Wow, there's just too many webloggers writing about China these days.  A very quality log with a knowledgable writer behind it, <a href="http://t-salon.blogspot.com/">Hangzhou T-Salon</a> provides insightful and high quality commentary on Chinese society and politics.

Today I did my training at the Borders Books Information Desk.  The search tool(s) for looking up books is amazingly primitive.  In fact, it looks like a semi-proprietary solution cooked up by <a href="http://www.altavista.com">Altavista</a>.  Considering the poor quality of the program, I'm not surprised that Altavista has done so poorly since the advent of Google.  The user interface is more of a maze than anything else.  Cryptic abbreviations and non-intuitive command names abound.  A cooler look-up application is Title Sleuth, which is available for customers to use in computers around the store.  Title Sleuth can look up a book by author, title, publisher, ISBN, character name(!) and keyword.  It can look up music by artist, album title, and by song name.  Within Title Sleuth you can access list of award winning books and movies like the Newberry, Caldecott, and Academy Awards, among others.