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What’s Your Favorite News Source?

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Other than Revanche’s always amazing round-ups, that is! Last September, as you’ll recall, I canceled delivery of the New York Times‘s print edition, because of the frequent nondelivery. Sometimes I do miss it, but nothing like as much as I expected.

Breakfast-time, the usual moment I have and prefer for reading print anything, occupies so few minutes that there was no way I could get through the entire paper before I had to get to work. Along the same line, my guess that a weekly edition of The Economist and a monthly New York Review of Books would suffice to entertain me over solitary meals proved to be correct. I can only get through a couple of Economist pieces before breakfast is finished. And when I’ve run out of Economist copy, the NYRofB’s more than takes up the slack.

Both periodicals contain plenty of interesting and informative copy.

Is any of it current news? Well. No. But how much current “news,” after all, do you want to fill your brain cells with? How many shootings and hit-and-runs and idiotic politicians’ utterances can one mind absorb?

I find myself searching out more news online now, though. Google News leaves much to be desired — such as, oh, say…news. The problem with Google News is that it’s uncurated: the hive mind dictates what appears on any given “page” of Google News. Apparently no real editors exist, and so no real intellect manifests itself there. The result is gestalt, unreliable, and often downright stupid.

What are your favorite news sites online?

Lately I’ve become enamored of Sci-News.com, a compendium of reasonably well educated science reporting. The site is organized by discipline. For the really good stuff, click on the top menu’s right-most link, “More.” Great stuff!

News flash! Men are more narcissistic than women, study says! No kidding?

“New Study Shows What Makes Latin American Telenovelas So Popular!” 😀 Can you spell “f-u-n”?, dear academic?

The nanotechnology section at Sci-News is eye-catching: Scientists Create Artificial Photosynthesis System!” Holy mackerel…can it hold a (heh) candle to the glowing nanocellulose paper?

Raw Story, while often undisciplined, is usually entertaining and often interesting. I like that it tends to run long-form stories. Although I prefer print for longer stories, as a practical matter I don’t get print any more, so this is as good a source as any…assuming you don’t mind a slightly yellowish tinge.

Far more polished and arguably more sophisticated is Salon. Just now they’re having quite a frenzy over the ludicrousness of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Salon, like The Atlantic, tends to skew a little too demagogically to the left for my taste. And really, the present “lite” version of The Atlantic is just fluffy enough and just ill-thought-through enough to annoy. But still: if one must have demagoguery with one’s news, I suppose left-leaning is better than what the right has to offer these days. {sigh}

BuzzFeed is amusing, but if Raw Story smacks of yellow journalism, Buzzfeed is…what? Unprintable? Is it really impossible to deliver news without benefit of click-baiting?

NPR does a halfway decent job of delivering hard news…although sometimes one wonders. “Man Plays Saxophone During Tumor Removal“? LOL! Talk about click bait!

BBC News is consistently good at reporting and interpreting events. Coverage is broad and, for a newspaper, deep.

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, provides responsibly reported, reasonably objective, and fairly thoughtful reportage. Unfortunately, both organizations limit the number of stories you can read before they start gouging you a fee-per-view, and so I tend to avoid their sites unless something urgently important is happening.

Access to local news poses a much bigger challenge than finding acceptable national and international reporting. In many parts of the country, there are no decent local news organizations. One could argue that’s the fact here in lovely uptown Arizona, where the most up-to-date and often most comprehensive local reporting is, heaven help us, on the Fox TV station. That should tell you something…

One local radio station emits a kind of news digest. But like almost all the other local news media, it reads like it was written by lower-division J-school students without benefit of editors. Often the writing is barely literate, full of cliches, factual errors, and bêtises. That leaves one doubting the veracity of anything that appears.

A local business journal produces some OK reportage, but its scope is limited. The local alternative weekly is a haven for yellow journalism, when it’s reporting news at all — mostly it covers restaurants and entertainment. The only halfway decent source of reporting on the rascals at City Hall (or at the Legislature) is solidly barricaded behind a paywall. And it’s very expensive, reinforcing the impression that only the elite can afford to be educated about government these days. Of course, what really costs the dollars is real reporting…but the impression remains.

Where are you getting your news these days?

wooHOO! Cookbook on Its Way!

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Dark Kindle LoResThe new version of the weight-loss cookbook is on its way to publication in print and at Amazon! This afternoon I sent all 296 pages and the wrap-around cover over to the printer, and then set up Kindle to accept the final version of the .mobi file, which should appear within a day or so.

The latter still needs to have its table of contents updated — bizarrely, Kindle can’t read a table of contents that has been compiled in any Mac-compatible program. So every time I need to upload a bookoid that contains chapters, I first have to send it to Tina, who performs the 30-second task of updating the ToC on her PC.

The copy in the new, renamed edition is largely revamped. Its first incarnation, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, was the first book I had ever uploaded to Amazon. And — wouldn’tcha know — it had the most complex formatting of any book I’ve posted there. In the fools-rush-in department, I took on footnotes, tables, lists, heads, subheads, sub-subheads, and even images without having a single clue to what I was doing.

Nor did I understand that Amazon’s online Kindle previewer is next to useless: what you see in that thing is decidedly not what you get. The result was a mess, but because I’d proofed in that online program, I didn’t know it was a mess.

Not until an angry reader posted a rant about the horrible formatting did I realize something was awry.

By then I’d figured out that you have to download a resident Kindle previewer onto your terminal — and, preferably, download your .mobi file into a Kindle reader or into an iPad, if you can figure out how. When I viewed the How I Lost file in the previewer installed on my Mac, I was horrified. No wonder that poor reader was flummoxed, frustrated, and infuriated!

At that point, though, I was maxed with other work — the plan to post eight to ten bookoids per month was absorbing 12 to 14 hours a day. Revamping the cookbook was not going to happen.

So I took it down from Amazon — unpublished it and forgot it.

Now that cutting the production schedule by 50 percent has allowed life to settle, I’ve returned to the cookbook. After posting more bookoids than I can count — some of which contain formatting challenges — I’ve learned what one needs to do to simplify a manuscript and get it to go online with relatively few glitches.

The manuscript has now been reformatted in a new template, its structure revamped and simplified, a great deal of extraneous detail cut. That made it look better. Then I went through and cut as much of the Bloggish as I could get rid of without rewriting from beginning to end.

Much of the original content had been copied and pasted from Funny. And y’know…blogging is not the same as writing. Blogging is more like a combination of texting and personal letter-writing. It has its own conventions, and its tone and style are casual to a fault.

In the book world, to a large fault. 😉

Language and style cleaned up, format reorganized, the book deserved a new title and new cover art.

Hence the new title: 30 pounds / Four Months.

This book would make a good Christmas present. It has about 120 recipes, some very old (even historic!) and some very 21st-century. The strategy it describes for losing weight really does work, and sticking to it isn’t at all onerous, once you see what works.

So watch this space! I’ll let you know when the electronic and the print versions are ready. If you’re interested in a print copy, let me know in the comments to this post and I’ll arrange to send one to you whenever I have them.

 

 

 

Minutes and minutes left…

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…before SDXB and NG show up here to spirit me away from the 87 gerjillion things that need to be done today.

They want to go hiking in the McDowell Mountains, which are on the northeast side of Scottsdale. Halfway to Payson from their house; about a third of the way from mine.

Oh well. It’s a nice break, as long as they stay off the subject of politics. NG is even further to the right than SDXB, which places her at the right hand of Adolf Hitler. If it comes out of the mouth of some Tea-Partier, they think it must be true. It’s hard to stay silent in the face of such nonsense.

I’ve learned to run ’em. If they start talking stupid stuff, I start hiking as fast as I can go (which is faster than I can run…). About ten minutes of trying to keep up with me runs them out of breath, so they can’t speak and walk at the same time.

Mwa ha ha!

Meanwhile, where were we? Yeah: all the things that need to be done.

I managed to get the December Camptown Races newsletter out this morning, despite MailChimp putting up a fight. If you subscribe to FaM, you probably got that in your email, or will whenever MailChimp’s queue sends it off.

The latest Fire-Rider collection, Fire and Ice, is live at Amazon: Books VII through XII. fire book 2aiThis is the part of the saga where Kaybrel and his cousin Jag Bova make heroes of themselves. It’s fairly violent — they engage the enemy in an ambush whose consequences will echo down through the generations, and they manage to escape extermination only by wile and steel nerve.

Do download it! And please, please, PLEASE go over to Amazon and review it! Fire-Rider needs your reader reviews!

In other Plain & Simple Press news, the hard-copy cover for the new version of the cookbook is done. If and when I EVER get some time to myself today, I’ll upload that and the content to the print-on-demand guys.

A-n-n-d…here’s our boy! And so it’s off to spend the day doing essentially nothing. Hope yours is more productive.

Bye!

It’s a Heat Pump Thing…

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So…do you folks who live where it snows have heat pumps to run your air conditioning and heating system? How does that work in a colder climate?

Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, temperatures plummeted to a near-unheard-of 32 degrees last night. Eek, say we.

Along about three in the morning I woke up to an icy breeze wafting across the bed. The heat pump was grinding away, and it was blasting out cold air. As the night wound on, the heater never kicked off…and the house temperature dropped!

If the dogs and I were huddled in a shivering mass with blankets and pillows piled atop us, my poor little roommate  must have been a block of ice. She’s sleeping on an air mattress — the roommate gig being a temporary thing — and so she’s on the tile floor. It’s cold in that room on a warm night! It must have been like a refrigerator in there along about 4 a.m.

This morning I called my favorite AC repair dudes. They said the problem is, when the ambient temperature drops below 32, a heat pump freezes up and starts blowing cold air into the house. Advice: shut the system down for three hours. Turn it back on. If it’s still blowing cold air after an hour, turn it off for another hour. Turn it back on: if that doesn’t fix it, call them and for a bargain $80 they’ll come out and see what the problem is.

LOL! This should get interesting.

The reason I’ve never had this problem is that left to my own devices, I don’t run the HVAC at night. After a summer of $250 air-conditioning bills, I can’t afford the cost of running a heater all  night long. Normally what I’ll do is pile on the blankets at night and then during the day warm the area where I’m parked with a space heater. If it gets really cold at night, then I’ll turn the heat on first thing in the morning, just long enough to take the chill off.

But Roommate, resisting the plot to turn her into a snow zombie, raids the thermostat and turns it to around 70 degrees when she wakes up shivering along about 4 in the morning.

Not unreasonable, do you think? There’s really no good reason for her to be miserable all night.

So along about 5, I get too hot and then I sneak out into the hall and turn the thermostat back down to 68.

Heeee! The battle of the old ladies.

Well, one of them isn’t exactly old. But she’s reaching that age at which women start waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t get back to sleep. 😀

So we’ll try the “shut it off” routine today and hope it works. After the $600 pool bill, I can’t afford another service  call this month.

Meanwhile, I have to make a Costco run this morning. While I’m there, I’ll try to find those heated throws they had the last time I visited, and I’ll grab one for her. After she heads up to San Francisco to join her DH, the dogs and I will be glad to have a warm spot on the sack, especially if the winter stays cool.

My son says he’ll bring her a space heater that won’t set fire to her possessions — mine are those bowl things with the red-hot element in the center, effective but not something you want to turn your back on.

Meanwhile, chalk up another entry in the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted: a heater that freezes when it gets cold outside.

Doing Less but Accomplishing More

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So the scheme to cut the production schedule by about 50% has finally pretty well kicked in. We’re now posting about four books a month — one a week — which makes me feel like I’m barely moving. Suddenly whole days have reappeared: I no longer wake up at 5 a.m. and go to bed five minutes later, at 11 p.m. 😀

Strangely, though, it feels like I personally am  accomplishing at least as much and probably more. We recently put our latest Racy Book online. Brace yourself:

Presentation7-3 LoResAnother short story, this one involves a science teacher, a studly visitor, and a funny twist at the end that leaves the other characters a little shocked. It’s the second piece in the “Travelers” frame story, and (assuming you enjoy a little clinical description now and again) it’s pretty entertaining.

Tuesday I’ll put the second “boxed set” of Fire-Rider stories online, offering books seven through twelve under one cover.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a new iteration of the ill-fated diet/cookbook, which I hope we’ll have a shot at selling now that we have a new marketing agent.

A boxed set of the “Family at the Holidays” series is almost ready to go online. All that’s needed is to add a special “bonus” story to give readers a little value added and then post the thing at Amazon.

I’ve put an ad up for one of the naughty books at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Set up a Pinterest page for the marketing lady. Tomorrow must chat with her about what and how she’s doing.

Today I finally got around to downloading Scrivener and beginning to learn how to use it. The instructions are packaged in five interminable steps. The first took a little over an hour to plow through, figure, out, and try to understand. Doesn’t look hard…just damn complicated.

Learning yet another large, complex computer program is NOT something I crave to do. However, apparently it can convert directly to ePub format, which is profoundly desired. Right now the bookoids exist only in .mobi format, which is easy to create but which is salable only at Amazon. We need ePub to sell the things at AllRomances and at Barnes & Noble. And you can mount an ePub file at Amazon, too — probably more easily than farting around with using Amazon’s conversion tool to post from Wyrd.

So once I’ve learned how to use the program, it should cut the workload by making it possible to use the same file to post books at three different retailers.

Scrivener is something I’ve been wanting to get to for weeks and weeks, but have had neither the time nor the physical strength to take on.

A-n-n-n-d… Right now it’s after 11 p.m. The dogs are barking. I can’t scribble another word. And so, to bed…

 

 

Is Costco “Amazon-proof”?

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Here’s an amusing squib from SFGate, ruminating on a recent report that some analyst has dubbed Costco an “Amazon-proof” entity. Deutsche Bank upgraded Costco’s ratings from “hold” to “buy” and raised its target price from $152 to $200.

SFGate’s Business Insider ruminates on the possible reasons for this, and concludes that “Costco has been able to hold its own because of its membership model and ability to incentivize visits to brick-and-mortar locations.” A vague comparison is made with Target and Walmart, which lag far behind the warehouse giant.

How does one “incentivize” visits to a real-world store when convenience and selection are so much greater at the virtual “store” that is Amazon? Besides the fact that Costco is often (but not always) cheaper than Amazon, Costco has one policy that in fact makes it more convenient than ordering items from the comfort of your keyboard: it lets you return anything without an argument. No wrapping stuff up and returning it to UPS, no deadline (except for some electronic gear), no written explanation of the problem: if you don’t want it, you don’t have to keep it.

And in our parts, Costco underprices just about every other gasoline seller in the city. Often as I’m driving away from Costco’s gas pumps, I’ll see prices at neighboring stations that range from 8 cents to 20 cents(!!) a gallon higher than what I just paid. Where they sell propane, they underprice everybody, too. Obviously, if you have to schlep to Costco to get a good price on fuel, you might as well pop into the store to buy whatever you need — or think you’re about to need.

Costco does not impose arbitrary rules that make it difficult or annoying for customers to shop there (“free shipping” if you buy enough junk you don’t need to rack up a $35 bill, or if you pay an exorbitant annual fee) and difficult for vendors to sell their products through the company’s stores.

However, I think the corporation’s greatest strength over its competition is that Costco has human beings. Ask them, and you’ll find most of them actually LIKE working at Costco. Then consider the recent NY Times article about the miseries of working at Amazon.  Look around inside a Walmart and ask yourself if you’d really want to work there: in our parts, 99 percent of the stores are dingy, depressing, and inhabited by real-world “Walmart People,” who are less funny when you’re elbow-to-elbow with them than they are when you’re watching them on YouTube. Walmart employees, if you can find one, act like they don’t care whether you live or die; Amazon employees, if you can find one, behave like rule-bound automatons. Costco’s employees are always pleasant and usually helpful.

Is Amazon hard to beat? Sure. But is it invulnerable? I doubt it.