I have not cared for my neighbors as I would have them care for me. Oh, Hell. I have not cared for myself as I should have cared for my neighbors.
• I have not established a presence on Goodreads, for the 87 gerjillionth day since I said I would do so. • I have not prepared the February books to publish. • I have not written this blog post. • I have not shopped 30 Pounds/4 Months around locally. • I have not prepared Fire-Rider, volumes 2 and 3, for print publication. • I have not even checked the PoD site today to see if the other two books I set up there have shipped. • I have not changed out the ads at Smart Bitches/Trashy Books • I have not picked up the house so the Apple tech who’s slated to show up here tomorrow will be freed of seeing what a pigpen I live in. • I have not posted on hated Facebook. • I have not posted on even more hated Twitter. • I have had nothing whatsoever to say on pointless Google+. • I have not cleaned the leaves off the bottom of the pool, the ones that blew in there three days ago and have been pickling ever since. • I have not walked the dogs (again!). • I have not walked myself (again!!!). • I have not filled the gas tank so I can make it way to Hell and gone out to Avondale come Saturday. • I have not made Sheldon’s Scottsdale Business Association badge, and probably will not before I go to bed tonight. • I have not pestered Jim to get him to update the SBA website. • I have not paid my own Web guru. • I have not…
What have I done?
• I have edited a lengthy new chapter from fave fiction author and returned it to him with various comments. • I have sent said author an interesting article from the New York Review of Books that I suspected he would enjoy reading. • I have corresponded with the same (author, that is; not the Review) about the ways in which the article seems to me to bear on the theme and technique of his current magnum opus. • I have sent out the weekly SBA notice and fielded a cute but time-wasting response from a member. • I have edited a number of pages of a chapter from a prospective client. • I have discussed conversion of said client’s complex document with Honored eBook Guru. • I have sent the sample edits to the proposed client with an elaborate proposal quoting rates for editing, e-book conversion, hard-copy preparation, cover design, and publication management. • I have once again attacked the problem of the diet/cookbook’s perennially cockamamie formatting problems in hated Kindle format. • I have uploaded dorked with downloaded uploaded downloaded dorked with uploaded downloaded dorked with uploaded the many-times-revised file more times than I can count. • I have called my own ePub formatter off so that she does not attempt to upload the thing into ePub, which will be just so much wasted effort. • I have re-evaluated, revised, expanded, and rewritten The Copyeditor’s Desk’s rate sheet. • I have somehow managed to curl my hair and feed the dogs. • I have belatedly gotten around to finding the W-9s I should have carried over to WonderAccountant.
In my old age, the glories of a lot of things the Moderns love do escape me. Facebook? Biggest corporate escape artist in town. Between its habitual invasion of privacy and its faceless corporate obstinacy, I find Facebook utterly obnoxious. I’ve never been able to figure out its appeal, but the more I’m forced to know about it, the less I grasp people’s fascination with it.
Facebook appears to have stopped reposting from Funny about Money. At least, it has if you believe JetPack, whose corporate credibility strikes one as a lot more reliable than Facebook’s.
Because I have no patience with Facebook and do not wish to consume the few hours remaining to me on this earth with learning how to operate a system whose point goes over my head, I hired an ad manager to run a Facebooks Ads campaign to publicize Fire-Rider and the diet/cookbook. She asked for my log-in details so she could set up an ad account for me.
Turns out Facebook, like Big Brother, is always watching you. Its machinery noted that someone was logging in from a different ISP than my Macbook and so they canceled the ad account, took down the ad campaign to which she had devoted a number of hours, and forced me to dream up a new password. When I asked for my money back (turns out the business of spying on your ISP is a known issue with FB — apparently no normal person can be expected to log in to FB from more than one computer), she came up with a workaround. It remains to be seen how long Big Brother is going to let that stay in place.
Understand: the feed from Funny was set up years ago by a long-since retired WordPress guru. She’s not even in the blogging business anymore. I wouldn’t have known how to set up a blog feed into Facebook, nor would I have been inclined to do so without said guru’s prompting — FB doesn’t interest me and I wouldn’t have signed up at all except for the choir’s insistence that everyone must go online.
JetPack makes it easy to feed blog posts to WordPress — thereby increasing everyone’s potential for pointless clutter by vast orders of magnitude. So with the latest update, it asked me to “refresh” FaM’s connection to FB. Obediently, the little sheeple did so.
It — JetPack — seems to have had no problem connecting Writers Plain & Simple to my Facebook feed, but it no longer can get Funny online, apparently because FaM is posted with the old password. I have no idea how to fix this, and I’m pissed.
Not that the world rotates around FaM. But since I’ve drifted away from PF blogging per se, FaM has become my personal blog. The old connection with FB, then, made it easy to update friends about whatever is, famously, “on my mind” (grrrrr! patronizing bastards) without having to log in and upload links or post bleats.
Among the many things I dislike about Facebook is the lack of control you have over what goes up on the thing. Facebook is like the Borg: We will assimilate you. It’s spying on you everywhere you go, and it seems to pick up messages for group B that you really would not like to share with group A among your friends, family and associates.
Why do Facebook’s arrogant developers fail to grasp the possibility that you might not want your church group to know about your spicy publishing venture? I do not publish porn because I so love it. I publish porn because I can’t make a living at teaching, a trade that now pays less than minimum wage. It’s not something I want anyone but porn readers to know about.
Facebook makes it difficult — IMHO probably impossible — to separate out groups of acquaintances and friends. It mandates against setting up more than one “account,” and the thing is set up to confound efforts to send out messages to targeted groups and still actually reach those groups. In theory it’s possible to do so, but who trusts Facebook? The risk that a message for Audience A will end up being shoved in the faces of Audience B is definitely there. And IMHO, any such risk is too much risk.
Do you ever wonder if at some point along the line you’ve blown a mental fuse? Slipped a cog? Dropped off the trolley cable?
Lately, “competence” does not seem to be my middle name. I never functioned at the level of one of those astonishing admins who keeps a department together and running with Scotch tape and paper clips. But as I recall, I wasn’t a total fool.
And also lately — much more to the point — it seems to me that I’m not getting things done at the rate I used to. It’s more like I can’t get them done in the time I’m accustomed to expecting. And one interruption — just one, dammit — will throw a whole day off, insuring that absolutely positively nothing gets done.
Today the schedule looked like this:
•Collect last six Fire-Rider stories and lay them out for Kindle publication •Obtain ISBN for the same •Convert to Mobi format; proofread; fix; reconvert •Post to Amazon •Lay out first FR collection for print production at new PoD guy’s site •Check to see if diet/cookbook proofs are ready; drive to south Phoenix, proof, approve (I hope) and order books for sale •Walk dogs •Try again to buy ads on SBTB •Search for similar website for speculative fiction or sagas •Work on establishing presence on Goodreads
But instead, here’s how it’s gone:
•Write, by email, a detailed explanation for ad manager of why I dislike and distrust Faceboook and what leads me to believe, despite her assurances to the contrary, that some risk exists for posts to any page established in my FB account to be distributed to my “friends” on the page that has nothing to do with racy books; explain why Racy Books writers and I established a “secret” page to avoid that happening •Make a decision about what to do next in the ad campaign, if anything, now that FB has screwed us. Explain in detail to ad manager •Write a post on the Facebook page for The Copyeditor’s Desk, which I had forgotten •Correspond with reader who wants to buy a copy of 30 Pounds/4 months •Correspond with accountant and with Web guru over whether Web guru needs to get a 1099 •Pick up mess before cleaning lady gets here •File loose paperwork •Get email from client summoning me to meet with him to kill another afternoon going over every one of my edits, and to discuss cost of P&S Press producing his book in hard copy…AT 2 P.M. TODAY •Prepare a two-page estimate of costs, broken down by task and comparing our estimate with the going rates posted at various sites on Google •Throw on my clothes •Paint my face •Set and comb my hair •Bolt down a few bites of cold roast chicken •Fly out the door
One of the delights of old age is that you can’t find anything unless it’s sitting in its accustomed spot. If you put ANYTHING down where you don’t usually put it down, you might as well have taken it out to the alley and tossed it in the garbage can. Ah yes. The joys of your golden years…
I just bought these gadgets to fight back said joys. How kewl is this?
It’s a set of FOUR radio-activated squawking doohickeys that you can attach to things you’re apt to lose. As soon as the package gets here, one of them is going right on the key ring (assuming the key ring isn’t permanently lost by the next Wednesday, when Amazon promises to deliver it). The other three are going to get Velcroed to phone extensions.
To what, you ask, to we owe this $30 pleasure?
Well, I’ve been sick as a proverbial dog since the 29th — that’s how long it’s been since I’ve gone out of the house. Most of the time has been spent literally sick in bed. Today was the first in four days since I’ve felt like walking around the block.
Normally when I come in the house, I stick the keys in the lock to my office. Take note of that, because…
Once you get past the age of about 60 or 65, if you don’t put the small incidental junk of life down in your accustomed places, you cannot find things. That’s because when you don’t put things down in the same place every single time, you can’t remember were you put it!
That is not an exaggeration. Ask any old bat and they’ll tell you.
Keys and phones are the bane of my life.
So this afternoon is beautiful and today is the first day I’ve felt well enough to move around. Wanted to take the doggies for a stroll. Went to get the keys out of the office door and, wouldn’tcha know it: no keys.
Searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and could NOT find them. Finally in a moment of desperation, I called my son. Sometimes I can look right straight at something and not see it, so there was an outside chance that a fresh pair of eyes could find the lost keys.
Making a call like this is never a jolly thing to do: he does not like his days off interrupted by frantic appeals from his enfeebled mother, who was crazy enough before she started to lose her marbles and who now drives him bats. Unhappily, he agreed to come over later — much later — to help me look
Beside myself with frustration and anger, I walked into the kitchen, glanced at the fridge, and remembered…hm…sometimes I carelessly drop the keys in with the dogs’ leashes and collars, which are stored in a basket atop the refrigerator. I didn’t think I’d taken the dogs out since last Tuesday. But checked anyway, on the off-chance.
And lo! There were the keys, right where I’d dropped them, without a second thought.
Those doohickeys would have saved me about 15 minutes of increasingly frantic searching plus a disagreeable phone call to my unsympathetic son.
Just you wait, kid. One day you’ll be 70, too…
Do you realize that when he’s seventy I’ll be 104?
How can I do without being spied on by Google at every damn turn? Let me COUNT the ways!!!!!
Really, the invasion of privacy that company inflicts should be prohibited by federal law. It should be effing ILLEGAL to track you around the Internet and track every one of your correspondents, too.
In fact, if Google were a government agency, it would have to get a subpoena to engage in the kind of spying into our personal lives that it does routinely. The reason it gets away with it? It’s a corporation. Because the Founding Fathers could no more have envisioned a world dictated by computer technology than they could have imagined taking a stroll on the moon, it never occurred to them to extend constitutional protections against overweening government to the real government that one day would evolve.
That would be the corporate shadow government, the one that dictates how we live, what we eat, where we work, how much we’re paid, whether we can borrow money and at what rate, whether we can insure ourselves against financial ruin in the event of accident, sickness, or natural disaster…actually, when you think about it, the one that dictates just about every aspect of our daily lives.
This morning I RSVP’ed to an upcoming meeting of a writer’s group I belong to. This group happens to have a Meetup.com site. And Meetup.com is synced with — who else? Google, of course. Within seconds after RSVPing that I would attend, in came an email informing me that Google has automatically installed a notice of the meeting in one of my several Google calendars (all of them, for all I know!) and that it will be sending me an email reminder. Lucky me! Here was a wonderful new G-service!
God damn it. Now I had to get into not one, not two, but three G-mail accounts and disable the damn calendars’ automatic notification. Yet another electronic time-suck. Really: do you need your time wasted that way? I sure don’t, and I’ll bet you don’t, either.
If I wanted Google Calendar to pester me with email reminders, I would proactively ask it to do so. The reason I don’t is that I tried Google Calendar and found it to be an endless hassle and annoyance. Annoyance annoyance ANNOYANCE! I do not WANT to be binged, pinged, and emailed for every deep breath I’m about to take. I don’t WANT Google to record every meeting I attend and every meeting I decline to attend.
So I quit using Google Calendar. I use iCal, which a) is resident on my machine and does not require me to go out on the Net to enter events, b) is easier to control, and c) can be persuaded not to make you crazy. I haven’t used Google Calendar in years.
Wouldn’t you think that would tell them something?
But ohhh no! Willy nilly, whether you love their tool or hate it, they’re going to push it in your face. That’s because they have THEIR corporate face pushed up your butt.
So why, you ask, do I use Gmail at all? No Gmail, no nuisance “calendar,” eh?
Well, because…
•I own a business and need a business address separate from my personal address. •That business needs two “addresses,” one for the publishing enterprise and one for the editorial business. •And I have a G-mail address that I use when forced to provide an email address to people I do not wish to share my address with, and to organizations that I believe are going to spam me. •If you own a small business and can’t afford your own server and an in-house IT team to run it, you don’t have much choice but to use Google. It is, in effect, the only game in town, and because of that, it’s coercive.
One of the biggest mistakes this country has made in recent history was to defang the anti-trust laws. And Google is a prime example of the reason those laws are necessary and should never be watered down.
Consider the aspects of our lives this corporation has its fingers in:
Gmail owns my thermostat, which sends them data (presumably stored someplace) about the amount of electric power I use, the number of hours per day I use the power, and the time of day I use it. Harmless? Maybe. But that’s none of anybody’s business!
Gmail evidently owns Meetup.com, which it markets to just about every volunteer and social group in the country. Every time a group sends out an invite with an RSVP, Google collects data on the group and on every member in the group: who RSVPed and, by extension, who did not RSVP. What groups I belong to and which of their meetings I choose to attend are none of anybody’s business!
Google watches your Web searches, evidently recording those, too, since it never seems to forget what sites you’ve visited in the past. None of anybody’s business!
Google publishes pictures of your home on the Internet, complete with specifics about its location and clearly showing where the doors and windows are, simplifying burglars’ lives. With a vengeance, none of anybody’s business!
Google owns Motorola Mobility, which has to do with your Android phone. How much information that’s none of anybody’s business are they collecting from that?
Google owns YouTube (which, we might add, it has nicely broken). It knows what videos you watch and which you post to your websites. None of anybody’s business!
Come to think of it, Google knows all about what you write on your websites. Of course. What you choose to post to the Internet by default becomes everybody’s business. But that’s about it.
Google owns 180 companies, many of which have reason and capacity to collect and store data about you, your comings, and your goings. It may very well be the largest spy network on the planet.
Soon it will be producing electric cars, which will track and record all your movements about your city, town, and country. Those movements are already being tracked to a degree if you have a newer vehicle that’s “connected” to the Net. But when you’re driving a Google car, bank on it: every trip to the grocery store, every trip to your mother-in-law’s, every visit to your paramour or to the local whorehouse is going to be seen and recorded.
And why is this legal? Why has intrusion into our daily lives become so routine we sheeple hardly even notice it? Pretty obvious, isn’t it: the other 99% of us can’t afford to buy Congressmen and Senators, that’s why.
When corporate America can buy the government, folks, it is the government. If you’re not mad about that, you sure as hell should be!
So I seem to have slandered the USPS in claiming they delivered an order of Racy Books to my feckless neighbor, and compounded the sin by accusing feckless neighbor of tossing the things in his fog of mental confusion. Yet another mail disappearance has occurred, and this time the evidence of theft was unmistakable.
Roomie, being an opera singer, wears stage make-up and other types of very high quality emollients and fancifications. She ordered an item from a New York City cosmetics company she likes to do business with. It was supposed to have arrived Christmas Eve.
As you might be guessing, it did not.
When I got home from yesterday evening’s party, I found a ripped-open, empty box and a message from a neighbor:
We found this as is in our front yard last night (12/24) when we returned home around 6:30 p.m. We wanted you to know that it’s possible someone opened your mail and stole it in case you were expecting this…
Ya think? 🙂
It was nice of them to bring it over…wish someone had done the same with the box for the missing books.
So, case closed: someone definitely is stealing my mail.
Now I have to pony up $200 for a relatively secure locking mailbox. Most specimens under that price can be prized open easily with a pocket screwdriver. The Epoch Boss seems to be about the best reviewed at Amazon. Of course, the local HD doesn’t carry it. So I had to mail-order the damn thing.
A-n-n-d I’ll have to pay a handyman to come install the damn thing.
Infuriating.
Meanwhile, AMEX confirmed that this month’s bills had been mailed out in plenty of time to get here. So the thieves have those, too. I arranged for AMEX to mail to the new private (effing expensive!!) PO Box. Meanwhile, who knows what else they’ve stolen? Probably year-end statements and tax paper from Fidelity and the community college district. And checks from Medicare and Medigap…
I am going to be in deep trouble if stolen Medicare and insurance checks have gone unnoticed…dayum!
Briefly, I planned to go over to the Post Office and fill out a form to have all the mail forwarded to the new private mailbox. On second thought, though, that seems like an unnecessary time suck. The barn door is open and the cows have run off, so any such line-standing, form-filling hassle and explanation hassle (x 2, because it would all have to be repeated after the security mailbox is installed) would be a pointless waste of time.
So as it stands, the supposedly jimmy-resistant locking mailbox should get here on the 30th. Handyman from Heaven will come by in the first week of the New Year. And shortly afterward, I’ll change the address for AMEX and assorted vendors back to that of my house. Between now and then, every day I watch for the MailPerson and race outside to grab the mail the instant I hear the mail truck putter on down the street.
