By Runex Tangled. I dunno who you are, Runex, but i think i love you…
So I spent the entire day studying up on Twitter and (I think) more or less figuring out how to work it for my nefarious purposes. Wanting to establish a new account for the Camptown Ladies in addition to FaM’s Twitter account I signed out of the FaM account and tried to create a new account.
Well. You have to have a cell phone, because they won’t let you sign up unless they can text you a verification code.
For all practical intents and purposes, I have no cell phone. I do have an LG 440G, but I got it unwillingly, only because with no pay phones available anymore I had to have something to call roadside service if my car breaks down.
I never use it. I don’t want to use it. I have enough electronic crap and gear to have to figure out, thank you very much!
So I haul out the instruction booklet, which I carry around in my purse, knowing someday I’ll have to figure out how to dial the roadside people.
This thing is utterly incomprehensible, because it’s predicated on the assumption that you already know how to use a cell phone. And it’s incomplete. I finally find about three lines purporting to explain how to send a text message, but nothing about how to receive one.
I look the little bastard up on the Internet. The user manual posted there contains nary a word about text messaging.
There’s something about SMS’s.
I’ve never heard of an SMS. Finally, after cruising the Web again in search of a definition, I gather this is a synonym for text message. Probably. Roughly.
Okay, so I study the instructions about what to do when you receive an SMS. The button they say to use appears not to be a button but a tiny painted-on white dash. When you do figure out how to get this bizarre button thing to work, it brings up nothing. However, figuring out to make it work does use up your minutes.
When you attempt “using your navigation keys, go to messages,” you never do arrive at the menu thingie that shows in the online user manual’s image. There’s no way to find “inbox” because the screen that (I guess) it appears on does not come up.
See why I don’t want to own a smartphone? I can’t even learn how to use this thing, the dumbest of dumb phones. How am I going to learn how to operate a really sophisticated piece of electronic detritus?
Anyway, I wasn’t able to set up a new Twitter account for the Camptown Ladies. Oh, well…
LOL! Check out mywee squib at LinkedIn. With that one, I’ve probably blown my blogging wad for the day.
But y’know, I’ve really got to start haunting the social media more. I don’t understand how they work, and they look like still more techno-timesuck. Well…I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they are.
The logic of “social media” where long strings of bloviations are posted mystifies me. Do people REALLY have nothing else to do but sift through all that chatter? Do they read any of it? Why?
I guess what puzzles me the most is that something like Twitter or LinkedIn seems so unfocussed. Finding something useful there — something relevant to your job our your interests — looks like a tall order. Among a great deal of chaff, I found this nicely written post at LinkedIn by Arizona graphic designer and book coach Michele de Filippo, but when I went back to find it, I had a time relocating it.
Twitter takes that staticky effect to a whole level unto its own. There what you see when you sign in is toilet paper. A long strand of toilet paper that apparently unrolls ad infinitum, with (as far as I can see) no end. Ever. Most of the posts there appear to be automatically slapped up there. A few live people are chatting back and forth. But the question is, how do t hey find each other and how do they filter out all the irrelevant static so as to have something resembling a “conversation”?
At Twitter, “Direct Messages” is clogged with spam…here’s some guy congratulating me on something I supposedly published on Disqus. Specifically what is not mentioned, of course, because the purpose of his message is to advertise something. A few live humans thank me for following them. Hm. I haven’t figured out how the hashtag thing is supposed to work on Twitter. Strange.
So…I gather we’re supposed to use the platforms to reach out to people who might be interested in whatever we have to offer. But the question is, how do we FIND them, so we’re not blitzing harmless bystanders with flak that doesn’t even faintly interest them? In the do unto others department, I’d rather not spray Web users with irrelevancies in the hope of reaching one or two folks who like what I’m offering.
?
Facebook seems to make a little more sense. The page that pops up when I go to that thing is filtered (somehow) so only my friends’ posts show up, and by and large what they post is either interesting or entertaining. Twitter feels like carpet-bombing. Facebook is more like a firing range. With targets.
In the marketing department, I finally got around to updating the Fire-Rider site. It’s been down, like all the other provinces of the Blog Empire, off and on for the past ten days or two weeks. When I’ve had time to work on it, it’s been down; when it’s been up, my hands have been full of other work.
Speaking of the which, WonderAccountant wants to know where a stack of statements are (?? how would I know?) and why my bank account is off by approximately the amount of a Social Security check (no clue!)
In the first of two annoying crashes, the Mac crashed and deleted everything I’d written here. I can’t even remember what I was going on about.
In the second of two exceptionally annoying crashes, WestHost (our new web server) crashed a post I was writing at Writers Plain & Simple and erased 30 minutes worth of work. In spite of my having saved it. No. BECAUSE of my saving it: I hit “save” and the “Edit Post” page went down.
God…freaking…DAMN…it, this has been another of those marathon time-suck days. Coming up with the idea of clustering the time-sucks on specific days was good: yesterday I got some writing done. Day before yesterday, not so much, because reality inetervened. But yesterday: Bobbi got tossed in the middle of BillyBob’s king-sized bed.
What could possibly happen?
So…artichokes. Did you know you can freeze them?
Trader Joe’s sells these wonderful little baby artichokes, SO cute and so delicious. They come in packages of four. What usually happens here at the Funny Farm is that I cook them all (they fit fine in a pasta kettle), eat one, and drop the rest in a Ziplock bag to stash in the fridge.
I may (or may not) eat a second one the next day or so later. But then the package gets shoved to the back of the refrigerator shelf. And I lose track of them.
(Did you know that some people think starting a sentence with “and” or “but” sounds pompous? Honi soit qui mal y pense, say I to that. Goddammit.)
Anyway, so before long these lost artichokes spoil. And I am disgusted and discouraged.
It’s quite enough to have computer technology to make you disgusted and discouraged, without having to be disgusted and discouraged over rotten artichokes.
Freeze them:
Cook them all. (To wit: boil a pot of water; add a little chopped up garlic and a sliced lemon if you have it; toss in the ‘chokes; cook until done, about an hour.)
Take them out of the hot water and set them upside down in a strainer or colander that’s been placed in the kitchen sink. Let the water drain out and the artichokes cool to room temperature.
Place the artichokes on a tray or cookie sheet. Set this in the coldest part of your freezer. Wait.
When the artichokes are frozen through, place them in air-tight plastic freezer bags and store in the freezer until you get around to eating them.
Voilà.
This morning I posted the third Fire-Rider installment on Amazon. It only took three hours to acquire the ISBNs for that and the fourth story and then to get the present piece “published.”
This happened because of the dizzying swarm of errors I’ve instilled in the MSS. I’m laboring away thinking godDAMNit, I know I fixed that I know it I know it I KNOW it!!!!!!!
Well. Yes. I did fix it. But I stored the fixed files to a flash drive and failed to copy them back up to DropBox.
But that notwithstanding, there were a couple of errors in the “fixed” files that I hadn’t fixed.
You begin to sense the complications implicit in this chain of events? Yeah. On and on and on…
I think they’re all fixed now. But I hate Word. I hate it hate it hate it. WHY does it default to do the stupidest most ridiculous most pointless things imaginable by the techie brain? Why do you have to fight it uphill every single step of the way?
Oh Hell. Fire-Rider isn’t an unwitting iteration of the Odyssey. It’s an allegory of Man vs. Machine.
FR III isn’t online at Amazon yet (it takes awhile for these things to arrive in the marketplace. But FR II is here.
Note how wallpaper brings to mind a black hole into which Time Itself is being sucked…
Did I actually sayI daydreamed of spending my days writing for a living? Really? What on earth could I have been thinking? Wouldn’t you think that after 70 years on this earth I would have figured out that NO ONE MAKES A LIVING DOING CREATIVE WORK.
My entire day has been consumed — utterly, totally consumed — with screwing around with other people’s websites. And what have I accomplished?
Almost nothing.
Well. Along the way I’ve taken notes and printed out how-to guides, so I now have a kind of user’s manual for the wanna-be micropublisher:
•Tracy Atkins’s guide to formatting hard copy and e-books with his and Friedlander’s book design templates.
•Atkins’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP.
•Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP, which conflict in places with the latter.
•The KDP contract, all 22 single-spaced pages of it.
•Kindle’s cover image specs.
•Nook’s cover image specs.
•Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to create a cover image using that monopoly’s new cover image building tool. (This will put quite a few graphic artists out of work.)
•Detailed instructions for how to move a domain off WordPress, which don’t work.
•William King’s (now outdated) detailed instructions for how to create a Kindle cover using PowerPoint.
But otherwise, what have I accomplished? Damn near nothing.
I’ve managed to upload the body copy for the diet/cookbook to the print-on-demand publisher. But since I wanted it coil-bound (so it would lay flat on a reader’s kitchen countertop), I imagined all I would need is the front cover image.
Wrong: after much puzzling and wrestling around and begging for help from support, I learn that you have to submit a PDF for a wrap-around cover, only with no spine copy.
Lovely. God only knows how long it will take the graphic artist to produce that. You understand, I’ve been waiting for MONTHS for cover images to come forth.
I’d hoped to get the cookbook up on Amazon today in e-book format. At the outset, it looked like Caliber was the way to go. Considerable time-wasting study later, it appeared that was a bad idea.
Instead, it would be better to go directly through KDP, despite constant bitter complaints about the difficulty of said process. By the time I’d figured that out, though, I was already too tired and too frazzled with computer-generated frustration to take on a monster job like that. It will have to wait till tomorrow.
And that will mean ANOTHER day will go by in which I get exactly zero (0) writing done.
WordPress.com will not let go of my writersplainandsimple.com domain name, even though in theory I own it and in theory they’re supposed to move it over to GoDaddy at my request. I paid the bastards to renew it, and now their records say it expires in less than a month. They kept the money I paid to renew that but canceled the Akismet subscription, so soon that site will be spammed out of existence. I have been banging my head against that wall since 9:07 this morning, to exactly no avail. I’m about to threaten them with a lawyer…this is getting ridiculous.
My friend the e-book builder sent a link to a very interesting market research tool that effectively deconstructs and reconstructs data from Amazon Kindle sales. Tried to download it. The outfit marketing it will only take cash or charges through PayPal. To do that, you have to have a password. Since we took both of our accounts off PayPal after the recent hacking attempt, at the behest of my bidness partner’s fiancé who has a degree in IT, I’ve forgotten the password. The one in my records doesn’t work. So I couldn’t buy the damn thing. Too bad: it looks extremely useful. Or…ahem…it could be just another time suck…
To Do, 7/21/2015
•Remind artist about need for 5.5 x 8.5-inch diet/cookbook cover image.
Mooted, two ways from Sunday.
a) He headed me off at the pass and sent the image before I could ask.
b) See above: a full wrap-around cover PDF is needed even though there’s no goddamn spine!
• Finish domain transfer from WP.com to GoDaddy, which didn’t get finished yesterday.
Foiled and frustrated, see above.
•Try to convert diet/cookbook to Kindle format using Calibre.
Hah!!!
• Build BikerBabe cover in PowerPoint, using William King’s somewhat outdated strategy.
Mooted by the discovery of Amazon’s proprietary cover-building tool, which looks useful but probably will prove to be another goddamn electronic frustration. If it works, though, it’ll be a godsend.
•Ask new web guru to build new sites for Camptown Races Press and Camptown Ladies Talk.
He still can’t get into Westhost.
•Inquire at PVCC about opportunities for Scottsdale Business Association to partner with the college’s internship program.
Bingo! Their internship director will meet with us next week. One count it (1) thing accomplished today!
• Get domain name for Camptown Races Press.
Pointless until web guru can get into the hosting service.
•Do pool chores
Most of those were automated and so they got done. By now, I imagine, the filter probably will need to be backwashed.
So. Think of that. By quitting the comp job, I’ve gone from spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate to spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate. Interesting.
So yesterday afternoon I schlepped back up to Costco. Having been told by two different car dudes to stay off the freeways with the Vintage 2006 tires, I followed the surface streets way to Hell and Gone up to Yorkshire and 27th Avenue. This is a very time-consuming schlep: about 40 minutes, and the second one I’d had to make in two days. Monday a.m. when I went up there to buy new tires, they said they had the tires, but if I’d wait a day and make an appointment, they’d give me a discount. Since the bill was shaping up to be $500 and I’d just dropped $214 on replacing the mirrors, I agreed to come back.
The mirrors. Yes. You’ll recall that the side mirrors have been held on with Gorilla Tape for some time, hm?
Well, that cat got out of the bag.
I drove myself to the Mayo’s ER with the giant bellyache that led to their slapping me in the hospital and chaining me to a saline drip for five days. So my car was left in the parking lot.
My son arranged to pick up my car and drive it home, which meant…yes. I’m afraid so. He found out about the Gorilla Tape.
Totally abhorred. I didn’t think he was EVER going to stop lecturing me.
So, nothing would do but what, last week, I had to put Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic up to replacing the mirrors.
While the car was at Chuck’s, I asked him to rotate the tires.
When I went to pick up the tank, he said they couldn’t rotate the tires because they were cracking so badly they probably wouldn’t survive being taken off and remounted. “You need new tires! And please…don’t drive on the freeway with these things!”
{sigh}
So Monday morning while I’m talking to THE cutest most handsome and drop-down-dead adorable young tire salesman and arranging to get Costco to change the tires the next day, I say to him, “I have to drive out to Sun City this afternoon and I’d like not to have a flat between here and there.”
His Cuteness says, “Well, just be sure to stay off the freeway.”
Moving on to {argh!}
Well, obviously, I made it to Sun City on the surface streets — that was really a treat! — and home, and back up to the Costco, all without mishap. Turns out those tires were installed in 2006. They were nine years old!
Because I stopped commuting when I was laid off in 2009, they still had plenty of tread. And I’d never noticed the cracking, which was obvious once the guys pointed it out.
At any rate, I’m sitting there interminably — this experience took two hours, but I’ve brought the laptop and manage to grade a 2500-word Spanglish paper and do a couple of other small projects, so I’m keeping myself amused — when the excessively cute Costco tire dude says, “Uhmmmm…. I made a mistake yesterday.”
“Don’t have the tires?”
“The ones we had are the wrong ones.”
Ooops.
What he proposes to do to make this right is to give me four tires that they DO have in stock, which are a grade better than the $500 worth of tires I paid for yesterday, AND to give me a discount on top of a discount. When all that is said and done, I pay $311 for FOUR tires, better than the ones he’d originally ordered.
THEN his boss says, “Let us buy you lunch.” (It’s 3:30 or so by now.)
I say, “Why, shore!” So he comps me whatever I want from the snack bar.
They don’t have filet mignon with béarnaise sauce, so I order up a piece of pizza and a soda.
Predictably, this stuff upsets the ailing stomach. But that doesn’t matter. Now I don’t have to use the few items left in the larder to fix dinner, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had a pizza. So that was nice.
LOL! Is that or is that not the most amazing transaction ever?
