Still not snowing, a challenge, and more

[kinzel]

Still not snowing ... is anyone getting snow out of this mess? Sharon is reporting a flock of robins at the college campus ...I guess they fled the snowfields of Pennsylvania and Maryland for more comfortable weather in Maine.

Yesterday I found this: who can name the source? No, it does not belong to one of Maine's well-loved Great Striped Northern Ravens.

The length is approx 15.5 inches/ 39 cm.

Meanwhile, I noted earlier in a tweet ( if you twitter, you can follow bechimo ) that at 6 AM this morning ...
6 AM -- Lee & Miller do Space Opera! Amazon says: Space Opera: Mouse and Dragon #29;Fledgling #43: Saltation #89: Dragon Variation #99   ... this deserves a bit of discussion. For one thing three of these books are yet unpublished -- so you can join in if you haven't ordered or pre-ordered, or please, go to your local indie bookstore and make sure they'll have them on publication date.  For another, Amazon has chosen to muddy waters by throwing kindle books among the paper ones, and more, I think among the books those books are some of their special offer (i.e. FREE) kindle books.  And then ...

Really, would you call Rachel Caine's Weather Warden books space opera? Earth Abides? Brave new World? John Birmingham's alternate history thrillers? No? me too -- but they've snuck into Space Opera at Amazon ... sigh. Databases are useful. Accurate databases are *more useful* ...

Have to get the trash out, catch you later!

Comments

Re: Then again

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

I saw a spread-sheet and database based presentation once where the assumptions were cooked on purpose -- so people were allowed to "test" their scenarios and prove to themselves that they couldn't *possibly* lose money investing in the project... sigh. Instead of the database they should probably have been investigating the start-ups administration, who helped teach me the meaning of "burnrate." This was also the demo where 2 of 5 "automated in depth web searches" were actually me querying a multiple search engines (something like dogpile) with my own search terms because neither the presenters nor the audience had any clue how to do searches.