TITLE: The Hollow Places

AUTHOR: T. Kingfisher

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DESCRIPTION:

"Pray they are hungry.

Kara finds these words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring the peculiar bunker—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more you fear them, the stronger they become."

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REVIEW:

Creepy but not horrifying.  The writing was decent with quirky humour, but the alternative world could have been explored a bit better.  There was just something missing.

I think this book will stay with me for awhile, I'm afraid the willows have taken root. I know many people draw the obvious parallels with Lovecraft, but for me this one also had some vibes that brought up touchstones from The Mist (Stephen King) and a smidge of Pan's Labyrinth. Definitely that dark otherworldliness but also the religious and/or mythical undertones throughout.

Sometimes the vastness and imagination that goes into multiverses can be overwhelming but I thought this was beautifully balanced by the characters, with their lightness and their dark humor and being so down-to-earth (which is funny, all things considered!). Carrot and Simon, and even Uncle Earl help even things out and brought levity to a quagmire of disturbing otherness.

The disquieting undertones all throughout was classic horror that I greatly appreciate. It's like a feeling you get that something is behind you and that paralyzing moment where you're deciding whether to look or not, to quickly escape or rationalize it away. In willow world or not, that feeling stays with you throughout the story and it's fabulously unsettling. On the flip side the vivid picture painted with some of the more in your face creepy situations, like the bus or Sturdivant, was grotesquely clear and so easily visualized.

I think my favorite part of all though was the last part in the Museum. It brought a whole new heartwarming element to the tale that I wasn't expecting. For lack of a better term, there really is no place like home, and the idea that your home might feel that way about you too is quite touching. All in all this was a fast paced enthralling read and I definitely look forward to reading more from this author in the future.

I received an arc of this book from Gallery Books via Netgalley and this is my honest review.

Automated search engine robots, sometimes called "spiders" or "crawlers", are the seekers of  HOLLOW ROBOT ARM YHZ1850-6-6A web pages. How do they work? What is it they really do? Why are they important?

You'd think with all the fuss about indexing web pages to add to search engine databases, that robots would be great and powerful beings. Wrong. Search engine robots have only basic functionality like that of early browsers in terms of what they can understand in a web page. Like early browsers, robots just can't do certain things. Robots don't understand frames, Flash movies, images or JavaScript. They can't enter password protected areas and they can't click all those buttons you have on your website. They can be stopped cold while indexing a dynamically generated URL and slowed to a stop with JavaScript navigation. How Do Search Engine Robots Work?

Think of search engine robots as automated data retrieval programs, traveling the web to find information and links.

When you submit a web page to a search engine at the "Submit a URL" page, the new URL is added to the robot's queue of websites to visit on its next foray out onto the web. Even if you don't directly submit a page, many robots will find your site because of links from other sites that point back to yours. This is one of the reasons why it is important to build your link popularity and to get links from other topical sites back to yours.

When arriving at your website, the automated robots first check to see if you have a robots.txt file. This file is used to tell robots which areas of your site are off-limits to them. Typically these may be directories containing only binaries or other files the robot doesn't need to concern itself with.

Robots collect links from each page they visit, and later follow those links through to other pages. In this way, they essentially follow the links from one page to another. The entire World Wide Web is made up of links, the original idea being that you could follow links from one place to another. This is how robots get around.

The "smarts" about indexing pages online comes from the search engine engineers, who devise the methods used to evaluate the information the search engine robots retrieve. When introduced into the search engine database, the information is available for searchers querying the search engine. When a search engine user enters their query into the search engine, there are a number of quick calculations done to make sure that the search engine presents just the right set of results to give their visitor the most relevant response to their query.

You can see which pages on your site the search engine robots have visited by looking at your server logs or the results from your log statistics program. Identifying the robots will show you when they visited your website, which pages they visited and how often they visit. Some robots are readily identifiable by their user agent names, like Google's "Googlebot"; others are bit more obscure, like Inktomi's "Slurp". Still other robots may be listed in your logs that you cannot readily identify; some of them may even appear to be human-powered browsers.

Along with identifying individual robots and counting the number of their visits, the statistics can also show you aggressive bandwidth-grabbing robots or robots you may not want visiting your website. In the resources section of the end of this article, you will find sites that list names and IP addresses of search engine robots to help you identify them. How Do They Read The Pages On Your Website?

When the search engine robot visits your page, it looks at the visible text on the page, the content of the various tags in your page's source code (title tag, meta tags, etc.), and the hyperlinks on your page. From the words and the links that the robot finds, the search engine decides what your page is about. There are many factors used to figure out what "matters" and each search engine has its own algorithm in order to evaluate and process the information. Depending on how the robot is set up through the search engine, the information is indexed and then delivered to the search engine's database.

The information delivered to the databases then becomes part of the search engine and directory ranking process. When the search engine visitor submits their query, the search engine digs through its database to give the final listing that is displayed on the results page.

The search engine databases update at varying times. Once you are in the search engine databases, the robots keep visiting you periodically, to pick up any changes to your pages, and to make sure they have the latest info. The number of times you are visited depends on how the search engine sets up its visits, which can vary per search engine.

Sometimes visiting robots are unable to access the website they are visiting. If your site is down, or you are experiencing huge amounts of traffic, the robot may not be able to access your site. When this happens, the website may not be re-indexed, depending on the frequency of the robot visits to your website. In most cases, robots that cannot access your pages will try again later, hoping that your site will be accessible then.

Resources

*SpiderSpotting - Search Engine Watch searchenginewatch/webmasters/spiders.html

*Robotstxt.org List of robots and protocols for setting up a robots.txt file.  robotstxt.org/

*Spider-Food Tutorials, forums and articles about Search Engine spiders and Search Engine Marketing.  spider-food.net/

*Spiderhunter Articles and resources about tracking Search Engine spiders.  spiderhunter/

*Sim Spider Search Engine Robot Simulator Search Engine World has a spider that simulates what the Search Engine robots read from your website.  searchengineworld/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

I was soooo excited when I won a fabulous signed hardcover for Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton and a paperback copy with a pile of goodies for Colel by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff.

Amazon / Audiobook / Goodreads

MY REVIEW

Kira Jane Buxton has definitely delivered on this original, unique glimpse into her zombie world where animals are the saviors and humans are the ones in need of saving. They can’t do it as individuals, it takes a murder to save a village. Hollow Kingdom is filled with every emotion I can think of, terror and fear, sadness and happiness, lost and found, tears and smiles, despair and hope.

4 Stars

When operating the hollow blow molding machine for processing, we must pay attention to some temperature control to ensure that a suitable plastic bottle is manufactured.

1. Melting temperature TM: For crystalline polymers, it refers to the temperature at which the three-dimensional remote ordered state of the macromolecular chain structure changes into disordered viscous flow state, also known as melting point. It is the lower limit of the molding temperature of crystalline polymers.

2. Glass transition temperature TG: refers to the transition temperature of the amorphous polymer (including the non-crystalline part of the crystalline polymer) from the glass state to the highly elastic state or from the latter to the former. It is the lowest temperature for the free movement of the macromolecular segment of the amorphous polymer and the upper limit of the working temperature of the product.

3. No-flow temperature: the highest temperature at which no flow occurs under a certain pressure. The automatic bottle blowing machine is to add a certain amount of plastic to the barrel at the upper end of the die of the capillary rheometer and heat it to a certain temperature. After the constant temperature is known to be 10MIN, apply a constant pressure of 50MPA. If the material does not flow out of the die, unload After pressing, the temperature of the material is increased by 10 degrees. After holding it for 10 min, a constant pressure of the same size is applied. This continues until the melt flows out of the die. This temperature is reduced by 10 degrees to the non-flow temperature of the material.

4. Flow temperature TF: refers to the temperature at which an amorphous polymer changes from a highly elastic state to a viscous state. It is the lower limit of the processing temperature of amorphous plastics.

V. Decomposition temperature TD: when the temperature of the polymer in the viscous flow state is further increased, the degradation of the molecular chain will increase, and the temperature when the polymer molecular chain is significantly degraded is the decomposition temperature.

The above five points are our summary of how to pay attention to the temperature of the hollow blow molding machine in production, but in general it is not just these five points, which requires us to constantly sum up experience in our daily work to find out that its problems exist .