In preparation for the holiday season, STG’s got some questions for y’all about e-books…

1. Which do you prefer: Kindle or Nook or Sony (or something else that is flying under the radar so far)?
2.  Which one do you use? How do you use it, e.g., books only, periodicals also? If you were choosing today, which would you choose?
3.  What do you like best about the one you use compared to print? What do you like best about it compared to other e-readers? What does your version not do or offer that others do?
4.  Do you also still read “real” books? If so, please elaborate. If not, what do you miss about printed books (if anything)?
5.  What new capability do you hope will come to e-readers in the future?
6.  Any experience with e-book lending programs, formal or informal? (Amazon recently launched a lending program for Amazon Prime members but single review I’ve seen claimed the selection is limited. No clue if lending programs are available or planned for Nook or Sony….anybody know?)
7.  Anybody have a clue which technology Dekalb County library system will choose (assuming it ever has hopes of budgetary capacity to even consider adding e-books)?

From the CSD Connections email sent out yesterday…

Do you have an opinion about when the school day should begin?  The School Start Time Advisory Committee commissioned by Dr. Edwards has launched a survey for all CSD families. Please log into the Parent Portal and click on inbox to find the survey.

If you do not know your Parent Portal ID and password, you may show identification in person at your child’s school in order to obtain your Parent Portal login information.

The survey closes December 9.  The survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete.

 

Last night, the Decatur City Commission heard from another round of residents upset about the recent deaths of cats in Drexel/East Parkwood neighborhood.  In a detailed Powerpoint presentation, Christy Bosarge detailed the death of her cat to a coyote 5 weeks ago.  She emphasized that she knew that the city could not eradicate coyotes, but that they needed to “put the fear” back into the coyote population so that they weren’t so casually interacting with the human population and their pets.

Ms. Bosarge even invited a coyote trapper, Chip Elliot, to the meeting, who was very complementary of coyotes’ intelligence and upfront about the fact that you can’t eliminate them from an area.  (A coyote’s territory is 5 square miles in an urban area, according to Elliot.)  The executive director for A.W.A.R.E, Tarah Hadley, also spoke out at the meeting, in opposition to trapping and killing coyotes in Decatur.

The contrast in viewpoints between Mr. Elliot and Ms. Hadley demonstrated the complexity of the issue of coyotes in urban environments.  While they both agreed that coyotes could not be removed from an area by trapping them, they disagreed that a coyote could be made more cautious of the human population through trapping.

However, Mr. Elliot admitted that the best case scenario is to trap yearly and hope that it instills caution in the coyote population.  But even this method won’t even guarantee that the population will decline.

The City Commission came away from the discussion with talk about getting the word out to residents about Decatur’s coyote population, but as the City Manager reemphasized in response to a resident’s question: the process of choice of most metro Atlanta communities is “cohabitation”.

So that’s that for the time being.  But let me quickly discuss the most interesting thing I heard at last night’s meeting.  In reflection on the comments from Mr. Elliot, at the end of the commission meeting Ms. Merriss noted that the calls to city hall with coyote sightings come in regularly like clockwork as the coyotes move around their territory, following the fresh water sources.  A sighting near Drexel will be followed a couple days later on Glenlake and then a couple days later in Winnona Park.

Also, at one point Mr. Elliot was discussing how coyotes choose their and noted that they go after whatever will burn the fewest calories.  Amongst the trash and other small animals, “cats who don’t run away”, were another option.

Which basically boils down to: if you live near a floodplain and have outdoor cats who aren’t especially skittish around dogs and other people, you should be the most wary about the coyotes.