The Human is scarfing down an exceptionally nice lunch/dinner thing with possibly more wine than should be allowed. The dogs are begging treats supplied by an exceptionally nice (and clever) church matron who makes them by hand in her kitchen. A gentle rain is falling, and now the Human is wrapping up lunch/dinner/thing with a final glass of wine and a rich dessert of…yeah…chocolate chips.
A voice from somewhere behind the lowering clouds pierces the sky:
Celestial Voice: What do you think you’re doing?
Human:(choke cough!) Uhmm…eating?
Celestial Voice:You’ve been “eating” for half the afternoon. When exactly do you propose to get any work done?
Human:Work? I’ve already rebuilt a template for hard-copy book formatting today.
Celestial Voice:Very nice. How about you actually do something constructive, like, say, FORMAT a book? And even maybe go so far as to publish the thing?
Human:Gimme a break, Your Vastness! I spent the whole darned evening last night and half this morning singing to your Holy Magnificence and helping to hustle cash to support your devotees.
Celestial Voice:Do I look fat in this radiant gown? It’s my favorite radiant gown!
Human:Oh, no, Your…uhm, Your Radiance! You look absolutely perfect!
Celestial Voice:Naturally. I embody perfection. To the extent that there’s any body to do any embodying.
Human:Well, Your Radiance, don’t you think that since You knocked off on the seventh day, your underlings should be allowed to knock off on Sunday?
Celestial Voice:That’s a cultural construct. How do you know Sunday was Day Seven? Could’ve been Tuesday or Wednesday or whatEVER.
Human:So, does Your Radiance mean I can knock off on Tuesday or Wednesday, too?
Celestial Voice:Surely. Assuming bankruptcy is a goal coveted by your species…
{Sigh} God as academic…
Oh well.
The Entrepreneurial Human is a) too tired to breathe, and b) too depressed by current events to function.
Today is Seabury Sunday in the Episcopal tradition. Under normal circumstances, it’s entertaining: we have a delightful band of Scottish pipers and drummers march us in and out with bagpipes, quite an impressive performance.
But.
You know, we — that would be you and me, my friends — are engaged in a holy war. Most Americans and possibly even most Norteamericanos have yet to notice this, or to fully appreciate its implications. But a holy war is what we have on our hands. We are at war with an evil on a par with Hitler’s Nazism. I grew up with it: Saudi Arabia was my home throughout my childhood, and in those days I had a front-row seat to the growth of a very scary movement.
We are hated by a faction of Evil unlike anything Americans, Canadians, Latin Americans, and Europeans have seen in centuries: Evil allied with religion. Really, it’s beyond our ken. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s an evil that decapitates nine-year-old children, burns caged young men alive, sentences dissenters to thousands of lashes, and murders harmless civilians going about their business. Yesterday’s events in Paris spoke to that.
You understand, bagpipes and drums are tools of war. Take that bit of history, put it inside a church (holy war + holy war: interesting), and combine it with my personal opinion, which is that our only hope is to fully engage the jihadists, NOW not later, with everything we’ve got. And by everything we’ve got, I don’t mean flinging volunteers into the war machine: I believe we need to reinstate the draft so that everyone has a personal stake in what is in fact a menace to Western civilization, and so that everyone can understand on a gut level that we’re facing exactly such a menace.
Yes. I’m retrograde. But I’ll say it anyway:
We are being swept into another world war. The sooner we and our allies grasp that concept, the better our chances of survival. The longer we dawdle about building that understanding and allying ourselves in war with countries that have a vested interest in holding back the forces of darkness, the less likely we will, over the long run, prevail.
At any rate…given the religious overtones of the ISIS attacks on innocent civilians, the presence of a tool of war inside a Christian version of the House of God was, shall we say, disturbing.
So, my friends, if there is a Radiant One, instead of asking “When are you going to get of your duff and get to work,” She may be asking “When are you going to get off your communal duff and bring a stop to this?”
Ruby and Cassie are up and ready to go by 6 a.m. Normally, we would avoid the park on Sunday morning, because gaggles of morons like to meet there on Sundays and let their large dogs run loose. No. It’s not a dog park. Yes, it’s against city and county laws to let your dog run around off the leash. No, none of them gives a damn. They all think their dogs are their children and kids need to run around the park.
However, our usual route, bypassing the park through a neighborhood of aging half-million-dollar shacks, has an inhabitant whom I also would like to avoid at this hour. He’s this adorable, sweet old gentleman, just the nicest old guy. He has an eccentricity: He loves to feed the neighbors’ cats and dogs.
I think he’s lonely, and this little hobby is a way to get out of the house. It also attracts people who like to chat with him. So as hobbies go, it fulfills an important need.
The shade-tree mechanics have a couple of big old scruffy cats, large and fat and calm, fixtures in the neighborhood. These cats live outdoors, left to take their chances with the cars and the pair of coyotes that cohabit the ’hood with them.
Our friend drives up to the front of the mechanics’ house at 6:30 or 7 a.m. every morning, parks, and walks down the side yard with cat food in hand. There he fills the cat-and-coyote dish to the brim. From there he goes around sprinkling piles of dog and cat kibble on the sidewalks.
If he sees a dog-walker, he’ll offer dog treats.
One tries to be polite. I would prefer that Cassie (in particular) not eat these things, because sometimes they make her sick. But more to the point, Cassie the Corgi is getting fat in her old age. And nothing is worse for a corgi than obesity.
It’s very hard to say “no” to this guy. He’s sweetly insistent: “They come from Trader Joe’s! They’re ORGANIC! They’re good for your dog!” Meanwhile, of course, your dogs are salivating and going batshit for the biscuits he’s waving around.
Yesterday, Ruby choked on one of the things. And really, it was looking serious there for a minute. We were half a mile from home and there was NO way I could get her to a vet in time to save her life if she couldn’t get it out of her throat herself.
She gagged and wheezed and horked and gagged and wheezed for several very scary minutes. Finally she managed to get rid of it. Thank God. If she hadn’t, there would be no Ruby to write about this morning.
So…that’s another route we have to avoid. At least early in the morning.
Really, it’s very frustrating.
You can’t go to the park because there’s likely to be half a dozen large out-of-control dogs racing around.
You can’t walk up into Richistan because there’s a crazy old guy who wants to feed your dogs stuff they shouldn’t have.
You can’t walk along Conduit of Blight because of the nitwit woman with the out-of-control Great Dane dragging her down the street, a dog that tries to attack your little corgis every time it sees them.
That doesn’t leave very many directions you can go in.
Think how much better the world would be if there were no humans in it, except for me and you.
Have you ever noticed that a doctor can cure whatever ails you simply by making an appointment with you? Amazing, isn’t it?
My theory: I’ve become so scared of doctors that the very thought of having to see one — let alone having to talk with the critter — scares the peewodden (and the ailment) out of me.
Exactly one-half hour before I have to revisit the gastroenterologist, who was not happy to hear the vast quantities of omeprazole she has me swallowing have made no dent whatsoever in the GERD that arose after the last Adventure in Medical Science. I personally think I have esophageal cancer (of course…who wouldn’t?), but she seems not to be very ruffled by that possibility.
Whatever it is seems to have gotten significantly better since she had her underling call and demand that I come in to see her.
Magic!
Before I forget, in the half-hour before I have to fly out the door:
We’ve LAUNCHED the new “Family at the Holidays” series. It will run through the month of November, right up to that wonderful, scary, fun, hassle-filled annual rite, Thanksgiving Day!
This is the story of a large Latino family whose grown children are summoned (as usual) to the family homestead for a big Thanksgiving reunion. Some have to drive a long way. Others live close-by and so are called upon to show up with food in hand. All of the kids are interesting characters. All of the grand-kids are…well…kids and teenagers. You know what that means. First story is Ruby and Frank in the Bedroom.
The author of this series has quite a nice sense of humor: low-key, mellow, and charming. It’s the kind of thing that leaves you chortling quietly as what she’s saying begins to dawn on you. I really love reading her stories. And yes, they are explicit, that being the nature of erotic romance. But funny.
Feeling reasonably pleased with the cover layout for this one. I think I’m getting better at cover-line design. If I get around to fiddling with it (probably won’t: too much to have to do), I might pull “in the bedroom” up tight against “Ruby and Frank” so that the descender on the “y” in Ruby appears to “hook” one of the letters in the second line.
But maybe not.
I thought making the font shadows pick up the shadowing in the quilt was freaking genius. 😀 Definitely, I missed my calling.
And one last thing: watch this space over the next couple of weeks. I’m going to run two give-aways: one for a fun little business book I picked up, a good and fast read with lots of practical advice; and one for a chance at an expensive gift, either for yourself or for a Christmas present.
Do you ever have days where EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH goes ker-sproinnnggggggggg!And explodes in your hands? All over you?????
Okay, about 90 percent of this is because of my own carelessness. No question, I make a lot of extra work for myself by overlooking a LOT of stupid little mistakes. But DAY-um! There’s just too much of this stuff…and some of it — at least today’s some of it — is not of my concocting.
So I start at 5:30 a.m., as usual, figuring to toss off a short job and then feed the dogs and myself before getting on with the REAL work of the day, which is to plow through at least 50 pages of Most Honored Client’s current iteration of his magnum opus.
First, though, the latest Camptown Races masterpiece is on the schedule: post to Amazon. This is a nuisancey little job that can take half an hour or more, and because it’s a pesty thing to do, I’d like to get it off my plate first, before moving on with my day.
TWO HOURS LATER…finally I clicked “Publish” on the damn thing.
Problem the first: When I upload the cover art, I see that the font color selected for the title and author name is too dim to pop out against the mostly black and dark aqua background.
This is really a very cool, extremely strange and dark Halloween story, and I WANT THOSE COVERLINES TO BE EFFING ORANGE DAMN IT!
None of the oranges in my program’s standard color palette are bright enough, weirdly, to stand out against the dark background. So now I decide to create a shade of orange or red-orange or something that will work.
Three tries later, it’s clear that nothing in the red to orange range is gonna cut the proverbial mustard.
Understand, ONE try can take 8 or ten minutes. Or more, depending on how bad Cox’s “high-speed” (har har!) connection happens to be at any given moment. It takes for-freaking-EVER for a TIFF file to load to Amazon. Not as EVER as an entire MS, but EVER ENOUGH.
Finally I decide to change the font color to yellow. But the standard yellow in my palette is not gonna make it. Too grating. So once again, I have to fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around to develop a shade of yellow that doesn’t make my teeth grind.
(And I’ve broken another crown, BTW, with the tooth-grinding. Good morning to you, too.)
This looks much better. Create TIFF. Upload. Watch Amazon grind away and grind away. View result. Realize the blue “glow” effect is absolutely positively not gonna make it.
Back into the guts of the program. Adjust glow to the newly invented bright orange; transparency (against a black background!) 50 percent. Change color of font line to black. Re-upload. APPROVE! Create new full-size JPEG, create new low-res JPEG, create new thumbnail.
How do you like it, by the way? Is this creepy or is this not creepy? That horse standing in the water is a kelpie, a type of Celtic demon. Be scared. Be VERY scared!
Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.
Upload edited, templated manuscript. Download the .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader.
This process being one that takes forever, I finally get up and feed the dogs, who have gone back to bed.
Problem the next: Amazon detects a half-dozen “spelling errors.” These all appear to be Scottish dialect spellings in the Robert Burns verse I put in the front matter. Just as I click “ignore all,” I spot ONE real typo: Scottish is set lower-case somewhere in the MS.
Yes. Well. But that particular line is the book’s subtitle, which is set all caps, so no one would know whether you typed “Scottish” or “scottish.” However, knowing Amazon, I figure I’d better fix it. They can penalize you if they think you’ve got misspelled words in your MS: apparently part of the upload process is having one of their abused, terrorized wage slaves check the copy before it goes live.
Fix one character, reload. Go brush my teeth while this takes place.
Download the new .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader. Go wash my face while this grinds and grinds and grinds away.
Back to proofing the .mobi file: In said front matter, half of the little definition of what a keltie is appears in italic! WTF? The name of the source, a website, is set italic, but the blurb itself is set roman. I can NOT figure out why a half-dozen words in the blurb appear as italic.
I screw around and SCREW around with this, racking up another couple of interminable uploads and downloads.
Finally I give up, scroll down the page, retype the copy, and retype the source, leaving it roman. Delete the corrupt passage. Pull up space pull up space pull up space.
Upload and download again. Pour another cup of coffee, open the back door and sic the dog on the new accursed cat that’s come over the wall, anti-cat barrier be damned. Takes almost as long to roust the puppy out of the sack as it does to re-download the .mobi file.
Return to proofing copy. The new passage I’ve typed spells “also” as “alos.” Alas.
Fix, upload, download.
And so on to infinity. Of course I find a few other errors. By the time this process is finished, it’s 7:30 in the morning! I haven’t had anything to eat. I haven’t walked the dogs. I haven’t come anywhere NEAR starting the project I’m supposed to be spending the entire day on.
A boxed set of the first six Fire-Rider stories is slated to go live on Wednesday. I haven’t updated the table of contents on a PC.
Yeah. Clever Amazon’s clever Word-to-MOBI converter cannot read the links in a TofC created on or even touched by a Mac computer. Don’t ask.
I send the MS to Tina. In the requisite 20 seconds, she returns it with the TofC updated on one of her terminals.
Now I need to enter new lines to break this thing up into the books it anthologizes. This, I hope and pray, will not fuck up in conversion (you may be sure the “hope” part is pretty forlorn). Ten minutes later I get down to the end of the thing and realize ONE CHAPTER in the last section lacks its numeral. Entering it in the TofC doesn’t work. AND the title of that book, which is supposedly formatted in a style undetectable to the ToC function, appears in the goddamn TofC as a chapter.
So I have to reformat the book title and fix the chapter title. And send it BACK to Tina to format on her PC. But not before deleting all the work I’ve interpolated into the TofC field, so as not to bollix it up on her end.
After all this screwing around, I see I haven’t assigned an ISBN to the damn thing. This requires ANOTHER ten or fifteen minutes of dorking-around time.
Right this very minute, I drop scribbling the present post (which I started as a device to vent and maybe allay some of the frustration factor) and head over to Bowker to get an ISBN.
Do you suppose I’ve written a stupid “description” for Bowker? Hell no. So now I have to write that, which you may be sure I don’t feel like doing to such an intense degree that I come up blank. I decide to wing it.
I upload the wrong cover image for the boxed set. Where’s the one Gary did? I search all over Digital Creation for the designer’s excellent rendition. Finally find it. Re-upload the cover image. Upload the PDF; watch the computer grind away and grind away. Jump through the remaining hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. This consumes a good 15 minutes, maybe twenty.
BTW, you must get the first boxed set. It’s an incredible bargain: SIX FIRE-RIDER BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!
Reviews of the serial installments are trending quite well. It is NOT p0rn0graphic and is, as a matter of fact and in my not-very-humble opinion, a truly terrific book. It will go live on Wednesday, probably around 6 p.m. Pacific time.
Just as Bowker finishes killing fifteen minutes of my time, the pool pump kicks on.
Yesterday, while my friend Carol and I were at a concert, a huge monsoonish storm came up. I don’t know how much water was dumped, but…whatEVER. Because I was across town, I wasn’t here to shut the pump off by way of preventing it from sucking up bushels of flying debris. When I got home along about 5 p.m., it was making a weird noise. The pump pot was gorged. I ran outside and shut the system down, figuring first thing in the morning I’d clean out the pump pot basket.
Yeah, well… First thing this morning, I was working. And the second thing. And the third thing. And the fourth…and so on to infuckingfinity!
I swear aloud, LEAP up, and FLY to the pool equipment. Shut down the gasping system and discombulate it. So much crap has been sucked up it has burst the plastic basket. That’ll be another 15 bucks I can’t afford.
Satan, the former owner of the Funny Farm, was an inveterate Happy Handyman. As you may know, the work of handyman hobbyists is usually suspect.
One of Satan’s projects was installation of a 12 x 5 metal storage shed on the east side of the house. Instead of pouring a concrete foundation, he laid down paving blocks, upon which he set his structure. The floor of this fine building is — wait for it! — oh yes! PLYWOOD!
Yeah.
The Sonoran Desert crawls with termites.
A family of these little munchers has found the shed and is eating its way across the floor. They’ve also invaded the shelves on the brick-and-board storage I built outside the shed — so those have to be taken apart and the boards tossed, somewhere far away from the house.
Saturday, I called my pet exterminator.
His wife called this morning to explain what they propose to do. No, they can’t use their (stinky!) organic (maybe not quite SO poisonous to humans and dogs?) product on termites. They have to use a standard termite product. For the same price, she said, they’d trench and apply prophylactic treatment to the entire house. They do not understand what this will entail, and I fail to enlighten her.
Price to treat the Funny Farm with a toxic product that is almost guaranteed to make me and the dogs sick? EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAH!
I can’t very well not do it. Once they get into your house, if a home inspector spots damage you can NOT sell your house without expensively treating it, and by “expensive” we do not mean a mere $800.
This reduces me to tears. I have no idea how I am going to come up with $800, now that I’ve quit my teaching job so as to free up time to work on the publishing endeavor.
Another client sends work that she thinks I’m going to do forthwith. Alas, it will have to wait until I finish reading Magnificently Paying Client’s project, which has to be done by Friday. I don’t even open her email: it’s now another message marked “unread” and flagged with a little red flag.
I need to pay my writers. Simultaneously, I should create another spreadsheet for WonderAccountant to display checks and deposits for the S-corp, as we are having to do with my personal account thanks to the kind ministrations of Intuit.
So I get into my checkbook register, another target of my haste and carelessness. Transcribe entries for checks and deposits going back to last April. Now I realize a $300 check I wrote to one of the authors has never cleared. I’m not sure how much I still owe her, since things were a little muzzy before this.
I get in touch with her and inquire about the missing check. She’s never received it, and by the way, the Copyeditor’s Desk owes her $700.
That’s exactly what I figured, but not for the reasons I thought. Oh well.
Now it dawns on me that the missing $300 check was written and mailed on the same day as a check I wrote to another writer, who also reported that it never arrived on his end.
This means the post office has lost two checks.
I drove these checks up to the post office specifically so I could drop them into THEIR box, so they would not be stolen out of my mailbox. Thank you SO much, dear USPS.
Neither check has cleared. So I decide not to shoulder the hefty stop-payment fee to head off any fraud. In fact, if someone succeeds in fraudulently cashing the checks, the credit union will eat it anyway, since they should’ve noticed that Clorox or some such was applied to the “pay to the order of” line. I write a new check to Writer 1 and send out two other checks to a couple of other contributors. These I place in the unsecured mailbox out front, since there clearly is NO EFFING POINT IN MAKING MY WAY THROUGH A MIASMA OF ROAD CONSTRUCTION TO TAKE THESE THINGS DIRECT TO THE POST OFFICE.
It’s now 12:36. I’ve had one banana and a handful of pecans to eat today. Plus three cups of cowboy-strength coffee (it’s ready when a spoon will stand up in pot).
Every single thing I’ve touched or so much as looked at today has devolved into some kind of fuck-up. I am hungry (whaddaya bet the grill is out of propane?) and I want a bourbon and water and that is exactly what I am going to have.
What d’you know about the annuity as a vehicle for retirement strategy?
I’ve always been dubious about them. However… I have a friend, whom I’ve now known for five or six years and whom I believe to be fundamentally honest and above board. Part of his business is financial management, and one his favorite strategies entails setting clients up with annuities.
He points out that if I took about $300,000 of my vast riches — approximately half of investments and cash holdings — and put it in a lifetime annuity with a death benefit of 300 grand, I could generate more than the amount I need to live on for the rest of my life, still have money invested in securities, and leave a guaranteed $300,000 to my son when I croak over.
Given my chronic bag lady syndrome, this sounds pretty tempting.
My concern is that if the prominent oncologist who de-boobed me is right — that I should live to about 95, barring accidents and unforeseen circumstances — I will outlive my money by ten or twenty years and than spend advanced old age in serious poverty.
I do not want to continue teaching freshman comp courses, a job I truly dislike whether in the classroom or online, and I’m certainly not betting that publishing Racy Books for Racy Readers is going to make me rich. Right now I can’t even get accursed Amazon to let me create an Author’s Page for our pseudonymous scribbler, Roberta Stuart.
So, assuming no money is going to come in from side gigs or the S-corp, and knowing the government is shearing the hell out of my savings by forcing me to take large required minimum drawdowns just as the stock market heads back into negative territory, I’m thinking an annuity that would return enough to live on would give me some peace of mind and also allow me to preserve at least SOME capital as I age. And also leave at least something for my son.
Two drawbacks come to mind, as I consider this scheme:
a) it locks up $300,000, which presumably I will never be able to access again; and
b) the payouts do not seem to be inflation-adjusted.
Even though we’re not seeing much inflation now, it would be absurd to assume that we won’t in the future. My father’s retirement was devastated by the inflationary period of the 1970s, which reduced a healthy savings account to…well, not enough to live on. He had signed himself into a life-care community just as that period started, so at least he had a roof over his head and a couple of meals a day. But because of the loss of his dollars’ buying power, he did not have enough to do much other than stay underneath that communal roof and eat in the (awful!) institutional dining hall. That’s even though he started out with the 1960s equivalent of just over a million dollars!
That, IMHO, makes for quite the dreary lifestyle.
US politics grow increasingly negative. Some extremely dangerous fools are trying to attain power, and sooner or later they will succeed. When that happens, the US economy will become even more unstable than it is. So, runaway inflation — or another profound recession like the one that’s taken us 8 or 10 years to come out of — is a distinct possibility. I have no faith in the country’s economic future, and I do not believe the stock market alone is a safe place to keep all of one’s savings.
Nor, obviously, is stuffing the mattress with gold bullion a great idea. The insomnia factor aside, gold bars are too heavy for an old bat to haul to the grocery store.
I’ve talked with WonderAcccountant about the annuity question, as well as the highly knowledgeable Evan at My Journey to Millions.
WonderAccountant thinks I don’t really need to set up an annuity, as she believes there’s enough money in securities to support me into my old age, no matter how much I take out, but she suggests the peace of mind could be worth the hassle and the risk. Evan observes that some annuities are excellent retirement strategies and some are not: they’re complicated instruments that you need to understand fully before you buy.
So, I’m thinking about it.
Even if most of my money were drawn down by the time I died, if I invested half of it in an annuity, my son would inherit my paid-off house and also the $300,000 death benefit. The house is probably worth $280,000 or $300,000 now — but we know how reliable those figures can be. Nevertheless, with a paid off house in hand, he could either sell the house he’s in or rent it, providing a little cash flow for him. Or he could sell this house and use the proceeds to salt his own retirement savings.
But…do I really want to tie up half my savings in an instrument that’s not inflation-adjusted? Twenty-five or thirty grand now sounds, well, just grand. But in ten years, even if inflation stays low, it won’t be enough to keep me going. In 20 years, when I’m 90, I‘ll need over $45,000 to buy what $25,000 buys today. And as for that $300,000 death benefit: if I die at age 90, it will take $541,833 to equate to today’s 300 grand. It will be worth a little more than half of what it’s worth now.
That assumes an inflation rate of just 3%, staying stable over two decades…
So yesterday afternoon I came home from a three-hour meeting (+ two hours of commute time) to find the wireless connection was down. Apparently the power was out for about an hour and a half.
The fix for this is to shut everything down on both the laptop and the desktop (quite a time-suck, since I always have a bunch of files open at once — the joys of multitasking!), disconnect the modem and the router, wait for a few minutes, replug the modem and router, and reboot the computers.
This worked last night…for about ten minutes. The wireless network came up for about ten minutes and then disappeared again. Several attempts had the same result.
Finally, I had to go to bed. So I left the modem and router disconnected overnight and rebooted again this morning. Same story.
When I got up this morning, the Nest thermostat informed me that it couldn’t find the wireless connnection.
Fortunately, it will drive the AC without being “connected” to the Internet. But…uhmmmm…. What if it didn’t?
Yeah. What if it didn’t? What if the refrigerator and the stove and the freezer and the lights and the locks on the doors and the watering system and the car and for godsake maybe even the toilet were connected to the Internet? The way, say, Google would like them to be?
What would happen if your modem went down then? You not only wouldn’t be able to publish and advertise your books on the Internet, you wouldn’t be able to effing LIVE.
Connecting your entire life to the Internet not only means you dispense with privacy, it means you dispense with the basic ability to survive autonomously. Or more or less autonomously — obviously you depend to a large degree on the power grid and the transportation system to go about your daily life. But…do we really need another system to have to depend on? Another system that leaves us in deep sh!t every time it goes down?
When the power goes down, you have a few headaches, but — assuming you don’t depend on it to operate a life-sustaining tool like a breathing aid — the hassles are inconvenient but minor. When the wireless goes down, you can’t do business at all.
To get online to all the sites I have to operate, I need a collection of passwords that is FIFTEEN SINGLE-SPACED PAGES LONG. To get into Amazon to post the next Racy Book we’re about to put online, I need an Excel workbook that contains ELEVEN SPREADSHEETS, one of which winds out like toilet paper. These things need to be open and on the terminal where I’m working in order for me to navigate the tasks I have to do. I also need access to folders that contain not only each book’s contents in PDF, .mobi, ePub, and Wyrd formats, but its cover image in Powerpoint, a high-resolution TIFF file sized for Amazon, a high-res JPEG sized for Smashwords, a low-res JPEG sized for Bowker, and a low-res JPEG sized for thumbnails. Just now there are eight books actively in play.
To move from one computer to another — as I had to do overnight — I have to transfer TWENTY-ONE GIGABYTES of data!
Fortunately, just a week or so ago I bought a large flash drive, since I wanted to back that data up not only to a thumb drive that could be disconnected and kept safely out of reach of hackers but also to the big desktop, which is connected to Time Machine, which not only backs up but encrypts your data as you type.
The desktop iMac, a fantastic piece of equipment, is hardwired to the Internet. However…
Yesh. However. The problem is, I can’t work at it for any length of time because the back and hip pain flare up (with a fuckin’ VENGEANCE) every time I sit in a desk chair for longer than ten or fifteen minutes. Just writing this blog post is gonna freaking cripple me.
Consider: I’ve been putting in twelve and fourteen-hour days, seven days a week! If I can’t get back online with the laptop, I’m essentially out of business.
Now transfer that thought to “no wireless connection” to operate the air-conditioning and the heat and the refrigerator and the stove and the freezer and the lights and the locks on the doors and the watering system and the car and for godsake maybe even the toilet.
To be fair, Google proposes to use the Nest thermostat as a kind of hub that will allow a “smart” home’s devices to keep talking to each other even if the wireless is down. But…has anyone noticed what Google DID to the Nest device after it purchased the company? The Nest on my wall was originally fairly simple to operate — certainly not as easy as an old Honeywell round bump on the wall, but once you figured it out, not a freaking nightmare. Shortly after Google took over, they force-fed new software into the thing, and it’s now screaming incomprehensible. I can no longer program it — that’s way, way beyond my skills and patience. It’s all I can do to turn it on and off and change the temperature setting.
Why would anyone want to depend on a complicated nightmare of a gadget that requires a degree in computer engineering to operate?
The last thing on this earth we need is to have to be “connected” to go about our daily lives. It’s risky enough that our business lives depend on this technology.
