Everybody’s business

You’ve got to hideaway
The ambitious young couple that last year took over Jasco’s and turned it into Jasco’s Heights (soon to be Broadway Heights—keep up, folks) is launching another venture: the Hideaway Café.

The café will be located downstairs from Jasco’s Heights, in the Phoenix Building, where the Beauty Fool cosmetics shop used to be located.

Paul Lavery, who owns the restaurants with his wife, Shannon, said the centerpiece of the new place will be sandwiches with Italian herbed bread and “really cool artsy salads,” along with light breakfast fare courtesy of their new pastry kitchen.

Shannon Lavery, an interior designer, has decorated the Hideaway Café in a “cozy, charming, rustic” style, her husband related.

The manager of the café, slated to open Oct. 13, will be David Price, whom some may know as the “coffee doctor” of Chico, for his skill at fixing machines.

Path logical
A few years ago, the DSL people were calling me asking for stories about how DSL was the new thing, and soon everyone would have the awesome, incredible DSL. I never did much with it, and to this day I only know two people in Chico with DSL.

But when I heard about the new, patented technology used by Digital Path, I was intrigued. In fact, it sounds downright cool—and I’m a bit of a skeptic.

The founder of Digital Path, Jim Higgins, grew up in Chester and has set up shop out by the Chico airport. (He’s the man who founded The Grid in San Luis Obispo in the 1990s and sold it to a dotcom. The eWindowShop.com site he started during the dotcom boom is no more.) The company already has 70 employees. In a reverse from how the big corporations usually unroll technology, Digital Path (www.digitalpath.net) is starting with the smaller, more rural communities and working its way up to larger markets.

“We’re checking out places where there are lots of trees, hills and mountains,” said Parker Lee, who’s in charge of marketing for Digital Path. Within two weeks, 80 percent of Chico will have access to Digital Path, and the company is starting on Redding in November. Later will come the suburbs of Sacramento, then Sacramento itself, and, said Lee, “We fully plan on rolling out nationally in one year.”

It’s all wireless (no phone lines involved) using a 7-inch by 7-inch radio receiver placed on the side of one’s house. It communicates with a device placed upon a house in the neighborhood known as a “relay house.”

The plans start at $19.95 a month, plus $65-$95 for installation. “We’re less expensive than [DSL] and we’re faster,” Lee said. It’s four times faster than DSL and 100 times faster than a 56K dialup. “It’s like having your own T-1,” he said.

Book ’em
The power of the Internet and a crummy state economy have combined to form a new way for local libraries to get the books they need. Butte County library branches are among those that have created “wish lists” for books, tapes, magazines and other materials via the Amazon Web site.

The Chico branch is currently hoping for 11 specific items, including: Where to Find Gold in Northern California, the latest Merck manual, Field Guide to Old Growth Forests and The Good Carb Cookbook. See the list at Amazon.com, or follow the links from http://buttecounty.net/bclibrary.