Coffee heat rising

Editing biz

Never a Dull Moment…

by

SO…here I was, about to write a complacent little post about how NICE is it that I’m getting a little respite from the grinding workload this summer and how a friend is coming over and we’re going to go window shopping at the long-ignored “fashion square” upon which we ruminated yesterday, and ahhhhh isn’t everything beer and skittles…

Never fails, does it?

Our Fair City, in all its City Parents’ bat-brained wisdom, evades going so far as to fix worn-out streets by patching them instead of resurfacing them. They send crews around about once every 10 to 15 years to fill and spray oil over the cracks in your neighborhood’s streets. This enhances the Look of Blight so fashionable in our town and delays having to do the job right for another while.

Week or so ago, they threw flyers on our driveways (we call those “Burglars Enter Here!” notices) informing us that we were to keep our cars off the roadway, because if they came across a vehicle parked at the curb when they arrive to fill in the cracks, they will have the vehicle towed.

I’m sitting here, then, about to start scribbling today’s post, when the dogs go FREAKING BATSH!T.

The tarring crews are out in front, and they are flummoxed. Neighbor catty-corner across the street, a very beloved and nice neighbor, has left an SUV parked out in front of his house. The workmen are obviously trying to get a rise out of the house’s occupants. Some of the men are taking the opportunity to loaf, to inspect the car, and generally to scurry around aimlessly. No answer: Joel & Dita presumably are…you know…at work.

I call WonderAccountant, whose house/office is next door to them. She hadn’t gotten the message that the City intended to impound vehicles left parked on the street, but in any event, the car is not Joel’s. It belongs to a friend of theirs who’s trying to sell it. Friend lives in a gated compound and is not allowed to leave it out for potential buyers to see. Not that they could get in through the gate anyway. So Joel & Dita are letting the guy sell it from our street instead of his.

W.A. texts Joel. Joel contacts Dita. Dita is home but like all women around here, wisely not answering the door to strangers; she is going to run out and move the car.

Ah, the drama. Ah, the operatic flights of fancy!

Respite…yeah, OK…what was that about? Oh yes…

The nasty cough that was the only symptom (except for a brief 102.5° fever) of the late great homicidal cold is still hanging on. FOUR MONTHS LATER.

After 12 weeks of choking and gasping, accompanied by some unprintably disgusting effects, I finally gave up and visited Young Dr. Kildare. The reason I persist in seeing this man, despite his having moved his practice to a part of town where you have to dodge bullets to get from the parking lot to the door, is that his signal quality is common sense.

You don’t often find that in a doctor.

So I tell him I’ve been to WonderAccountant’s lung doc, who says it’s not asthma and who says the X-ray he ordered came back “clear.” YDK whips out his stethoscope and listens to everything you can listen to and says he can’t hear anything in the chest, either.

I remark that the evil Other Symptoms sound a lot like the cough you can get with GERD. He being a GERD veteran himself, remarks that it could be.

He suggests that I go back on the omeprazole for two weeks. If it helps, we’ll know it’s the GERD and a few more weeks of omeprazole should calm it back down. If it doesn’t help, then we’ll know it’s not GERD and then we’ll have to figure out what to do next.

Two long weeks later… Nothing. The omeprazole plus liberal doses of ranitidine have effectively zero effect.

Well, not quite zero. It’s gotten a tiny bit better, but not so much as you’d notice.

This means I really should go over to my “official” GP at the Mayo. But I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna because those folks at the Mayo are test-happy. Extravagantly test-happy. They are going to subject me to hour after hour of tests — which will entail endless drives to the far side of Scottsdale. And one of the tests they’d like to foist on me involves shoving a camera down my throat. I do not want a camera shoved down my throat. Enough medico-miseries are ENOUGH, already.

So I think…hmmmm…. So it’s probably not GERD. It’s not lung cancer (though it surely could be esophageal cancer but it’s probably not). It’s not Valley fever. It’s not pneumonia. What can we conclude from this?

a) If it’s not esophageal cancer, it’s likely not life-threatening; and
b) It probably has something to do with the Cold/Cough from Hell.

I’m not swallowing any more of the carefully husbanded stash of codeine cough medicine, which I think is contraindicated anyway because the reason I’m coughing so hideously is all the gunk that’s coming up. But I do have some Mucinex left over, purchased when I came down with this thing. It didn’t do a whit of good then. But…it functions to make you cough stuff out. What if the problem is that this hideously thick, gummy stuff is stuck in there and needs to be expelled? The worst that could happen is the Mucinex could kill me, and at this point, that doesn’t sound like an altogether bad thing.

So I try the stuff. And amazingly…next morning, the cough is about 90% better! It’s still there, but it’s not about to drown me, nor am I gasping for air.

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

So that’s relief number 1.

Relief number 2 will be engineering a chance to visit with my friend for several hours today. And even to go into a very fancy, very air-conditioned mall and view the way the One-Percenters live. Always an amusing prospect.

This relief is attenuated by the facts that…

a) A new version of Honored Clients’ 33-page (typeset!) tome on matters economic arrived yesterday, with a request to please turn it around in three days; and
b) The second set of The Complete Writer‘s page proofs are ready at the printer’s shop, and my Honored Spy there thinks the cover is still not working — suggests redoing it from scratch.

Welp, I got through 12 pages of the Chinese economic study yesterday, plus the headnotes of the 8 single-spaced pages of 11-point tables. So if I can get through six pages today and six pages tomorrow — not at all unreasonable — that may leave time to proofread tomorrow afternoon, or at least will make me only one day late.

Meanwhile, I have a presentation on Saturday and really wanted to have the book in hand to sell to the audience. This means those proofs have to be picked up today!!!!!!!!

It also pretty well guarantees I will not finish the Chinese paper tomorrow, because it will take a good half a day to rebuild the goddamn cover, and because I’m still not finished preparing the presentation. And the interior copy will need to be double-checked to be sure the three or four dozen changes came across OK.

So I propose to suggest that Dear Friend, who planned to drive today, leave her car in my garage and let me drive, thereby consuming my gasoline for the considerable drive to the printer’s shop.

If she agrees to this exploit, it will be an experience for her, since the printer is located in a part of town where…shall we say…nice girls do not go. It’s due south of the airport, in one of the most desperate slums in the Southwest.

For the Love of Chinese Scholars

by

Chinese Scholarship in a Worldwide Context

It’s a lovely day today, warming up enough that soon the pool will be eminently swimmable. I’ve finished my scheduled allotment of Chinese-to-English edits and read about a third of an Iraqi woman’s memoir that I’d agreed to “beta-read” some time back. And now I’m thinking I’d like a beer but don’t want to have a beer without dinner and feel too lazy to fix a dinner and so probably will refrain from the beer.

“Beta-read”: That means read it (usually for free) and critique it without editing it. Both of these works are extremely interesting.

The current team of Chinese economists did an elaborate study of the inner workings that create stress in successful multinational corporations when they attempt to list themselves on international stock exchanges. These stresses are significant and, from what I can grasp, may even go so far as to threaten the company’s existence.

They stem from cultural ideas about money, about business, and about government that differ radically between East and West. In China, the government itself — or the Party — has what amounts to a stakeholder’s interest in certain kinds of major corporations. The upshot of this is that any time, some part of the corporation’s board of directors will be government functionaries.

These folks will be there to help insure that the corporation’s ethos stays focused on the culture’s accepted view of a company’s raison d’etre. In the West, a business — particularly an incorporated one — exists to make money and to enrich its stockholders. In China, well…yeah, that’s all well and good. Obviously a company exists to succeed and thereby will make money; but it also has a duty to support the mores and the progress of the country (i.e., the government) itself. Part of that involves taking care of the employees; there are other implications, too.

That alone would be regarded as a conflict of interest in most Western countries (at least, those that don’t have Donald Trump at the helm… 😉 ). You can imagine the potential for corruption, as you can imagine the frowning-upon by a stock exchange such as NYSE.

So what ensues when a company gets listed on an international stock exchange such as the NYSE is an intense conflict of values brought to bear on the firm’s management and leadership. The outcome of that can, in theory, be poor decisions, paralysis of decision-making, getting crosswise with the government or public opinion, and on and on. In some respects this conflict may weaken the company, in the same way that having to deal with excessive bureaucratic bullshit can weaken a business in the US. It certainly does nothing to make life easy for the company’s management.

They interviewed a number of upper-level executives in various departments of their subject corporations. The remarks these guys make on the subject are very interesting.

Speaking of Business

This paper and a second one coming in this weekend, plus a little income from the blog, will just about make this month’s revenue goal for The Copyeditor’s Desk. If this continues through December, there will be enough to distribute a little dividend.

And that, I hope, can be put toward shoring up the shack. Now not only does the pool need to be replastered, but the back wall is starting to lean. It will need to be (expensively) repaired.

Thanks to the rolling box of computers new car, instead of $2,000 to $4,000 left at the end of this fiscal year, I figure about $700 will remain from this year’s RMD. That, alas, is not good.

It’s way too close a margin for survival, and it doesn’t come anywhere near leaving enough to cover the growing number of fix-up jobs the house needs.

So that makes Chinese scholarship look even more interesting!

Update: The Business

by

Along about 10:30 last night, I finished editing the latest Chinese academic paper, 12,250 words not counting the half-dozen complicated tables.

You understand: the last allegedly book-length manuscript I read was a little over 12,000 words… This is pretty large, for a journal article, which you would usually expect to run 3,000 to 5,000 words. And extremely arcane: a statistical study trying to make sense of the relationship between corporate board structure, Chinese laws, and the life cycle of firms over a period of 10 or 15 years.

The authors surfaced late last week and said they want it turned around by the end of the month. That is like right now.

Fortunately, by way of saving a few yuan, the co-authors asked me not to review the tables. That was a mercy, because tables cause some big problems with Office.

I sincerely hope the problem was the tables. Wyrd is allergic to tables and typically will react, after enough is enough, by swooning into a catastrophic crash, causing you to lose all your data not only in the file you’re working on but in any other files that are open at the time!

This can be dealt with by setting Wyrd’s auto-recover function to save every five minutes. Thus you lose only a few minutes of work, rather than a quarter-hour’s worth. Sounds good, eh?

Well…. It’s not nice to fool Mother Microsoft… Yesterday the thing started throwing up an error message to the effect that the computer was out of space and the document couldn’t be saved.

Sheee-ut!

On the home stretch, fucking exhausted, anxious to get done…I knew I was GUNNA DIE if this thing decided it wouldn’t save to disk.

Rescued what I’d done by saving to RTF and, as fast as I could, emailing it to myself. This kept all the changes up to the point where these messages – which interestingly enough, occurred every five minutes – began to warn of an impending (current?) crash.

Opened it on the freaking enormous overpowered iMac, found nothing had been lost, and resumed working. Believe me, there’s more than enough space on that thing.

But…the file is still telling me it’s not being saved. Same irritating, nerve-wracking message.

Suspicious, think I, that it saved everything right up to the last edit before I launched it into the email ether. Hmmm…

I hit command-S (which is alt-FS in the real world), and it seems to save. Hm.

Again I email the file to myself…and again the saved attachment does contain all the edits I’ve entered.

At this point, I conclude the problem lies not in the Mac but in our corrupted file. Even the RTF version generates the same aggravating messages. It’s probably the tables.

So I keep working, frantically, and saving manually about at the end of every sentence. Then I have to go through and verify page after page after endless page of references. And yea verily, our worthies have included eight or ten sources to which they haven’t referred in-text. And the References section isn’t alphabetized. Or rather it is, in a cursory way…it takes looking at it with the glazing removed from one’s eyes to realize the problem isn’t just a couple of entries incorrectly entered, but that the entire thing is fucked over.

In a file that has corrupted. Oh, good.

But I finally manage to finish, finally manage to get it saved. Run a compare-docs operation to generate the edited version; then have to review the 23 pages of edits. Oh, God! What a jumble!

And of course, this file, too, keeps generating – every five minutes – the “I ain’t a-savin’ this thing” message.

At last the project is as done it can get, at least until such time as the journal’s editor arrives at the office and finds my query: I need to know how the journal formats References entries for books. This journal uses a bastardization of APA style. It’s largely APA, but with weird quirks…like bold-face italic c/lc for journal titles. My god!

The thing comes out through Oxford. Why the hell not use Oxford style? Ohhhhh no. We have to get weird.

I’m drafting this post in Wyrd by way of seeing what happens.

The answer: nothing. Evidently the problem was in the file, not in the hard drive.

Moving on.

This paper will generate almost $400.

The Copyeditor’s Desk hauled in a phenomenal amount of work this spring. To hit my $20,000 goal for all of 2017 by the first of July, I’ll only need a couple of articles like this a month, or one book-length editing project per month, or one major index per month. That is effing amazing.

If this keeps on, the S-corp will start to generate, for the first time in its existence, enough that I can draw down a salary. Hot dang!

Problem is, I’m pretty fuzzy about where all this business came from. Word of mouth, I think. It’s a little hard to believe that the switch from a page rate to a word rate worked effectively enough to open the floodgates.

The writing bookoid, which I intend not to market on Amazon so much as to use as a marketing tool for the bidness by handing it out at speaking engagements, has yet to go to press, simply because I haven’t had time to fiddle with it. I believe the ebook designer is about done with it, but for the past month I’ve been too sick to go to the weekly networking meeting where he and I see each other on a regular basis, so have no idea where we are there.

I’ve also got to re-up for Toastmaster’s, another task that I’ve been too lazy/busy/sick to attend to.

And so, onward…

This, That, and the ‘Tother

by

Cheers! Check out Kostas Chiotis’s latest round-up over at Finance Blog Zone. Kostas hit up every finance blogger in sight to contribute a blurb on how to manage debt. It’s old home day over there! (And new home day, too: a bunch of younger writers are in there with us old bats.) There’s Trent Hamm, by golly: the original inspiration for Funny about Money. Others of the old guard are there — Evan of My Journey to Millions wins my prize for “Man of Fewest Words”: on the subject of managing debt, says he, “Figure out why you have it.” 🙂 Many of the younger pups are represented, among them Ginger of Girls Just Wanna Have Funds and Shannyn Allan of Frugal Beautiful. Though Funny has drifted away from Personal Finance as a genre (once you feel you have enough money, the subject gets a lot less interesting), the niche is still alive and well.

{grump!} Just poured coffee on my keyboard. Looks like none of it got down inside there, though.

Driving to Tempe in a couple of hours to meet my bidness partner at our favorite lunch hangout. Amazingly, she did not get accepted to law school (those fools!), so I’ll be interested to hear what her next plan is. We also need to cook up a scheme for next year’s Society for Scholarly Publishing conference, whereinat she proposes that we do a panel presentation. She actually had that in mind this spring, but we missed last fall’s RFP deadline.

Which is good: it gives us several months to come up with a winning idea.

The half-dose of codeine worked…half-way. Still coughing, but not gasping for breath. Kinda doubt I can sing tonight, but at least I should be able to make it out to Tempe without expiring on the freeway.

While I’m running around, I should drop by a Sears. We’re told that Sears is on its last legs, and there’s a household doodad I need to get only at Sears. Dammit.

My fridge is a Kenmore. It’s run well for lo! these 13 years — twice as long as its engineered life expectancy, with no repairs at all. It dispenses filtered water, which is rather nice for one’s b&w’s… To do that, it uses an expensive screw-in filter cartridge. These things last a long time. In theory you probably should replace them every six months to a year, but in reality I think I’ve only used about four or five of them. They’re made by Kenmore. You can buy them on Amazon…at considerably higher cost than the already bracing amount you’ll pay at Sears.

So I think I’ll make a Sears run and buy two or three of the things. That refrigerator can’t last all that much longer. But I’d like not to have to replace if for a stupid reason like “they don’t make those filters anymore.”

Here’s a marvelous little gem in this morning’s news: The FDA announces that the very type of breast implants the boob surgeons tried their damnedest to talk me into cause cancer. Holy shit! Am I glad or am I glad that I put my foot down and refused to let them stick those things under my chest muscles!?!

You know, I rather like being flat as a nine-year-old. A pair of fake titties tattooed on there might be nice…but since nobody ever sees me except an occasional passing helicopter pilot (who deserves what he gets 😀 ), it’s surely not a matter of any urgency. Or of much interest. As it develops, almost all of my clothes look just fine on me. And for sure everything is about 110% more comfortable: no binding, no rubbing, no squeezing, no itching, no riding up, no sagging, no hurting. Just think of that: clothes that don’t make you miserable! And the joy of never having to shop for another bra ever again: priceless.

Somebody tried to shoot up the British Parliament, we’re told. How’s that gun control workin’ out for ya, folks? On the same subject, though, it doesn’t seem to be working out well here. In lovely Arizona if you’re a felon, even of the minor variety, you are prohibited evermore from owning a gun. That notwithstanding, a pair of nitwits — the as-yet unconvicted wife no doubt operating as a straw purchaser — enjoyed keeping a pistol around the house. The female nitwit tossed the pistol on the bed as she was fiddling around the house. Their two-year-old picked it up and shot their nine-year-old in the head. He died, after a pointless spell on life support.

You should have to pass an IQ test to be eligible to buy a gun.

The Economist is agonizing over Brexit and Scoxit — the Scots now proposing a second referendum to divorce Britain, so they don’t have to leave the EU. Of course, the journal being a very liberal, free-trade sort of publication strongly espouses staying and is editorially abhorred by the vote to exit and the ascendence of Theresa May. Yet they do (unlike American publications of record) publish reasoned arguments for the other side. A commenter in the March 18 letters, Robert Aitken of Oxford, asks a very interesting question: “if Britain had never joined the EU, would we now vote to do so?”

His answer to that fine rhetorical question is, in short, no: “Looking at the wasteful, sclerotic, and undemocratic grouping it has become, only a Euro-enthusiast of the deepest hue could think that we would.” The remainder of his letter explains his reasoning — it’s very much worth reading.

But in the “reading” department, Firefox is busy threatening to crash again, so it looks like it’s time to close this and close all the other tabs and shut the whole system down and go get ready to drive across the city.

And so, away…

Zapped and Whapped!

by

…and driven to a bourbon and water… {gasp!}

Just sent off 60,000 words to an Honored New Client. Another 30,000 pending. My brain was about paralyzed from that effort when in came a yelp from an existing client...eek! Would I help her get a squib off to a scholarly journal annnddddd it’s due on the 25th h-e-e-l-l-l-p!!!

Heh heh heh… Well, naturally, I’m not about to let Existing Client down, she having been around for quite awhile and also being exceptionally sweet, as human beings go.

Never rains but it pours, hm?

So I’ve been incommunicado for days, struggling to turn around the Magnum Opus for HNC. Spent three hours before breakfast working on the scholarly squib. Then fed the dogs and myself and set out to reach a stopping place 2/3 of the way through the Great Novel of the Western World.

These files can get pretty data-heavy. To give you an idea, the original file for the novel was 589 kb. For reasons I cannot fathom, the edited version is a mere 439 kb (there are some things you don’t wanna know), and the clean version is a slender 292 kb. It has, mercifully, nothing that looks even faintly like a graphic. ♥

More to the point, though, Wyrd’s “Track Changes” function tends to make a file unstable. That’s especially so if the file contains tables, Hanzi characters, or Hebrew characters. Or Cyrillic characters. Or Arabic characters. Or…god help us. Mercifully, our budding novelist does not incline to write in Chinese and does not favor tables.

By way of getting around this instability, I’ve been using Compare Files instead of Track Changes. But HNC, delighted with the edits in the first three of his chapters, pasted them into his MS and then sent it back to me to continue. Heee heeeeeee!

You do not even want to guess what Compare Files > Track Changes on Tracked Changes will do. F’sure, I am not gonna guess and I’m not gonna try it. So that left me with completing the job using Track changes. And that is what we call “a bitch.”

Naturally, the file did crash this morning, about 55,000 words into the job. But fortunately, being wise to Wyrd by now, I’d set the program to save every 5 minutes, so lost only about a paragraph’s worth of work.

Reading HNC’s entertaining fantasy novel riles me up to want to go back to writing my own fantasy novel, the Varnis story: Queen of the Universe Meets Weird Intruders from Another Dimension (we think). But, speaking of Intruders, all the intrusions from the freaking Real World put the eefus on that scheme. I’ve written one (count it, 1) paragraph of chapter 1. 😀

Going nowhere there…

Whenever I finish whinging about this state of affairs, I’ll get on with the current academic emanation.

This influx of work, though it’s kept me glued to a chair like that lady whose body supposedly fused to her easy chair, was OK while it was raining. But today is clear and beautiful and warm, and the poor little doggies haven’t even had a stroll. Sooner or later I must get up and move around.

The influx, however, has another effect: if HNC’s payments don’t return the S-corp’s bottom line to where it was before I took to sailing the Amazon, the next index most certainly will. And about three comparable projects this year will fill the coffers nicely.

I need to net a little over $11,100 p/a to replace the teaching income; that’s a gross of around $14,500. We’re on track to do that if demand continues. But demand rarely continues.

We shall see.

Back at the ranch…

Today saw a fuckin’ FLOOD of nuisance phone calls, unhindered by the CPS call blocker. I think it’s because some bitch got through and got rude to me so I told her what she could do to herself. Probably she had the sophistication to route a sh!tload of junk calls my way.

The problem is (or was) that for some systems (depending on how much junk you’ve got wired into your cable connection) the call blocker can interfere with the Caller ID, so that you can’t see who’s calling. This means that when a call that the gadget has yet to identify comes in, you either have to answer it or let it ring through to the answering machine. That’s a nuisance, but because the call blocker has cut the number of calls down to one or two a day, I haven’t bestirred myself.

Today, though, after about the 8th call, I got on the phone to the company’s customer service.

Which is, we might say, beyond superb.

First off, their guy was able to ascertain that the incoming was random, and so probably not the result of a problem with the device. He explained that sometimes companies share phone numbers (which is exactly what i surmised Phone Bitch had done) and you’ll get a deluge for a day or two. So over the phone, he was able to help me rewire the device’s connection so it no longer keeps me from seeing the Caller ID numbers, and also to show me how to program in certain codes to block specific types of nuisance calls. Since I got off the phone from him, not one more robocall has weaseled its way through.

That’s gratifying. But still…what a nuisance to have to jump through all these hoops to keep sh!theads from constantly pestering you over the phone! Since call-blocking technology exists in several iterations, why aren’t phone providers required by law to offer it?

Okay, so now that i’m duly unwound, it’s time to get back to work. Lhudly sing goddam!

 

 

45 Minutes to Blast-Off

by

My friend and sometime editorial client La Maya will show up in a little less than an hour with a plan to go for coffee at our favorite uber-Mexican restaurant. So that will be a nice way to start the day.

Normally by 7:30 I’ve been working for half an hour or 45 minutes and will have another hour to go before disconnecting to feed the dogs and then go back to work.

The Copyeditor’s Desk is experiencing an amazing flood of work, one customer after another lined up at the door. Just now I’m working on two major projects, an abstruse study in business management theory by one of the elite Chinese academics and a wild-assed fantasy novel by an author who appears to be a gamer at heart. We just wrapped up (I hope) another issue of Chicana/Latina Studies, and I’m hoping the client whose ethnic studies volume we just finished editing will hire us to index it and its companion volume.

If this much work would come in all the time, I could make a living off the editorial business. Well, no: I could earn enough that combined with Social Security I wouldn’t have to use every red penny from the forced drawdowns from my IRAs. Then I could reinvest the drawdowns in taxable funds and, with any luck at all, not run out of money before I die.

Exactly how to keep the work flowing in escapes me, though. Facebook does nothing for you as an advertising medium. Twitter is a joke. About the only effective marketing device for this kind of work seems to be word of mouth. The Chinese will spread your fame like wildfire. Americans? Not so much.

Meanwhile, some changes need to be made pretty quick.

Intuit has jacked up its rates for Quickbooks Online to far more than I’m willing to pay. It was more than I’m willing to pay from the git-go, but $15 a month for a program that’s been “upgraded” to the point where I can’t even begin to figure out how to use it is not gonna make it. I keep all my records in Excel and my accountant enters stuff in Quickbooks by downloading from the bank accounts and checking against my spreadsheets.

IMHO, that is fuckin ridiculous.

She wants me to keep QB Online for the business but suggests dropping it for the personal accounts. I would like to switch the business to a program such as Wave or Xero, which can download to .csv files that can be uploaded into HER Quickbooks.

So…that discussion is ongoing.

I’m also royally sick and tired of PayPal. The bastards gouged me $12 for the most recent payment from Taiwan. It’s annoying to use, and since the most recent Flap of Fraudulence episode — in which my business partner’s  husband insisted that we both take our bank accounts offline from PP — the only way to transfer funds to my bank is to make them issue a check. They gouge you for that privilege, too.

Not sure how to jump that ship, though. Although there are several alternatives — some apparently both cheaper and better — everyone uses PayPal. Asking clients to use some other tool is problematic. Most people who live overseas do not use checking accounts. In the rest of the world, interestingly enough, checks are a thing of the past. If you ask someone in Asia or Europe to pay with a check, they’re flummoxed.

They end up having to pay with a money order, which is even more expensive than PayPal, and a nuisance to boot.

And speaking of providers, Cox was up and down all day yesterday. Looks like it’s doing the same thing today. I don’t think it’s on my end, and neither did the Cox tech I chatted with yesterday. My son thinks I need to shut everything down and reboot the computers, the modem, and the router. Did that. Didn’t work. So…struggling with large files when your Internet isn’t working is not a joke.

Lovely Uptown Phoenix has precious few internet providers, so this is going to be a problem. I could switch to Qwest’s successor, CenturyLink, but really, I want nothing to do with anything even vaguely connected to Qworst. And as a matter of fact, CenturyLink’s Yelp reviews are in the sub-sub-basement. Roundly hated. Cox: equally so. They both rank one (1) star. The only ISP that’s well rated is Direct Satellite TV, which states firmly, “We are not a stand-alone internet service provider.”

Since I have no time or desire to sit in front of the television — nor do I even own a TV set anymore — I guess that lets them out.

Verizon has lukewarm reviews; they seem to be hated slightly less than CenturyLink and Cox, but not exactly beloved. The only one that gets really good reviews (all 7 of them, no doubt paid for…) bills itself as a “business-class telecom service,” which suggests their prices are significantly higher than Cox’s. I may call them, though, just to get a bid.

I hate doing business with these outfits. But…it might actually be worth paying more to get better service.

Uh oh…here’s La Maya. And so, away!