Coffee heat rising

Angst

If I won the lottery…

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What would you do if you suddenly came into SOOO many bucks there was no question of your ever having to work again?

Tellya what I’d do: I’d find an incredible resort somewhere and rent a suite…not for a week or so, but for several months at a time.

The thought of owning a vacation home makes me cringe: isn’t one house enough to take care of? 😀 But if I won the lottery…ah, if I won the lottery, I’d make a resort my vacation home: a getaway where someone else takes care of fixing the plumbing and maintaining the septic tank and repairing the roof and…whatEVER. Where someone else fixes breakfast, lunch and dinner whenever you want it. Where someone else cleans the pool, and someone else cleans the house and changes the sheets and does the shopping and there’s not a Costco within driving distance.

Yeah.

What I would like to do right now, right this minute, is zone out and write another storyline in the ineffable Fire-Rider saga. There are a lot of ideas on the float, but I haven’t had a moment in months and months to sit down, think them through, draft, redraft, create… Nary a moment.

Not that I’m complaining. By the end of this week I will have billed enough to make up for all the cash I’ve diddled away in the ridiculous self-publishing venture. But my god! The amount of work!!!

I’ve been working from 5 in the morning till 9 or 10 at night for so long I’ve actually lost track of how long it’s been. Weeks and weeks. This morning I was up at 3 a.m. wrestling with what I thought was a corrupt PDF. (Not so, thank god: the client’s magnum opus was SO long it took the print-on-demand vendor’s website about eight hours to upload the damn thing.)

As a practical matter, it looks like I’ve succeeded in working myself sick. Yesterday morphed into a Day from Hell along about dawn.

A couple of days ago, a swelling developed under and around an eye. I thought a mosquito had bitten me right close to the eyelid, because it itched a lot.

By yesterday it was clear it wasn’t a mosquito bite. The old-lady bag under that eye was so swollen, it looked like a big blister.

I suspect this is a side effect of the omeprazole — remember, if a drug has a weird side effect, I will be among the .01% that gets it. So I look this up and discover…yea verily. Facial edema is a side effect, and it’s considered a bit of a medical emergency. “Seek medical care immediately.”

Of course, it’s five or six in the morning by the time I figure this out. I call the Mayo trying to get through to the internist on duty — all I want to do is ask a doctor is this is something I need to have checked right this very minute, or if I can safely wait until I can make a normal appointment with a normal doctor. The stupid answering lady will NOT let me through. She says I need to go to the ER.

I do not think this is an emergency-room problem.

There’s an urgent care place just down the street. I get in the car and drive over there. Naturally, it’s closed.

Why call it “urgent care” if you’re not going to be open when people urgently need care?

So I end up driving up to the Mayo’s ER.

This consumes most of the fuckin’ morning. The doctor there, after a cursory look, says he thinks it’s an infection and prescribes an antibiotic.

Fortunately, the copay only cost me a dollar at the Walmart, since it made my tongue turn red and swell up and my lips tingle like they were getting ready to explode.

Dropped a Benadryl, which beat that back to some degree. Called the quack’s office, which by now was open. She prescribed another antibiotic, one that has to be taken every six hours, on the button. Luckily I wake up at four in the morning every night anyway….

So now I’m ripping up my already tender innards some more with a drug I do not believe is appropriate for the purpose. I still do not believe this is an infection: there’s no redness, no heat, no fever, no general malaise. I’m as certain as I’m sitting here that it’s a direct reaction to the omeprazole.

But right now I’m too damn tired to argue.

Finally, after endless dicking around, I put the client’s 463-page book to bed last night. But it refused to stay down. As mentioned above, the PDF seemed not to be loading. Screwed around and screwed around with that until I couldn’t screw around another 30 seconds.

At 3:00 this morning, the file was still blank after page 35. Holy shit.

Emailed a desperate cry to my spy at the PoD joint.

Also at 3:00 a.m., I remembered I’d forgotten to edit a Chinese mathematician’s latest paper, in which he and two esteemed colleagues prove mathematically that Twitter works to help diminish contagion in an epidemic. Ripping myself away from the magnum opus, I got to work on that thing. And what a tangle it was: passages where it was hard to tell what the authors intended to say; crazy formatting where it was converted out of Latex into Wyrd.

But better yet: Section 4 was missing! I would’ve seen that if I’d started on the paper the minute my guy had sent it. But I couldn’t — I was fully immersed in two other projects.

Translated that, tidied that, made two copies of that, and sent it off to the client with an offer to read the rest of it ASAP if he’ll send it right along. So far nothing back from him: it’s probably still the middle of the night in China.

About 8:30, the PoD angel e-mailed saying he couldn’t see a problem. He thought we should just go ahead and order the four copies Client wants.

?????????

Now I get back online and lo! There the thing is, in its glorious entirety. Looks as good as it’s going to get at this point. So yea verily, I ordered the four copies Client wants.

Then of course he wants another copy. And note that he wants these by Friday.

Well, I hope they’re done by then. This is Tuesday. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and if I have any sense, I should actually call the Mayo and make an appointment with an ophthalmologist to look at this damn eye. And I had to cancel the mechanic’s appointment to work on the car: that needs to be redone, too. I have a serious suspicion that I’ll be wanting to do something — make that having to do something — far, far away from the Third-World country that is lovely South Phoenix.

Well, the ice pack has probably been on the face long enough to reduce the “blister” enough so I won’t frighten small children. And so, away to run an errand or two. Then back here to drop some Benadryl again. Ugh.

Life in these United States…

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…gets creepier and creepier every day…

Just imagine giving this guy access to that kind of data collection by virtue of the nation’s highest public office… Because Big Brother isn’t the government bound by the US Constitution but is a company that can be subpoenaed, just about every detail of our private lives is accessible not just to anybody who wants to sell us something or push ads in our faces, but to anybody who wants to control our behavior and our thinking. Or put us in jail because we don’t agree with their thinking.

big brother...watching you
big brother…watching you

Image: Scanrail; Depositphotos

All Done In…

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So I started at about 5:30 this morning. It’s 7:30 p.m. and I’m knocking off. That’s…what? Fourteen hours, interruptus…

Paused to walk the dogs (40 minutes), clean the pool (half an hour), and dicker with an Apple tech to get my email back online (probably another 20 or 30 minutes, not counting time spent steaming at Apple’s obnoxious telephone Muzak). So about an even 12-hour workday. Nice.

I’ve created not one, not two, not three, but eight renditions for Honored Client’s book cover. Excessive, I know. But…though I’ve now generated about 30 book covers for my own fine literature, this is the first cover art I’ve ever done for someone else. And I really would like it to be right. I really, really want him to be happy with it.

We’ll see.

Two of the covers are pretty good. The problem is, we’re working with images he took himself during a lifetime of world travel. He has some wonderful pictures documenting some wonderful adventures, but the quality of the images leaves something to be desired. Even the best of those old point-and-shoot cameras left something to be desired…like resolution, for one.

Later in his travels, he got his hands on a high-quality digital camera, and those images are close to print-quality. But from among those, I’ve only got one candidate for cover art.

One picture is extremely cool: it’s a Gypsy family, presumably in Romania, riding atop a haystack on a horse-drawn wagon. The people in the image are mostly kids. It’s really a kick. But when you take one of these things and blow it up to fit a 5.5 x 8.5-inch cover — or worse, try to wrap it around front to back to get fancy with the thing — it pixelates. Big time.

Tried sharpening it with one of those online photo editors. When set site-by-side with the original, it doesn’t seem any better. Or any worse. The same…that would be the word we’re groping for here.

In terms of print quality, the best picture he has — also extremely cool — is of a man playing a traditional Ukrainian stringed instrument called a bandura.

The guy’s performing on a sidewalk in front of a shop, the door behind him open and the shop window plastered with come-ons and advertisements. The picture is as clear and crisp as you could possibly want. Trouble is, when I set it up to fill the front cover, all those window ads create a mass of visual static. No matter what you try to do with the cover lines, no matter how big you make them, no matter how loud you make them, no matter how white you make them, no matter what kind of shadows or glow or whatever you manipulate, they’re lost. Unreadable.

So  I ended up cropping the thing to create some space above the image for the title and subtitle. The byline could run across the gray stone sidewalk with no problem. It looks…OK. Better than most of the others because it has enough resolution to hold up to some abuse. But not as good as it would’ve looked had I been able to use the entire image to fill the front cover.

We’ll see how that goes over. Tomorrow the client will be here to inspect all these efforts.

Meanwhile, today I also plowed through another chunk of textual analysis of Semiramus narratives ranging from the 1st century AD to the early modern period. If I ever reach the end of this chapter (which just now seems questionable), I’ll be halfway through.

The current Chinese graduate student is quiescent for the nonce, presumably wrestling another chapter of her dissertation into shape. I believe she’s past the deadline for her extension, so I hope her director hasn’t knocked her out with the Nerf bat.

With three large projects on the burner, what should one of the CLS co-editors do but load up a new article for the next issue. Holy sh!t.

Hope to foist that onto the Kid, assuming she’s back from the honeymoon and not completely smothered with the work that will have piled up during that excursion. If she can’t do it, then I’ll have to. How, exactly, escapes me.

MacShafted

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Give me back my index cards and my typewriter, please! Granted, the Mac is better than the PC. That does seem to be so. But it’s still a computer and it still is designed to inject as many headaches and hassles into your life as possible.

I have to say, at least Apple has some customer service. With a PC, you’re on your own. Still…yesterday, two of the three CSRs who tried to solve the problem had no idea what they were talking about; a third figured it out — or rather, the two of us did, together — but only by sheer persistence. And during the course of that marathon hassle, I learned that if I update my OS to the latest Scenic Wonder, “El Capitan,” it probably will disable my Office for Mac programs.

Holy sh!t.

It sucked FIVE HOURS out of a day burdened with a huge editorial project (with two others in the wings) to learn that the reason my e-mail program was crashing random incoming mails is that MacMail was not deleting messages consigned to “Trash,” as it was supposedly programmed to do.

A few years ago, I set MacMail to delete items in the “Trash” folder once a month. Then, as they came in, I flagged spam messages and Twaddle, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest notifications to go direct to “Trash.” In theory, all of these attention-distracters were being disappeared automatically.

In reality? Not so much.

After an interminable exchange over the phone with one of Apple’s factotums, we discovered that something over three thousand messages had accrued somewhere in the accursed Cloud. And because all Apple computers now function to some degree in the Cloud even if you haven’t bought into the idea that you should store all your data there, all this stuff was building up like dental plaque somewhere in the Cloud.

Fixing this entailed a trip to the Apple store, explaining to a “Genius” what was going on, listening to his theory, discovering that it was wrong, being told it was something on the Cloud that he wasn’t allowed to mess with, making an appointment to talk by phone with someone somewhere in the bowels of Apple Corp, (is that Core?), jawing with her for quite a while, thinking she’d figured out how to fix it, discovering she hadn’t; calling back, hassling to get another person on the phone, explaining the whole mess over AGAIN, and then hanging on the phone for two hours while we tried to figure out the problem.

Ultimately we figured out that something over THREE THOUSAND junk messages were hiding in Computer Hell.

They could not be killed off by highlighting all and deleting all. It looked like I was going to have to delete them one at a time, guaranteeing a permanent case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Finally we figured out that I could highlight & delete about a dozen at a time. So it took all afternoon to clean all these out. This was after I’d sunk god only knows how much time, a few days earlier, disabling and deleting all my “Rules.” At one point, the Cloud was cloning deleted messages and re-saving 21 iterations of each. It took FOREVER to get rid of them.

It looks like MacMail is probably working again. You can tell by the volume of spam and junk pouring into the inbox… Lovely.

The guy on the phone suggested waiting two or three days to be sure all messages are getting through before trying to reinstate anti-spam “Rules.” So now my Inbox is filling up with junk faster than I can kill it off.

What. a. NIGHTMARE. hassle.

Meanwhile, the gigantic task of indexing 350 pages of Anglo-Saxon art history got put on hold.

Yesterday I intended to enter another marked-up chapter’s worth of index entries in Wyrd. Instead, I carried an unread article to the Apple store so I could start marking it up. Despite making an appointment with their “Geniuses,”  you still end up sitting around a noisy, crowded store for quite a while before you get service. Conveniently, though, they let you sit at a table while you wait, making it possible to cram in some work. In between episodes, I continued to mark up page proofs.

And these are some page proofs. This particular author finds himself fascinated with a specific Old English word-suffix combination, from which he believes he can deduce any number of enlightenments about monastic culture and theo-political thinking during the Benedictine Reform. At one point, the guy surveyed existing literature and counted 137 occurrences of this linguistic combination.

Holy sh!t. Can you even imagine how OCD you’d have to be to do that?

On my end, speaking of OCD, I have have found Word for Mac’s keyboard commands for the letter eth (ð) and the letter thorne (þ) to be somewhat wanting. For the eth, Wyrd’s keyboard command creates a thing that looks like an italic version without the crossbar; for the thorne, it creates…nothing. It does, however, do a nice job with Æ and æ. That’s something. I guess.

Fortunately, WordPress has these characters, which can be copied and pasted into a Wyrd file, thereby making it possible to do the job without begging the client to replace substitute symbols out of his specialized software.

And speaking of Wyrd…the guy who was helping me on the phone remarked that my system needs to be updated to the latest operating system, cutely named El Capitan. I said that I had not updated to the newer Big Cats or to the latest Scenic Delight because I had lost the use of a key program in an earlier update and I do not wish to lose the use of any more programs. He allowed as to how El Capitan could disable Wyrd 2008 for Mac. This would require me to update to Wyrd 2013 (or, more simply, to close down my business altogether…). I hate, hate, HATE  the fucking “Ribbon,” and I have exactly zero desire to work with my own and my clients’ files in Microsoft’s “Cloud,” nor am I going to end up paying far, far more than the program’s real value by being forced to buy a monthly subscription.

When you look it up, you find that issues with Wyrd 2008 are mixed: some people say the program still works, others say it’s broken. There’s not much you can do about this, since Microsoft stopped supporting 2008 some time back, partly by way of herding its sheep customers into the Cloud Corral. Eventually you learn that the program will work if it was already resident on the upgraded machine, but you can’t install it anew under El Capitan:

Users report that they cannot install Microsoft Office 2008 (out of date) on El Capitan. If Office 2008 was already installed on Yosemite and you upgrade to El Capitan, it will work.

And in the unholy hassle department, here’s what we’re told you have to waste time doing to “get ready” for El Capitan:

  • Use Software Update to keep all Apple software up to date, including the OS.
  • Apply all free updates to other software you use.
  • Set up an external hard drive and use Time Machine.
  • Add more RAM if you can.
  • Fix damaged and duplicate fonts.
  • Use Disk Utility to repair permissions on your hard drive. (This is safe to do, and quick.)
  • If you are running a version of Mac OS X earlier than Snow Leopard, you will have to install Snow Leopard first. You can buy an installer disc for Snow Leopard from Apple’s web site for $20.

Read on, and you learn the thing disables any number of programs, including anything that’s called a “Power PC” program (whatever that is). And of course, it assassinates yet another expensive Adobe program.

Mac is hardly alone in blithely robbing consumers of programs they need through “recommended” or “required” upgrades of its operating systems. Microsoft’s 2010 Office upgrade, for example, would delete all of an upgrading user’s Access and Outlook files, without asking permission to do so.

Y’know…if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! What the frack is the point of these endless time-consuming upgrades that don’t do much except complicate people’s lives?

Truly. This is the sort of thing that makes me crave — more and more often! — to go back to my IBM Selectric and my Smith-Corona. At least they couldn’t be “upgraded” by some arrogant corporation.

Trust no one.

Disconnecting: A Good Thing?

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DayUM but I’m sick of the whole time-sucking, tooth-grinding, sub-minimum-waging computer effing CONNECTED goddamn THING. Here’s a question (by way of getting a word in the title into the first graf, as an SEO thing): what if, what IF you disconnected (got that, Google? DISCONNECTING!) about every second day? Yeah, you got that right: what if every other day you refrained from signing on to your computer, your tablet, your phone, your whateverTF?

Oh, let’s go all the way: what would happen if you only signed in every third day? What if you read your email and cruised the net and dorked around with your social media no more often than once every three days? What if you reserved the third out of every three days for computer connectivity, and all the rest of the time you reclaimed for your SELF?

Dare one suggest that your sanity might be much bolstered by such a scheme? Dare one suggest that, in fact, you might regain a grip on your humanity?

This morning as I was driving out to the Thursday wee-hours meeting in Scottsdale, a thought intruded on the zen-like calm elicited by sharing the roads with several thousand fellow homicidal drivers:

• I want my ranch back.
• I want my horses back.
• In specific, I want a propane refrigerator and a propane range and water running in from the Hassayampa and a stockpond full of bass and couple of candles for light after dark and my dogs chasing after me and Babe as we roam across the landscape and Ruby trying to catch a cow and most specifically I do not want a fucking computer yammering at me.
• At 7:16 in the morning, I want not to be running effing LATE to a business meeting but saddling up Babe for a day-long amble through the back-country of a thousand BLM acres.
• I want to spend the day exploring the back-country by horseback, not exploring the Internet by keyboard.
• I want my effing life NOT to come to an end because Cox’s effing connection to the effing Internet goes down for half a day. Or for any length of time.

My life is wonderful and urban and technologically enhanced and amazing and unimaginable just a couple of decades ago and godDAMN but I hate it.

Is there anyone out there, anywhere, who wants as much as I do to be FREE of the technological glory that is Life in Twenty-First Century America? Am I the only person on this planet who would dare suggest our lives today represent some kind of Hell?

We have, it must be said, devices (naturally…) to help us avoid wasting exorbitant numbers of hours on the Internet.

But I don’t think that’s the issue. To use moi as an example again: Although I do waste a certain amount of time on the Net reading the news and playing repetitive computer games, in fact MOST of the time stolen from my life is devoted to work: writing blog posts; tracking down factoids; downloading, storing, and documenting Shutterstock images; keeping a grip on the vast organizational challenges entailed in coordinating the publishing, editing, writing, and blogging empires; paying bills online; managing blogsites; riding herd on the freaking endlessly fire-hosing e-mail; creating a “presence” on other sites…and on and on. Most of this is work-related or IRS-related.

Most of the time absorbed by Connectivity has to do with business or with attempts to make some kind of profit.

And most of that profit, to the extent it exists at all, is minuscule. The Third-Worldization of educated American workers happens through a computer portal. The miraculous technology that infests our lives has taken us back the the sweatshop.

So I wonder: what would happen if we time-stamped ourselves out of the sweatshop? What if we restricted computer time to once every other day or once every third day? Would we not, given a shorter time frame, accomplish the same amount of online work in fewer hours, simply because we would have to focus on getting through x or y amount of work in half or a third as much time? And would our professional and personal lives come to an end if all we did on the Net was specifically related to a given client or job? And the rest of it went away because we limited the number of hours online?

What I propose is not exactly going off the grid (although just at this moment I would be beside myself with joy to find a practical way to do so). The question is, can we go partly off the grid without watching our lives grind to a halt?

Goodreads: The Last Social-Media Straw

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Dear GOD how I hate these accursed faceless social media platforms, with their horrid “help” pages that run you around and around and around circles and don’t answer your question and seem to have been designed solely to frustrate users.

It’s been a while since I visited Goodreads. I need to get back into my author page, update my booklist, and start a blog. But GR has decided I’m “not a member,” even though it seems to recognize  me, sort of.

It wanted a password. I entered the pw I have in my records. It rejected that password. I clicked “forgot password.” It emailed a link to reset the password. I jumped through that hoop. When I tried to get in, it ran me RIGHT BACK TO THE SAME HOOP JUMP!

It asks me to enter a password, flicks me the electronic finger, and then tells me to enter my email and if it approves it will send me a link. I jump through that hoop again…with the same result.

GoodreadsAnnoyance

Your choice is to “confirm” with a password or, astonishingly, to “confirm with Facebook.”

FACEBOOK? Why on earth would I want Facebook to have my Goodreads credentials or to “confirm” that I’m me or even to know that I’m on Goodreads?

It apparently is a choice (of sorts): either enter a password or “confirm” (whatever that means) with Facebook.

Over the past months, I’ve put off going back to Goodreads, even though it’s supposedly a key marketing tool, because I got so mad the first time I signed in there that my password is a near-obscenity. Because three of my books — published through real publishers, not through Amazon — came out under variants of my full name, they won’t let me post the Racy Books at my Goodreads site, because they’re published under the “Roberta Stuart” pseudonym. None of my bylines are pseudonyms.

My parents gave me a clunky, old-fashioned, ugly first name that made me the target of bullying throughout grade school. When we came back to the states, I started using a nickname based on my middle name. As a journalist, this was my standard byline, and The Essential Feature, a journalism textbook, naturally was published under that byline. But I had used my full formal name for my first book: a historical biography that grew out of my Ph.D. dissertation.

The first business partner I had, back in the day, was a marketing & PR guy of some skill. He felt I should go by the full, more formal-sounding middle name, which is also stuffy and stilted but at least most people can pronounce and spell it. So my third book had that name, and I still use it for business.

Amazon and its purchased underling Goodreads have decreed that a legal name consisting of three fungible parts — a first name, a middle name, and a last name — is actually three pseudonyms! No argument to the contrary is brooked.

That means, of course, that I can’t use Goodreads to market the steady stream of books we planned to emit — and have emitted — through Camptown Races Press! Goodreads had already glommed what it announced were “pseudonyms” from the books Columbia, Folger, and William Morrow had posted on Amazon years ago and so would not allow me to add a real pseudonym.

When I protested this, a CSR came back with an elaborate workaround. It was so complicated and promised to be such a vast time-suck that I was put off and let the whole project drop. Then I ended up in the operating room.

The medical nightmare was such a distraction that it was all I could do to try to meet our original goal of publishing 80 to 100 books within the year. Anything that was aversive — or that had an aversive element — got tabled. And the most solidly tabled of those was Goodreads, primarily because the first experience with it started off in full aversive mode.

Much as I dislike toilet-paper-style social media platforms, I did take up Twitter to a lesser extent Facebook. Facebook is inhabited by my coreligionists, whom I would rather not proselytize with Racy Books. So Twitter was pretty much it.

And the result was not very successful, probably because I don’t understand the point of social media and so don’t understand how to address them.

Magazines, books: I know why people read them, and I know how to reach magazine and book readers. Blogs are to a  large degree similar: you can see a reason that a person might want to read a given blog. A blog is magazine-like in that it has an editorial voice, it usually has a specific topic or slant, and it has a relatively consistent publication schedule.

But an endless, gestalt flow of nonstop babble about…what? Trivia? Cat pictures? Kid photos? The latest house you sold? That plate of food you bought at Alice’s Restaurant? Why? What is the appeal?????

Social media of the Facebook/Twaddle/Google+/Goodreads variety seem to me more like small talk than like journalism. And I’m really not good at small talk.  Because it bores me, I lack the patience to engage it for very long or to come back for repeat engagements. It’s part of the Aspergery character of my personality: I don’t connect with people in that way.

And…I don’t want to be “connected.” Not that I don’t like people. Most of them, I do. It’s just that I don’t want to be all over them, and I don’t want them all over me. 😉

So. I don’t know if I’ll ever get on Goodreads. And quite possibly don’t care.

***

Meanwhile, print copies of the cookbook have been flying out the door! It’s sold a few electronic copies on Amazon (why anyone would want an electronic device on a kitchen counter while water, olive oil, butter, and flour are floating around escapes me, what what the hey?). But I can barely keep up with the requests for hard copies.

Interesting.

So I’m thinking my real social medium may be Toastmasters. This would give me an opportunity to talk about writing and thence segue into mentioning my books. I’m pretty good at public speaking, after 20 years of teaching in a college classroom. But people I’ve met who’ve been to Toastmasters are really good at it. One woman who gave our writing group a presentation on public speaking was so skilled as to be downright gifted. She came across exactly like one of those people who give TED talks.

Maybe what I need is not to be parked in front of a computer poking useless messages into “social” media but out on the road, talking to live people face to face.