Are you ready for some Potter mania? Scholastic just announced an astounding, astonishing, astronomical, and every other “ast” word you can think of, 12 MILLION COPY FIRST PRINTING for the new Harry Potter book. With a cover price of $34.99, this means that the first printing alone is greater than the GDP of 13 countries (yes, I did the math). Hey Tonga, better get cracking on that YA novel you’ve been putting off writing.

Nathan Bransford: This Week in Publishing

I have nothing to add - I just felt the "Hey Tonga" line was too funny to not share.

technorati tags:NathanBransford, HarryPotter, publishing

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So not too long ago I was browsing a bookstore and flipping through the computer books section. Of course it had a varied selection of O'Reilly books - the ones with the woodcut animal drawings on the covers. These are classics for computer nerds - you can expect a certain level of quality from such a book. And then I noticed with a fair amount of disgust a new line called "Head First" books that are some sort of stylistic cross between the "Dummies" design and some marketing droid's impression of what slacker Starbucks consumers look like. And I was even sadder to realize that these are also O'Reilly books. Yuck, yuck and double-yuck.

I can only assume that somebody decided the animals weren't going to appeal to a new generation of script kiddies wending their way through what passes for college these days. (Java as a primary instructional language? Pfeaugh! In my day you grokked pointers or you washed out. And probably ended up in marketing creating book covers to annoy me.)

Keep your fresh trendy faces off my reference books. And stay off my lawn!

technorati tags:books, OReilly, HeadFirst

Blogged with Flock

So Friday we went to trim the cat's nails and Heisenberg had one that seemed swollen and had some dirt matted into his fur. He wasn't very happy to let us mess with this claw, and we cleaned it a bit and let him go. Over the weekend we checked it both days and it continued to be swollen, and the claw itself seemed like it might be discolored. He's broken a claw before - badly enough that it had to be removed so this didn't seem impossible. So Monday morning I had to call the vet and schedule him an appoinment. And both of our cats utterly transform in hissing, spitting balls of fury when they go to the vet, so they have to get sedated. So I got to drive on the freeways in rush hour traffic (to drop him off) and then had to leave him all day. Karin brought him home, but he was still all dopey - his hind legs didn't even work when he first came home, and it was several hours before he could walk even vaguely straight. So we ended up rescheduling dinner at Forbes Mill for Tuesday so we could keep an eye on him (and make sure Schrödinger didn't beat on him while he was defenseless and smelled like the vet).

In the end he's fine though - it's apparently just a minor infection. He's got some antibiotics and a pain pill he gets twice a day, and he looks a tiny bit undignified with two toes shaved. But he bounced back and was fine by Tuesday morning.

Still would have rather he just didn't observe my birthday at all though . . . .

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technorati tags:cat, Heisenberg, vet

Blogged with Flock