s house … or a neighbor. Me? I like the green between me and the piers, but I don’t think the parrots are a compelling argument to force the owner to keep the trees. The parrots hang out elsewhere, all over the hill and beyond. If these trees go, there are plenty of trees, some even on public property and subject to current tree rules, that they will flock to instead.

Solomon, where are you?