Coffee heat rising

Computers

Fire-Rider Book 7: You Live & Learn

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Every new publication at Amazon is another learning experience. Fire-Rider Book 7 — The Battle of Loma Alda — is online. Click on the link to the right and take a look at it!

It’s taken SIX efforts at publishing these damn serials to figure out how to force Amazon to publish them in a way that distinguishes them from each other more clearly. I’ve tried every which way from Sunday, and every goddamn time they publish the thing as “Fire-Rider,” in one iteration or another.

Even though Amazon claims it will number serials and post them in the order of the serial number, that does not happen consistently. Sometimes they appear in order, sometimes not. But most of them do not have the whole title or the correct title.

I’m kind of literal-minded, clearly too much so to survive in the Digital Age. I tend to think that if you have a series that has a number of bookoids, any given bookoid’s title should be SERIES TITLE: Bookoid’s Title. The series is not a subtitle. The book’s title is not a subtitle. But there’s no easy way to indicate to Amazon that thus-and-such a book is part of a series until you’re well after the fact: you have to have already submitted the title & subtitle before you can tell Amazon’s endless form that the thing is part of a series, and here’s the damn series title.

Today it dawned on me that instead of telling Amazon the title is Fire-Rider: The Battle of Loma Alda, I should go the other way around and say it’s The Battle of Loma Alda: Fire-Rider.

The problem is much worse at Bowker, where you can NOT convince the software that anything coming after a colon is part of the book’s title. The result of that is, as we speak, 13 ISBN’s for books titled “Fire-Rider.” Over  there, too, a colon signifies a subtitle, even if it’s punctuation in a series of words typed into the “Title” slot. Extremely annoying.

Oh well.

Book VII is lively stuff! You should read it. I really need people to review these things, and so if you’d like to do so, please let me know and I’ll arrange (if I can figure out how) to put one or two installments up as freebies. Sooner or later I’ll need to do that anyway, but will move the task forward if one of you indicates you’d like a peek.

Just put up a pretty erotic image (speaking of lively stuff) at Camptown Ladies Talk — a famous and very lush painting by Gustav Courbet. The occasion: a nifty poem that appears in today’s NY Times Magazine.

 

Dumb Tax and Learning Experiences

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Okay, this is gonna have to be fast because a ton of THINGS remain to be done. But you probably think I fell off the edge of the earth…so…just to keep my hand in, here goes…

Since quitting the teaching job about the four weeks ago, I plunged into a whirlpool of nonstop work, 12 and 14 hours a day: trying to catch up with all the work that hasn’t been done over the past year while I’ve been wrestling with the Mayo Clinic and trying to establish a business framework in which to build the proposed p0rn novelette empire. I’ve gotten a LOT done, much of it entailing technologies and jobs with which I am not familiar. Videlicet:

• The print version of Slave Labor is now in existence.

• The diet/cookbook is finally online!

• Day before yesterday I returned corrections for the print version of Thirty Pounds in 4 Months; while I was at it completely reformatted the endless thing in a new template. Awaiting new page proofs.

• The blog empire is moved over to WestHost but the new back-end guy hasn’t done much to get it organized. Says he picked up a bad bug from his two-year-old’s day-care experience…which is likely, because there is a nasty bug going around these parts just now.

• I’ve about learned how to upload a book-length MS to Kindle and soon will apply to Nook (later!).

• My friend who can fairly be described as the dean of scholarly publishing, referred me to the editor of Johns Hopkins University Press. I wrote a new cover letter and sent the proposal for the Boob Book to him, and he immediately sent it to an acquisitions editor, saying it “looks promising.” 🙂

• I’ve hired a freelance who has written several p0rn0graphic bookoids with more to come; I will fill in with two more after I understand more about how her characters interact. This will give us a seven-story series in a frame story.

• Considering another potential scribbler; we shall see on Friday when I interview the guy.

• Created a contract for hiring these creatures.

• I’ve written two founding stories for series of spicy novelettes, but have had an awful time finding time to write any more around all the other demands.

• The 18 installments of the Fire-Rider series are ready to go; just waiting on the art director to finish the covers (seven are in hand, though…that’ll last the better part of a month if I publish at the rate of one every three or four days).

• I’ve come to hate things technological…what a time suck!

• Finished the last freshman comp course I hope EVER to have to teach. Told the chair I’m taking off next semester.

• Took out a month’s subscription to Shutterstock, which gives me the privilege of downloading up to 750 images.

• Already have found, downloaded, and catalogued about 100. Every time I enter a new set of key words, a bunch more likely candidates come up.

• Found some extremely kewl drawings for the Camptown Ladies Talk blog (which has yet even to be established at Westhost; reference the alleged kid virus), but discovered they’re .eps files, which have to be converted to jpegs and then reduced hugely in size. But still…amazingly kewl.

• Created an awesome cover, using PowerPoint and Preview, for the first installment of the Biker Babe series. Unfortunately it’s a little too racy (read “eye-popping”) to publish on this site, but when the Camptown Races Press site is up, those of you whose sensibilities can sustain a truly lively image will have to come over and admire it.

• Purchased 100 ISBNs.

• Created spreadsheets to suffice (i hope) in the absence of a decent database.

• Edited copy. Advised one distraught author and another who simply plods along and refuses to give up.

• Escaped having to deal overmuch with my neediest client, who thank God ended up with his account at Createspace intact and operative.

• Mocked up a cover in Powerpoint that looks pretty persuasive but have not had the nerve or the time to fiddle with trying to upload it to Amazon or B&N…another day!

• Spent two half-days getting the car’s tires changed.

• Spent half of yesterday today re-learning Windows at the campus’s computer commons; figured out how to get content loaded to Amazon correctly, using a PC not a Mac.

• Approached the college with an initiative the Scottsdale Business Assn has cooked up, by way of offering internships in members’ companies under the SBA aegis. Interesting but tricky.

• Raised Hell, put a block under it, and finally resolved the issue with AMEX about the freeze on my credit bureau accounts. Extracted two new credit cards from AMEX, to kick in after American Express’s contract with Costco expires.

Along the way,  I have learned a LOT of stuff, most of it falling under the heading of “dumb tax.” For example:

• Yesterday I learned that Kindle cannot run a table of contents generated on a Mac, no matter what iteration of Word you’re using. It must be updated on a PC or its links will not go through. Period.

What’s the Dumb Tax part of that? If I’d been paying attention when I read the endless instructions for  how to upload to Kindle from .docx, I would’ve noticed this little detail… 🙄

• Bowker gives one an opportunity to buy a bar code and UPC to go with the ISBNs you’re spending your children’s patrimony to buy. I declined, knowing they weren’t necessary for e-books. But what I did NOT think about is that they are necessary if you want to sell hard-copy books on Amazon. Or anywhere else. The bar codes are expensive, and I was too cheap to pay for them.

Greed Tax: same thing as Dumb Tax. Now I’ll have to have the damn things printed out on labels and ship any hard copies of the diet/cookbook to Amazon, expensively, from my house rather than having the PoD guys ship direct to Amazon. 🙄

And why not have the graphic artist just add the bar code to the wrap-around cover? Because I’d like to sell these things sometime in my lifetime…

• When using a finely tuned Book Design Template, you have to use styles even if you’re preparing PDFs for print. If you use Wyrd’s italic or boldface function (command-i or command-b), for example, what will happen is that any line with so much as one character of italic or b.f. will take on added leading. So instead of the line being, say, 10/12 (ten point type over 12 point leading), it will appear to be 10/13. Lovely.

Why did I not sense this in advance? Not knowing, I’d hesitate to state, for fear of being erroneous.

My friend the e-book builder had converted Slave Labor to .mobi with far more techie software and expertise than I’m capable of marshaling. When I wanted a print-on-demand version, I just slapped the copy I’d sent to him into Book Design Template’s “Focus” model (very handsome, BTW) — without even thinking about the font formatting. Nor was there any reason to think it would make any difference. The styles are designed to make the files work with Kindle. Oh well.

• Also yesterday I learned that Windows has reinvented itself so many times that to a Mac user it now looks like it was developed on a planet circling Antares.

Should’ve bought myself a cheap laptop PC with which I could continue to use Windows, down through the ages.

That’s only partial Dumb Tax, though: in the past, I’ve found that switching back and forth between the Mac and the PC environments causes a lot of headaches. It’s quite a PITA when you confuse one set of commands with another.

• Because of the TofC issue, I learned that the college’s Computer Commons is dead empty in the summertime and is a HEAVENLY place to work. It’s quiet, it’s air-conditioned to sweater-weather levels, and with no one around, you get the techs’ complete, undivided attention.

I’m definitely going back today or tomorrow to work more on relearning windows and to refine the Fire-Rider tables of contents. If I can get them to let me sign in as a member of the public after my campus credentials expire, then the Computer Commons may become my office-away-from-the-home-office, at least during the summertime.

Honestly, I couldn’t believe how cold it was in there. In the morning, I was sitting here at the Funny Farm with the AC blasting and fans running, and sweat was running off my  nose as I was tapping away at the keyboard. I’m not thrilled about burning the gas to drive up to campus every day, but if I get more work done and have fewer conversion problems, it may be worth it.

I think the groundwork for the Camptown Races Press enterprise is now about laid. I sincerely hope so, because wrestling with all this stuff has meant I haven’t been able to write more than a paragraph or two a day for the past several weeks. By the time I’ve finished a day’s raft of To-Do’s, I’m so tired I can’t hold my eyes open.

So I’m hoping that by the end of this week I’ll have the websites updated, announcements of the newly published books posted here and at those sites, a social media expert hired to help peddle the things, and FINALLY some time broken loose in which to do what was the whole point of this exercise: sit down and write for a living.

Now…the only question is, how do I persuade every single reader of Funny about Money to review my astonishingly brilliant and wondrous to read Amazon books???

DUCK-Duck saves Day from Hell (almost)

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Well. She tried. Until a fly fell into the last few drops of cheap red wine we were self-medicating with.

She’s so, soo cute. Come 4:30 in the afternoon, she dropped into the pool (like a fly into a puddle of wine, only DUCK-Duck can swim). Ruby and Cassie the Corgis went bat-sh!t, of course. Cassie has been distracted by Ball but Ruby is still running around in circles. Anxious. A very anxious little dog.

DUCK-Duck is a calm bird. Nothing seems to faze her, not even very anxious little dogs. Evidently realizes that the VALD can’t get through the fencing between Duck and Pups. Even if VALD could pull that off, by some magical canid trick, Ducks have wings. VALD’s do not.

Today has been a Day from Hell, oh so inappropriate for a Sunday. Especially the Sunday of a Memorial Day weekend. I guess it’s because we’re not singing for the summer, unless of course we could afford to go on the European tour. Those of us who are on Social Security, who believed the Mayo Clinic would ding us for something between three and ten grand, and who are generally flat broke under the best of circumstances do not fit into the European Tour category.

By late last night, it became apparent that DropBox, the system through which we deliver services to Our Beloved Clients, had cut off the Fat Lady from its sacred services. The Kid could still access it, but to her puzzlement noted that those things I claimed I was posting to Our Current Beloved Client’s folders seemed not to exist.

A little squirreling around revealed that DropBox was quietly — very, very quietly, yea verily almost inaudibly — saying that it was “not running.”

Not running on the laptop.

Not running on the desktop.

Not fucking running.

So to make a long story short, I started working at 5:00 a.m. of this lovely, crankifying Sunday. I worked until 2:30 p.m., with one midmorning break of about an hour to gulp down some fruit for breakfast, feed the dogs, and run a  load of laundry.

Six hours of banging around seems to have caused DB to “run” on the laptop but not on the desktop.

Having been around the technological block a few times, I sensed that the damn thing was about to do quite the little number. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of megabytes that resided on DB still visible on my terminals if not on anyone else’s, I began the downloads.

Downloaded as fast as I could to flash drives (one was not enough to hold all the data, ohhh no). (We do run a bidness here, after all).

I backed up to flash drives. Backed up to the laptop’s hard drive. Backed up to the iMac’s  hard drive. The iMac backed up to Time Machine.

These processes revealed some extraordinary weakenesses in our organizational architecture: to wit, this stuff has been growing like kudzu.

Grabbed a machete and started to hack.

Reorganized and sanitized the mess on one computer.

Cloned the reorganization and sanitization on the other.

Searched (and searched, and searched, and searched) for a fix online, since as is SOP for these accursed tech entrepreneurs, no human being could be reached.

Struggled and thrashed and banged and thumped and struggled. Eventually both terminals were back online with DropBox.

Let both Bidness Partner and Client know they could access the ongoing project.

Five minutes later, the iMac lost contact with DropBox.

Just this minute, the MacBook (laptop) still seems to be in touch. But I don’t expect that to last long and don’t give a damn. Whenever I sober up (which probably will be along about 5 tomorrow morning), I will open a new account at some other provider of free online Cloud space.

Pisseth me off.

Do you know how much productive work I expected to do today?

• Download and install Scrivener
• Learn to use Scrivener
• Apply it to at least one FireRider serial installment; but
• Ideally, apply it to three
• Check on new online stoonts
• Read the several papers early-bird online stoonts have already posted
• Work on Old New Bad Novel
• Come up with some spice to replace a very boring post-adolescent passage therein
• Clean the pool
• Walk the dogs
• Socialize with the neighbors
• Socialize online

Oh hell. At least we got the pool cleaned.

I love computers. I hate computers

YoungDucksminimized

How Old Does a Computer Think You Are?

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Do you look like a young pup? Or is it time for a new set of make-up and some fresh dye in the coiffure?

Lo! You no longer have to gaze into the mirror and guess, or take the word of those who dare not offend. Run on over to Microsoft’s new tool and ask…

Monitor, Monitor, off the wall
Who’s the youngest of them all?

It not only will tell you how old it thinks you are, it’ll take a stab at your gender, too.

Now, to my mind it’s a brilliant invention: contemplating a face devoid of paint, the thing thinks I’m 17 years younger than I really am! That’s based on a photo snapped, on the fly, by PhotoBooth.

LOL! No wonder every medical factotum who demands that I regurgitate my birthdate (again!) coos “ohhhh, you don’t look that old!” phbhbtphbhbt!!

Fox News reporters, who apparently have little to do but manage to keep a sense of humor anyway, tested it on a bouquet of celebrities, several wax figures, and a pancake. Time, like all liberal media inclined to take itself more seriously, stodgily ran the portraits of ten presidents past it.

Result: the ages of US presidents are easier to parse than the ages of movie stars.

On the other hand…it’s a pretty sure guess that anyone residing and working in the White House is likely to age at the rate of two virtual years for every one solar year.

Try it out! You simply upload a photo to the CIA… a group of Russian hackers… the Koch brothers… Microsoft’s How-Old.net site and the program will render its opinion of your gender and your age. Over here, the techies responsible for these antics explain what they’re up to.

And at the Azure site, Microsoft techs express their awe at the number of people who have signed on to try it out, followed by a great deal of amusing user chatter.

Says one user:

Well. I’m 57. It guessed my most recent picture as 36. It also guessed the turtle tank I was standing next to as 4 and female. I’d say that’s typical for a Microsoft beta.

😆

She’s B-a-a-a-a-c-k!

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We were off the air yesterday until about mid-morning local time. Internet service in Utah, where Funny is hosted, had crashed.

I started out the day with some brilliant idea for a post. Then discovered the dashboard was inaccessible. By the time Jesse got the site back online, I’d forgotten whatever the brilliant idea was. And by then I was engaged in whatever other busywork fricassees my little brainpan during the daylight hours.

And now, it’s off to Scottsdale, for the weekly meeting of our merry business group. I have a presentation to give, as well as chairing said shindig. And I believe my ride will be here within the minute.

Later!

Cheap, USABLE cell phone scored!!!

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Hot dang! FINALLY I seem to have found a cell I can a) afford and b) operate without needing a master’s degree in engineering and special equipment to dial a phone number.

Saturday I dropped by a nearby Radio Shack to pick up batteries for a couple of walk-around extensions to the land-line. The phone that resides in a cabinet shelf near the floor, where I can reach it should I break a hip the next time I fall on the tile, had about gone dry, and the kitchen phone had keeled over dead.

Radio Shack, as you’ve probably heard, is a moribund corporation, another of the best features of twentieth-century American commerce about to go away. Only one other customer was in the store, and the sole sales clerk was waiting on him. That was fine: it gave me a chance to browse all the strange and silly objects Radio Shack sells. Some of this stuff is great fun, and I’ve found they often undersell the competition on the same brands of Chinese import electronics. Ah…the doorbell thingie that rings when someone opens the door, thereby letting you know when your customer enters or your kid exits! Oh…the 37 berjillion little jackets you can put on your cell phone. Eeeeh…the array of colorful funny-looking Bluetooth speakers… And on and on.

Naturally, I perused the vast array of cell phones they offer, all the while thinking, “But I don’t want to carry a tiny computer around with me! All I want to do is be able to call the roadside service if my car craps out on the freeway.”

Eventually the other guy left and I purchased the batteries. In passing, I asked the sales dude, “Do they make a cell phone that all it does is make phone calls? I don’t need anything more than that.”

The kid recognized a doddering old bat when he saw her. “You want a phone for emergencies only, right?”

“Yeah. That tank out there is almost 15 years old, and sooner or later it’s going to fall apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.”

“Have we got a phone for you!”

Radio Shack carries TracFone gadgets, and lo! They had a totally dumbed-down flip phone for LESS THAN TWENTY BUCKS! It has real buttons — not stupid virtual buttons that won’t respond to your fingertip and that you have to punch with a stylus, if you can see the damn things, if you can figure out how to get them to come up. And the real buttons are large enough to fit your fingers and for your eyes to make out the numbers on the damn things.

Its main function is to make phone calls. But it also will send texts — convenient, since my son thinks it’s rude to telephone people and, unless the call is made by ER personnel on the hospital’s phone system, will generally respond only to texts. And it even has a little camera on it. Apparently it will download and play music, too, which it will kindly play through Bluetooth speakers.

For another $20, you get 120 minutes or 3 months’ worth of air time, whichever comes first. That, compared to the $35/month I was paying T-Mobile for nothing, is quite the little bargain.

I was tempted to ogle another cheap phone that had more features (momentarily forgetting, in my enchantment, that I can’t figure out how to operate those features…). Amazingly, the guy did not try to upsell me! To the contrary, he insisted that since an emergency phone was what I wanted, the cheaper model and plan were what was needed.

So. Now if the Dog Chariot craps out, I can call the roadside rescue service from the side of the road. 🙂