As a former SPCA volunteer and longtime vegan animal rights activist, the issue of destroying companion dogs, cats, rabbits, and other animals by humane societies is one of the hardest to deal with. Craig Brestrup's book provides valuable insite and gives a realistic alternative for handling the pet overpopulation problem.

At their best, animal shelters provide room and board, veterinary treatment, food, and a chance for adoption to stray animals who would otherwise be in immediate danger. Unfortunately, traditional shelters have become death camps for owners to conveniently drop off their animals once they become a burden. This book describes the unintended side effects of this practice. Shelters have maintained an open door policy of accepting animals even when they are full. The reasons given by "owners" include but are not limited to: someone in their family is allergic, they are moving, they don't want to clean the litter box, the cat claws the furniture, the family just had a baby, among several others. A full shelter accepting creatures given up for frivolous reasons makes it too convenient for humans to view the animals as disposable commodities. The shelters also have low adoption rates because their procedures overly scrutinize and intimidate potential guardians. Meanwhile, a potential owner can quite easily get fertile animal who will reproduce from a pet store, breeder, or give away thus dooming one more creature in the shelter to be killed. Both the humane societies and our culture as a whole should really look into the entrenched belief that euthanizing is always saving an animal from fates worse than death.

Brestrup provides a solution which all of us involved with animal rights and animal shelters should consider: focus on only taking in stray animals and those who are in obvious immediate danger into the shelters. Do not accept guardian released animals who are not homeless yet. Instead work with the guardians on taking care of their animals, eg. management of allergies and behavior problems, redirection to pet friendly landlords, and assisting guardians in arranging their own adoptions if relinguishing is truly inevitable. Continue to screen adopters, however, be more customer friendly by working with marginal adopters instead of turning them down; once they take home an animal, have volunteers work with them to take responsibility for these sentient creatures. By working with the adopters, the humane societies will show consistency and respect for the lives of companion animals. Through his group in Progressive Animal Welfare Society, the author began his own program as described above. It will be interesting to see how it progresses, hopefully, other humane societies will catch on.

Like many people, I have always hated that millions of healthy adoptable animals were killed, even painlessly by humane societies. Unfortunately, I could never think of any other alternatives on how to handle the pet overpopulation problem. While Craig Brestrup acknowledges that his solution will not be without imperfections, DISPOSABLE ANIMALS is the first book which I have read that gives a realistic strategy.

As a former shelter worker and currently a feral rescuer, I know too well of the owner convenience attitude of Americans. This heart-breaking account of pets which no longer fit into Americans' life-style should be an eye-opener to all pet owners. This book is packed with compassion and sensitivity as Mr. Brestrup gives a compelling argument to stop the killing in our shelters.

The heart of this book is a readiness framework that blends assessment, strategy and tactics and project planning. The focus is on business and customer value.

I like the way the book starts, with a look at the big picture, defining your goals, and complete look at all stakeholders. The beginning also introduces e-business models, the readiness framework itself and a quick sanity check to test your readiness.

This is followed by a more detailed look at the "eBiz Readiness! Framework" and its major parts: stakeholders, components and enablers. Also addressed are knowledge management, trust and technology, all of which are interwoven into the fabric of e-business. I especially liked the framework metrics, which include benchmarking, customer and business metrics, and how to manage the metrics as indicators.

What makes this book practical is the map given to applying the framework for implementation of e-business processes and systems, and once implemented, how to effectively manage using an evaluation framework. The evaluation framework covers both small- and big-business perspectives in the form of stakeholder assessments. Also addressed in detail are trust services (perhaps the cornerstone of e-business), security, and related issues.

Another aspect of this book that I liked very much is the coverage of the e-business stakeholder model and governance, which spans topics such as globalization, socioeconomics and your defined market. This sets the book apart from those that seem to focus on technology without a regard for the bigger picture.

This book is an invaluable resource to both business planers and IT because it balances the business and technical issues, both of which are addressed, in assessing e-business readiness.

Finally, someone has started to 'de-mystify' what e-business is! The foundational material yields a discerning insight into the concrete necessities of e-business whether large or small. The stakeholder model details what components are needed and exactly how the elements of e-business fit together, and also what you need to be successful - the book gives you proven, effective yardsticks to measure where your business is and where your business is going! An excellent read! I highly recommend it. Jutla and Craig are groundbreakers!

This is an excellent resource for new and experienced engineers. A very handy resource for those of us in the consulting or plant engineering business. Highly recommended.

A significant contribution to the technical literature of our profession. A must-read for younger people coming into the field and an insightful refresher for those people who have been in it for a while.

i made a few of the projects they worked great and were cheap

This outstanding book presents a number of useful circuits for shaping the sound of electric instruments. Starting with small projects and presenting gradually more difficult jobs, the author takes the reader by the hand and makes easy the whole process of building a "stomp box." You can save money, or create a more powerful tool than is commercially available, or sometimes even both. Best book of its kind. No electronics knowledge necessary to begin - but you will have some when you're done!

I love Flash, and I am an audio designer for over 20 years. It has baffled me how so many great Flash designers wow me visually and totally ingore the power of streaming audio in Flash. Brad Kozak has organized this information and hit the nail on the head of what it takes to make quality audio, covers the tools and techniques to do it right are allin this book. I bought it as a reference, but I suggest it be required reading for anyone designing Flash presentations for the web and CDroms. Silent movies didn't last very long in Hollywood and there is no reason Flash movies should remain silent or contain mindless music loops when audio that supports the visuals is so easy to deliver in Flash.

This is a great book, especially the style used in writing the actual code. Great instruction on using audio editing programs, and how they relate to the Flash projects. Excellent instruction for linking audio button to animated button. Amazing demonstration of "Multiple Logic" for button behavior. Great video game instruction. I like that there is a website for it, and I really appreciate that the entire project is included on CD-Rom to study. I am inspired by the chapter illustrating how to define the project with the client. It really helps when an author discusses how to actually run a web-based business.

As a card carrying member of the gin-and -whiskey generation, I got quite a jolt from reading this collection of nine stories all dealing with drug users whose every act is motivated by the prospect of their next high or by reminiscences about outstanding highs in their pasts.

In fact there were several jolts, some pleasant, some not. Craig Pugh is an honest writer who unmasks much of what is false and petentious in modern societies by placing his characters in situations, sometimes dangerous ones, that require interaction with the establishment or with the law. Most of the characters, depressingly inarticulate narcissists, are young and apparently permanent members of the underclass, even if their origins may have been otherwise. Some have the beginnings of an education. Others have none. Their conversation is as stuimulating as a brick wall and as hard to penetrate, owing to the extensive sub-culture lexicon they use. Apart from their highs, one has to ask what their values might be like.

These stories are not of uniform quality but several are good. In "Slingin'" the drug dealing Tony is kidnapped by two murderous urban savages who stab him and then force him to drive out of town so they can finish him off, and the reader does not expect him to survive the ordeal. The narrator makes the most of Tony's thoughts, similar to what the rest of us would think in such life-threatening circumstances.

The final story, about a wood carver who has a semi-mystical experience at the rim of a volcano-crater that manages to work out some inner demons that had been bothering him, is probably the best in the whole collection.

The author get high marks for his lean-and-mean prose style and also for writing mostly out of the thoghts of his characters, out of their mental processes and personality quirks. He even makes some of them likable: I never thought I could feel empathy for a drug dealer like Tony.

Lay it on me brother! Thanks to Craig Pugh for writing a book that doesn't extol the merits of marijuana or take a holier-than-thou attitude toward it. Ganja Tales looks at the dope-smoking community straight on, using today's language. We get people we all know, in situations we've all been in, laid out in all honesty. A collection of short stories, Pugh's lucid prose moves the plots along while capturing the details that immerse you in the situation.

"Slingin'" touches on a dealer who finds himself at the wrong end of a gun. It's suspenseful and I felt tense all the way through. In "Sisters" we get a female perspective, as women and their babies live with pot-smoking/dealing dads. One guy goes nuts trying to find some weed in "Reefer Madness," tearing his apartment apart. Even the supporting characters, kidnappers, clients, roommates, are fleshed out in revealing detail.

My favorite story is "Torched." It explores the craft of glass blowing, and we see Pugh's technical knowledge. He describes how the glass is positioned, worked with, and the need to keep the piece moving. "It's in the flame, and it's glowing like an aura or a rainbow, and the colors are shifting and changing, shimmering and twirling." The reader not only sees the process, but also feels the movement through the sentence structure. All this technical information is slipped in while we enjoy a story about a guy blinded to the outside world by his flame. Such layers of meaning exist in all of Pugh's stories.

Ganja Tales is an entertaining escape that offers much more on closer inspection. I was pleasantly surprised, and highly recommend this book for any reader. It's not solely a marijuana book - it's about universal human experiences. In any story, you can replace marijuana with your drug of choice: cigarettes, money, power. The writing holds. Artistic sketches punctuate these sketches of life, too. Ganja Tales will please your simplest desires and satisfy your more discriminating tastes.

I disagree with the reviewer who thought Dr. McCullough's translation is unwieldy. I have read Waley, Seindesticker and McCullough and I only wish McCullough had printed a full version. It is difficult to present tenth century ideas in a form comprehensible to late 20th century Westerners. I think Dr. McCullough does a fantastic job, and I encourage readers to read her abridged version of the Tale before attempting the full version by any other translator. To suggest that Dr. McCullough take "slightly more poetic licence [sic] in order to make it easyer [sic] to read" is missing the point of translation. If you want to read the results of "taking more poetic license", read Waley. But know that he messed up the chronology and threw out an entire chapter because it "didn't fit." Murasaki Shikibu wrote that chapter for a reason. We should not disregard the work of this paragon and progenitor of Japanese fiction simply because it "doesn't fit" with our idea of how a story should read. It is a masterpiece, and Helen Craig McCullough's translation is accurate AND readble.

I am not a historian or a scholar of ancient lituriture, I simply have a passion for Japan and it's history. So as a reader for fun i found it very difficult to understand, I read the version published by Stanford University Press which did have some apendixes and foot notes but I found them very wieldy and not very useful. I tink it might be useful to have reverse pager notes or a short summery of each page at the top of the page, like i had seen in some Shakespear and the Odyssey. I have read brief portions of Heike Monogatari in modernized japanese and I understand the difficulties of translating into English and I think the translator did a magnificent job in keeping very close tho the original meaning. But i would also probably forgive slightlymore poetic licence in order to make it easyer to read. But as for the content of the tale itself I think it reviels alot about 12th century Japan. The Strong charictors often weeping, making extreem oaths such as promising to die in cirtan circomstances that are protrayed in the Monogatari tells about what the japanease found entertaining in that time, it reminded me some what of the charictors in Lord of the Rings by Tolken. The main theame of the comming of the latter days of the law I found very ineresting and to see the story of Japan falling from a noble society and beurocracy centered arowned the Empiror to a Warior society ruled by the Shogun was quite intesting.

Erickson's book (as well as "United We Solve") is a fabulous tool for teachers of math (as well as some social sciences). The activities are for small groups and the "rules" for solving the problems make it a good basis for evaluating both individual and group work.

I use these activities with my third and fourth graders, but the activities are also good for much older students. The topics are varied, including geometry, equations, logic, and even some social studies topics. My students love working on these, and I love watching them as they work to solve the creative problems.

I highly, highly, highly recommend this book AND "United We Solve".

I think of myself a traditional teacher. As a sixth-grade teacher of math, I believe that students need a strong foundation in the basics of mathematics. However, with Get It Together by Mr. Erikson, I found myself motivated by activities that go beyond the trendy 'math games.' There are many acitivites that have real learning value. Also, the students enjoy working together in small groups to find the answer. At least once a week, I find myself using an activity or two out of this book. It has been an excellent resource in the classroom.

I have bought the book some years ago and it is still very good reference book for me now.

This is the Gigabit networking bible that finds its way in to so many bibliographies. A must have for anyone looking at High speed networking (DQDB, SMDS, broadband ISDN, ATM) Craig Partridge is one of the most respected authors in the high bandwidth networking arena.

To paraphrase Hitchcock, sometimes what the audience doesn't see, but anticipates, is more horrifying. That is the case with Craig's book. The creeping fear that gradually consumes the three children of Navy widow (is her husband dead or not?) Clary Hale as they begin to realize their mother has disappeared into the night without leaving a clue, is so thick you will find yourself shifting uncomfortably in your chair. Craig has an excellent turn of phrase and he sets you up to feel exactly what each of his tortured characters feel.

Gradually the nosy elderly neighbor and the oversexed, love starved cleaning woman also draw you in with their own theories and speculation as to what has happened to Clary and their stories jump off the page as we see what they do not - the fact they are very involved in the disappearance. In addition, they are followed and approached by a Naval officer who states he can assist them in finding their mother. He is charming and commanding - but is he what he says he is? The children's search takes them on an agonizing road trip with deadly results as they try to piece together the mystery, using clues that may very well lead them to their own deaths. The plot hinges on a tragedy from Clary's teenage days. To tell more will ruin the plot, so I will just say the book is DEFINITELY worth one long rainy night, if you enjoy a good, adult scare.

Clary Hale's children have been left home alone... or so they think.

Underneath a façade of suburban bliss all hell breaks loose when a psychopath obssessed with his childhood sweetheart comes calling and leaving a bloodbath in his wake. With crisp, edgy writing, funny lines and characters one can't help but care for, Kit Craig (pen name for cult-favorite horror/Sci-Fi writer Kit Reed -- "Tiger Rag", "cry of the Daughter", "Catholic Girls"-)creates a roller coaster of suspense without the formula that has made such authors as Sidney Sheldon, Mary Higgins Clark and Iris Johansen so commonplace.

Here, you never know what's going to happen next... and it is all great fun!