The next day I called the mini-cab service to book another ride.

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Not long after, it became obvious that my bag, a freebie from the National Book Festival, was a mini-compost pile, with a pretty obvious lining of various meat and vegetable sleazes.

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"Mini-notebooks, " which include the hardback-book sized UMPC standard engineered by Intel and Microsoft (and manufactured by Samsung, OQO and Asus), sold fewer than 350, 000 units worldwide in 2007, according to IDC data.

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"Mini-notebooks, " which include the hardback-book sized UMPC standard engineered by Intel and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) (and manufactured by Samsung, OQO and Asus), sold fewer than 350, 000 units worldwide in 2007, according to IDC data.

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But this was a bit of an anomaly as I had built my trip to California around a tourism industry event, a sort of mini-conference, which in turn used a travel agency to book my ticket.

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Blogger Dan Nosowitz, tongue planted in cheek, declared the Mini's trade-paperback size will make it a more highbrow option for e-book lovers than the smaller Kindle Fire, which more resembles a mass-market paperback.

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On either side of the road, up the green slope and down on the lake side, turnouts and driveways for lovely inns, kooky ersatz Austrian mini-villages, hip coffee houses and eccentric galleries appear invitingly like pictures in a pop-up book.

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