Coffee heat rising

Computers

Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast…

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…Got to make
The mornin’ last.

Putting the brakes on the ambitious publishing enterprise, and they’re finally beginning to engage. It takes a long time to persuade an 18-wheeler to slow down…

So freaking tired of computers am I that I’ve developed a flinch reflex at the very thought of re-engaging The Machine.

Last night I mounted an entire month’s worth of Racy Books to Amazon — which is really only seven shorties but goodies. It’s the first set of books we wrote under the Roberta Stuart byline, two of them by moi and five by a writer who for a number of reasons can’t publicize her name. This lady is really a very good writer, with an actual — get this! — SENSE OF HUMOR. Her stories always have a mellow wit that makes them charming to read.

Assuming you like Racy Reading. 😉

Also got the second “boxed set” of six Fire-Rider books up. That really is a serious book; each of the three collections of six “books” apiece will be novel-length on its own.

So, with the design and bureaucracy done, all that’s left to do is click “Publish.” The plan is to “publish” (I use that work guardedly: to my mind, putting a book up on Amazon is more akin to “posting” than to “publishing”) one bookoid a week through December and into January. This gives us eight books each of which can be posted with a single click. So if I click “publish” each Tuesday, then each Wednesday a new bookoid should appear on Amazon.

In the meantime, I will try harder to figure out how to get Goodreads to work. It’s purely torture.

And I will try to mount a FaceBook advertising campaign, a prospect that makes me cringe. I may try to hire someone to do that, possibly from Problogger or Fiverr.

Hiring a pig in a poke from Fiverr also makes me cringe. But it occurred to me that there may be bloggers who know how to handle FaceBook — or at least are younger, more flexible, and techier than I am. So I think I’ll post an ad on the Problogger job board and then do a few searches at Fiverr.

If YOU know how to deploy FaceBook Ads, by the way (this will entail identifying the right demographics in technolanguage that FB can understand and use), I’m interested in talking with you! Leave a comment below with a functional email address in the little sign-in form above the comments box, and I’ll get in touch. The book that would be advertised at the outset is Fire-Rider, not the erotica.

In another few weeks, I may have a boxed set of “Family at the Holidays” available, which would then be worth putting money into for marketing. If the PoD guy comes through (he has not, so far), then we already have a print version of “Family.” Either of those could also be marketed on FaceBook, if it’s possible to identify adult audiences(!!) who want(!!) to read erotica.

How exactly you target those audiences without accidentally hitting some kids escapes me. For that reason, I’m very dubious about advertising the Camptown Races bookoids on Facebook.

At any rate, if I can hire someone to relieve me of some of the social media marketing torture, that would free up time a) to have a life, of all the outrageous things; b) to write some more copy; c) to manage design and production; and d) to take care of business, which has been sliding.

FireFox lately has been given to strange catastrophic crashes, which can on occasion crash my computer. And of course we know Wyrd loves nothing more than to crash, preferably taking your entire system down with it.

Whenever the system crashes while any Office programs are up, every file you had open at the time reloads in two versions: whatever was saved at the time the system went down, and a “recovery” file that may or may not contain the most recent data you entered. My system is set to auto-save every five minutes, so not much data is lost. However, if you have, say, seven files open on Wyrd (not unreasonable around here: I often move from file to file), you have to compare FOURTEEN files line by line to see what was lost and what can be saved. If the auto-save has more recent data, then you have to close the file you were working in and save the auto-save over it with the new filename. But sometimes this process causes the system to “forget” where the original file resides, so you have to figure that out — my computer contains literally thousands of data files, and I’ll tellya…some days it ain’t easy to find where a recovered file is supposed to go.

Well, one of the recent crashes took down the Excel file I’d built to transmit data to WonderAccountant, after QuickBooks converted itself into something I simply cannot use. Even she has a time with it — and she takes courses in Quickbooks!

So, after I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the entire new program that QuickBooks has mounted, I went back to recording credits and debits in Excel spreadsheets. This workbook I posted on DropBox for WonderAccountant’s delectation — she does my bookkeeping, and really, if the spreadsheet is set up correctly, all she should have to do is upload to the correct account.

Last night I discovered that during a recent crash, data was lost from this Excel workbook.

But SOME data was saved in another iteration of it, which resided in another directory on my terminal.

Recovering the data entailed opening both workbooks and comparing each spreadsheet, line by line by infuckingTERminable line, to determine a) which was most current and b) how to consolidate the data in one file.

And needless to say, this entailed not one but several fuckups. By 9 p.m. I was tearing my hair out by the roots! It took over four hours of this hateful process to straighten it out!

And that, my children, is why the old lady is coming to hate computers.

Really. It was so much easier when you just noted debits and credits in a real, paper book of blank spreadsheets.

And it’s why I need to find somebody else to mount and manage the marketing campaign. At this point, when I get up in the morning and think about having to wrestle with the computers again, I just cringe.

No wonder my stomach hurts!

Whenever I finish diddling away time with the hobby blog, then, I need to take the dogs for a walk; then bring them back here and go back out for another 2.6-mile tour by myself. That gets in about 3.6 miles a day (assuming I get time in a day for these hijinks), which helps a lot with the stress and is helping to bring the weight back down.

But yes…”get time in the day…” As dawn cracked, the phone rang: pool guy. He wants to come over between ten and noon to fix the leak in the pump. Let us hope Gerardo is right, that the leak is just from a gasket. Thanks to Gerardo, the guy is going to have a challenge trying to upsell  me to a new pump, which will set me back a couple thousand bucks. Not looking forward to that exchange…

Anyway, carving that chunk out of my morning means no doggy & human walks: it’s already after 9:00 a.m. Walking a mile with the dogs, who have to sniff every blade of grass and lunge at every passing dog or cat, takes a half an hour. And the 2.6-mile junket requires 45 minutes.

It was very cold this morning — by Arizona standards — and so at 6:00 a.m. I decided to wait until it warmed up. It usually takes this pool guy days to respond to a phone call, so I figured I’d have today to myself. Not so… Now we’ll have to wait until after the guy gets here and lightens my pocketbook some more before we can go out. By then I’ll be fully engaged in something else.

The roommate left before dawn to fly to New York for an audition. She’s an opera singer. So the dogs and I have the Funny Farm to ourselves for a day. That means there are quite a few things I need to do by way of cleaning up the place and making it more livable for her. Those could easily fill up the day.

Roommate: I haven’t written about the roommate because she hadn’t announced to all and sundry that she’s leaving her several jobs in town. She’s one of the paid professional singers with the choir, a very lovely mezzosoprano who sings alto in our rowdy crowd. She also teaches at the Great Desert University and is enrolled in her second master’s degree program out there. Well, her husband got a job in the Bay Area, so she’s having to drop everything and move up there.

She didn’t want to walk away from the teaching job (some day she hopes to get an academic position, and so there’s a bridge she doesn’t want to burn), nor was she happy to leave the other contract gigs she has here in town. But they realized that, given the cost of housing in and around San Francisco, even on DH’s very substantial new salary, they couldn’t afford to maintain two dwellings even for a couple of months. So they sold their house here, rented a place in the City, and she is now couch-cruising to fill in the gap.

Actually, she’s got my guest bedroom, which is a lot better than a sofa. Except there’s no bed in there, so the poor thing is sleeping on one of those blow-up mattresses. All of which makes me feel mighty guilty for not having bothered to buy a bed for that room. It would involve hiring a moving man to move the impossibly heavy TV armoire, which is no longer used for TV but is full of linens & things, and that exceeds the hassle factor that I feel like dealing with. So does purchasing and installing a bed in there, come to think of it.

Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have a human being around. I mean, dogs are charming company and all, but…well, they are dogs. She’s not around much, because she has a hectic schedule that usually keeps her out from morning till late at night. Yet a few conversations have been had, and that is nice.

If it were possible to be sure you could find a person as quiet and considerate as this one, renting out a room would seem like a very good idea. It would provide some company and obviate the need to actually work. But I’m pretty certain this one is rare as diamonds.

🙂

Why Do I Dislike Social Networks? Am I a Curmudgeon?

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So the church has obtained this social network thing called “Realm,” a proprietary platform available to nonprofit groups. They want everyone on the choir to join up. Just now they have a campaign going to have everyone in the parish get photographed so your picture can be posted on the system.

The other morning while we were lining up to process, I ran into a very charming young marketing type, a greeter, who urged me to hurry and join Realm. I said I’d tried to do so but was unable to get it to accept any credentials or allow me to create a username and ID. She suggested I needed to download Chrome, install it, learn to use it, and try to get in with that browser — though she allowed that FireFox (the browser of choice) should work.

Others around me really started to apply a lot of pressure to get on Realm. That I said I do not want to join yet another social media platform nor do I enjoy the platforms I have to use in my business was irrelevant. Nothing would do but what I have to join up this thing.

Well. I think not, thank you very much.

I find myself wondering why I dislike and distrust social media so much. Twitter? God, I hate it! Facebook? Okay, so friends post a few photos of their trips or their kittens or whatever and that’s nice, but I can take it or leave it. Google+? Total mystification.

But what IS the problem?

I think the problem is that in my mind, a computer is not a toy. It’s a tool. It’s something you use to do work. And you know, I feel I , do quite enough work, starting at around 5 a.m. and grinding through till 6, 7, 8, or 9 at night: all of it on computers.

I don’t want to socialize on the computer. I just want to get the damn work done and get OFF the computer! Far from making me feel “connected,” the social networks feel like just another component of something that keeps me from having a life. Twitter, with its torrent of spam; Facebook, with its unending stream of trivia, false wisdom, and sappy sentimentality; Google+, whose reason for existing at all is inscrutable:

Here’s a post by an employee of Constant Contact plumping in favor of Twitter. And yeah, I get it: she finds an expensive doodad — a cell phone — that she’d lost in an airline’s overhead compartment; she figures out how to escape a traffic jam; she gets the very LATEST latest news; she asks a credit bureau to correct an error; she apologizes to some famous guy for offending him.

But…really? Are there not more direct, less time-sucking, less “social” ways of accomplishing these things? For example…

  • Don’t put your cell phone in an overhead compartment — take it out of your jacket pocket and put it in your purse or your pants pocket. Listen to the local radio traffic reports, or simply avoid routes prone to traffic jams.
  • Recognize that most of what we think of as “news” today is trivia, and that you can do nothing about 99.999% of any news that really matters. You don’t need to have instantaneous Tweets about any of it.
  • Email or snail-mail the credit bureau; it’s a lot more private…and again, does that error really need to be fixed right this very minute?
  • Don’t insult celebrities (or anyone else) in public (or in private).

When you consider what the writer’s saying, you’re inclined to think that over time her growing dependency on Twitter surely must erode her problem-solving skills. What does she do if she can’t Tweet up her lost phone? If she stumbles across a news report that really does concern something important and urgent, how does she find out all the details, and how does she get a fully reported, credibly accurate accounting of events? And how does she (or her husband) ever learn common courtesy?

Last year Lifehacker posted an article by Alan Henry that offered a number of very good suggestions for keeping the social media plague more or less under control. I like his ideas…but again: t.i.m.e…s.u.c.k!!!! The amount of time it would take to clean up your accounts and organize them in the ways he suggests: oh, ugh! Once you got the mess under control, though, these strategies probably would help cut the amount of time you then continue to waste on Twitter and waypoints.

If I follow the guy’s suggestions, I’ll have to “unfollow” about 600 Twits. That could be even more time-consuming than luring them to follow me in the first place. To say nothing off pissing off a lot of Twits. Organize them by “Lists”? I know Twitter Lists exist, but I also know finding out what they are, figuring out how to work them, and deploying them in any meaningful way represents yet another huge time-suck. Is that really what I want to do with the shrinking number of minutes, hours, and days left to me on this earth?

Well, no.

Therein lies the problem. And I don’t want to spend any of those fast-dwindling minutes, hours, and days on learning a new social media platform, either.

Digital Aversion

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They say you should start your work day with the chore you like least. Then you have the worst done and the rest of the day is, as it were, smooth sailing. Thus if you’re in sales, you should start with cold calls. If you’re a lawn man, maybe you should pull out weeds by their roots first thing in the morning.

By that theory, I should be over at Amazon right now, X-ing out my existence as the author of six books and creating a new existence as Roberta Stuart, pornographer par excellence. This is how I should start my day: get the most obnoxious, difficult, hair-tearing, time-sucking job out of the way first.

But as you can see…I’m not there. I’m here. Doing this.

It just makes me cringe.

What an ineffable waste of time. Amazon has decreed that you can’t have more than three pseudonyms, and it has further decreed that any variant of your name is NOT your name but is a “pseuodnym.” (I have three, because my dear parents gifted me with an unpronounceable, weird, and insufferably snooty first name.) So in order to build an “Author Page” to peddle my little company’s Racy Books, I have to sign out as myself and sign in with a new email and create a new persona. Then I have to persuade Amazon that the new persona is me. Then I have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop, presumably, to get revenues for Camptown Races books directed to the corporate bank account. It is going to be a freaking nightmare and I don’t wanna do it!

I don’t want to do it, because it soaks up time. Needlessly. And time is my only asset with any value!

The only element of my life that’s worth anything is my time. And as the seconds and the minutes pass, I have less and less of it. Every time the sun rises, every time the sun sets, I have less time in my spiritual bank account.

The older you get, the more conscious you grow of that particular little reality.

Hence: digital aversion. NOTHING consumes time more voraciously than these wondrous computer devices, programs, and platforms we all have to deal with, day in and day-a-wasting out.

Every day I have to learn some new program, jump through some new digital hoop, contend with some new hassle. Every hour is at least partly consumed  by watching a computer grind away and grind away and grind away. Some part of every day is absorbed by getting around yet another error message, yet another digital roadblock.

As we speak, I’m hassling with WordPress because it’s decided to hang over the upload of a freaking THUMBNAIL, goddamnit, needed to update the Camptown Races Press site. It’s not like this was a gigantic TIFF here. No. This is a tiny little JPEG. Now I’ve had to crash out of the program, my coffee has gone cold while I’ve wrestled with that sh!t, the page is not updated and for all I know may never BE updated and for the life of me I can NOT figure out how to make   control the amount of air between those damn thumbnail images.

I personally have come to hate it.

Yeah, digital technology has done wondrous things for our ability to communicate and to cope with vast quantities of (largely irrelevant) information. But folks…

Life was better without it.

Speaking of Roberta, that wily and prolific author has emitted another new book:

Veronica & KJ 2Girlfriends LORES

And she would be forever in your debt if you would grab it from Amazon and post a fine review of the thing.

Why a “connected” home is a bad idea

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appleairportthingieSo 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.

5 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.: The 16-hour workday

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Amazon has nothing on The Copyeditor’s Desk and its doughty imprints, Plain & Simple Press and (yes!) Camptown Ladies Press. Outa my way, Bezos: it’s slash and dash for the likes of you!

Yup. We started at five o’clock this morning and worked all the way through, with time off to multi-task while grilling a slab of tuna and slicing a tomato to go with it, to 9:30 p.m. That would be about 16 hours, give or take a few minutes. I did pause long enough to brush my teeth and wash my face. And I went out to lunch with Wonder-Accountant.

But as we and the IRS know, lunch with an accountant is a working lunch. 😉

Today’s marathon work frenzy is, to put it mildly, ALL MY FAULT.

I screwed up fairly massively a few weeks ago, as the MacBook was threatening, with all its siliconish little heart, to go down with a resounding crash. Seeing the beloved computer falter, I dumped data on every drive and pseudo-drive that would take it, trying to save the 87 gerjillion files I typically have open at any given moment.

(You wonder why my computers are given to crashing?)

Saved the data but scattered it all over creation.

Some files came to rest on DropBox; clones or later versions of those files settled like dust on the hard drive. The result was I found myself migrating back and forth between DropBox and the hard drive, and never really knowing (or remembering) where File A or File B should be stored.

The result? A fulminating mess.

Today I set out to clean it up. This, as you might imagine, was a task easier said than done. Shortly after setting out on said  adventure, I sensed that the easiest strategy would be to create a new folder on the hard drive (titled, sapiently enough, “Clean Up the Mess”) in which I could store the latest, cleanest versions of the many mutant files I’ve been working on.

Yesterday I’d cleaned up DropBox…and felt pretty good about that.

Today I had to find, identify, and organize all the things I’d cleaned up from DropBox…not so good.

It literally did take the better part of about 15 hours. I’ve managed to get exactly zero productive work done.

However, the computer files and organization are looking a lot better.

I’d gotten into the habit of using DropBox as a hard-drive-away-from-home: a convenient way to share files between my own computers as well as among clients and contractors. This, I think, is not good, unless you’re willing to pay DropBox for the space to make that privilege work.  Which, as you might guess, I am not.

So now I’ve got things set up so that the bulk of my work (and only my work) occurs on my computer’s hard drive, and DropBox is reserved for data that needs to be shared with others. That will clean a LOT of space-eating redundant data off DB. (A fair amount of it went into the Mac’s “Trash” folder…) Once very couple of days, I’ll back up a) Dropbox and b) Documents to flash drives.

Anything that goes on the iMac is backed up to Time Machine. But alas, the far more convenient and comfortable to use MacBook speaks not to H.G. Wells nor to his time machines.  So the only way to keep data on its hard disk moderately safe is to back up early and often.

So, another day went by without my getting any writing done. It’s now almost 10 p.m. I’ve scarfed down my daily medicinal bourbon and water, and now I must crawl into the sack. And so, adieu and away!

Foiled by the Effing Cell Phone!

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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…

Ladies portrait
When ARE we going to get our coming-out party?