Jan Friedman's Eccentric America proved that the most unlikely events and landmarks could become tourist attractions. This award-winning title is dedicated to the sheer lunacy of California and her citizens, covering the biggest, the best, the wackiest and weirdest of the state's people and places. From art-car and golf-cart parades to the Valentine's Day Sex Tour at the San Francisco Zoo; from a festival that moons Amtrak to a town with its own language; from obsessed collectors of Pez, yo-yos, and bananas to kitschy theme motels and a man who built a three-storey mountain out of hay, adobe, and old paint. Eccentric California takes an in-depth look at one very peculiar place.

A delightful romp around the British Isles searching out the mad marquess, the eccentric earl, the barmy baron, and the daft duke and gathering a fair collection of crackpot inventors, weird adventurers and fascinatingly and not to mention insanely curious customs along the way. All of which make this rainy little island home to that remarkable breed of individual - the British eccentric.This expanded book still doesn't tell you where Stonehenge is, but it does tell you where ten spookier stone circles are where there will be no crowds, no admission charges and no parking problems... This is a book for the intelligent, humorous, curious tourist who doesn't go with the crowd. It is also a great armchair read that has been known to have readers weeping with mirth at the weird ways of the British.

A Southern Methodist minister, Oscar Penn Fitzgerald (1829-1911) of North Carolina was sent to California as a missionary by his denomination in 1855. He remained for more than twenty years, winning appointment as state superintendent of public education in 1867 despite his pro-Southern position during the Civil War. In the late 1870s, Fitzgerald returned to the East, editing the Nashville Christian Advocate, 1878-1890, and accepting appointment as a Southern Methodist bishop. California sketches: New series (1881) is the second installment of his reminiscences, again focusing on his Southern Methodist ministry in California, 1855-1880. Topics include his pastorate in Sonora, clergy in California, rivalry with Northern Methodists, and the Pacific Methodist Advocate.

ABOUT THIS BOOK Thriller doesn't describe it! People live all sorts of lives but few as exciting as portrayed here. The author's short stories go from entertaining murderers and gang members to scary dating moments with a potential rapist; only to find love with someone she met 300 years prior. Sharing her work as a psychiatric social worker gives us many real life experiences one can only hope to avoid in one's own life. Yet some situations are encouraging as she helps others survive. The details of her descriptions are amazing as she paints us pictures so vivid we can shut our eyes and see the little gray sausage-like curls and round steel framed glasses on Mrs. Waddell. Whoever wrote a poem about MY ZIT? Different times in history are clearly described from when the little lady of the plantation threw the Yankee soldier over the fence to land in a mud puddle surrounded by snorting pigs. What does one do when facing the jagged glass ends of a broken beer bottle handled by a furious man 6'3" tall? Who ever dared to foster a former heroin pusher? Does anyone in your family vividly remember the details about our perspective of WWII? The author lived in the only city in the U.S. that housed an active army Overseas Replacement Depot. She even remembers the blue cellophane that covered the flashlights of the Air Raid Wardens. This writing covers: humor, adventure, religion, history, law, education, philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, parenting, drama, and much more. Call her crazy: call her eccentric. She lived, loved, DARED, and wrote to tell about it. You will enjoy plenty of laughs! R. Charles Guenther, retired school administrator

Middleware is a critical foundation needed to leverage the development of a wide range of mobile and ubiquitous applications. Intrinsic challenges when building such middleware require the combination of expertise from areas like distributed systems, networking, software engineering, and application development. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the main fundamental problems, technologies, paradigms, and solutions of concern to developers of middleware for mobile environments. The contributions are grouped into four parts, on networking and programming issues, communication models, middleware issues, and application issues. Each chapter is structured as a self-contained tutorial, presenting an overview of a specific topic and the state-of-the-art solutions for the related problems. In addition, the book also includes an authoritative reference list. The material has been successfully used in several thematic training schools organized by the ESF MiNEMA (Middleware for Network Eccentric and Mobile Applications) program, and the book's organization and presentation is ideal for an advanced course on middleware.