Sound familiar?
I think the second and fourth panels on this excellent comic strip by Scott Meyer can easily be applied to Internet trolls — you know, the dickwads who always have something nasty to say in online forums and in comment threads. Do read the whole thing to get the full message.
Image embedded with the author’s permission.
Still very busy, getting ready to relocate, but the end is near.
First of all, you need to understand that I really do like writing in this blog. It makes me feel good to post something each morning as I enjoy my morning coffee. Whether it’s a poorly disguised rant or a detailed account of my latest helicopter trip, it feels good to get the words out and share them with others. I am, after all, a writer at heart and writers need to write.
And that’s actually what I’m doing. I’m working on a revision to a 600+ page book and am about 3/4 finished. There’s a very tight deadline — one I’m not sure I’m going to make this time (don’t tell my editor) — and I’ve been working my ass off on it, getting very burned out in the process. I’m not complaining; this one book earns a whole year’s income so it’s worth what I put into it. But it does leave me too tired and burned out to write in this blog — and not really enough time to do it right anyway.
But the end is near! I’ll soon be repositioning my helicopter and RV to Washington State for the summer. (My house-sitter is already installed to care for the fish and backyard birds and keep an eye on things.) Once there, I’ll finish up the book and have a lot more time for other projects, including some videos and, of course, this blog.
Between now and then, I’ll be making two trips from Phoenix to Washington. On one, I’ll be a passenger in my own helicopter for a day or two. On the other, I’ll be driving my “rig” on a two to three day journey through Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington. On both trips, I won’t be writing about computers. So I expect to have a clear enough head to share some stories about the trips. Maybe some photos, too. With both hands free in the helicopter, I’ll have no trouble taking photos.
So bear with me just a little longer. New blog posts will come soon. I promise.
Inexpensive publishing on demand works for calendars, too.
I spent much of Thanksgiving Day and this morning assembling my 2011 Flying M Air Wall Calendar. I had to hurry to meet the noon PST deadline for 1/2 price printing on MagCloud.
This is the second year in a row that I’ve created a calendar for my clients and other folks. It’s a typical 8.25 x 10.5 inch (folded) wall calendar. Open it and a full-page photo appears at the top with a calendar grid beneath it. The calendar includes U.S. Holidays (sorry, Canada), moon phases, and mini-calendars.
The thumbnails on this page represent the main images in the calendar, in the order in which they appear. The calendar also features about 20 smaller images, including panoramic images, related to each main image. I made all the photos for this year’s calendar with the exception of two cherry drying photos made by one of my clients.
I created the calendar with an InDesign template I first used last year. I had to update all the dates and replace all the images. I put about 10 solid hours of work into it this year.
Once the calendar was finished, I saved it as a MagCloud-compatible PDF and uploaded the 29MB file to MagCloud. Their system processed it immediately, creating a page with previews. I set options and entered a description for the calendar and clicked Publish. The calendar is now available to the public for $9.95 plus shipping.
I wrote about MagCloud last year after a blog reader told me about it. I now use it for all my printed marketing materials and am in the process of writing a full-color book I plan to publish with MagCloud. Last year around this time, I wrote about using MagCloud to create my 2010 Flying M Air Wall Calendar.
The reason I had to finish today by noon is that MagCloud was running a 50% off sale. (Follow @MagCloud on Twitter to learn about special deals like that; they ran a 25% off sale for Halloween.) I needed to buy 75 calendars and I wanted to buy them at half off. I finished with 20 minutes to spare, placed my order on time, and saved over $200.
I spread the word on Twitter and a handful of my Twitter friends also bought at a discount. Apparently, some kind of sale is still running, because as I type this, the MagCloud price is $8.55.
The calendar makes a nice little gift for anyone interested in travel or helicopters. I don’t have nearly as many photos of my helicopter in this year’s calendar as last year’s. Instead, I concentrated on travel photos.
One thing I do want to point out: if you order on MagCloud, you’ll have to punch your own hole to hang it. MagCloud publishes magazines, not calendars, so there’s no option to have them punch the hole.
Check it out on MagCloud and let me know what you think.
A few more photos.
Back in 2008, on my first trip to Washington State for cherry drying work, I spent a lot of time exploring the Quincy Lakes area not far from where I was based. I took along my camera and made quite a few photos. Some of them appear in my June 2008 and 2009 posts, “Flying Things of Quincy Lakes,” “Takin’ Pictures,” “Sometimes It’s Too Easy to Get a Good Shot.” All of the best ones appear in my Washington photo gallery (slide show).
I went back on July 12, 2010. I’d waited too long. Most of the baby birds had grown. It was very hot every day, making hiking an avoidable activity. But I still managed to shoot a few dozen images. The ones here are the best.
This is a family of American Coots. These were among the youngest birds I saw that day. (View larger image.)
The chicks of this family of American Coots had outgrown their nest. But that didn’t stop them from squeezing into the area at the end of the day. (View larger image.)
A male Brown Headed Cow Bird. (View larger image.)
A family of Yellow Headed Blackbirds. The youngster (in the middle) is still begging for food. (View larger image.)
This is my favorite shot from the day. This heron looks as if it had settled down for the night on this little island. I happened to snap the image just as a bird flew low over the water, adding itself and its reflection to the final shot. (View larger image.)
How does anyone get anything done in this town?
The old guy Mike called to give us an estimate for replacing two windows refused to take driving directions to our house. Instead, I had to drop everything and go out to meet him.
He wasn’t at the corner where he was supposed to be. Instead, he’d driven his unmarked truck past me and was waiting two blocks from our home. He used his cell phone to call me. I tracked him down and he followed me to my house.
The window on the right is the one that needs replacing.
The windows are upstairs. He followed me up the stairs. I pointed out the 4 foot by 8 foot double-pane glass panel that needed replacement. The seal between the two panes had failed and moisture had slipped in. Each day, the window would fog up in a way that couldn’t be wiped clean. Since the window is one of two that offer the best view in the house, we wanted it fixed quickly.
He walked up to the window and looked at the garage roof outside. “How do I get out there?” he asked.
“On a ladder,” I replied.
“We can’t do that. The glass is big and heavy.”
“You did it twelve years ago when we first bought the house,” I told him. I pointed at the identical panel of glass beside it. “You replaced that one right after we moved in.”
“How did we get up there?” he asked.
“On a ladder.”
The bathroom window is broken.
I took him into the upstairs bathroom to see the other window that needed replacing. This was a small two-part window of white-smoked glass. One panel slid back and forth to open or close the window. The other panel remained stationery. The stationery panel had always had a bad seal that let moisture in, but we never bothered to replace it since you couldn’t see through it anyway. But during a recent storm, that panel’s outside pane had broken. We wanted it replaced.
He pulled off the panel that slid back and forth and set it down beside the toilet. He reached around, pushing the screen out a bit and mumbling about how he hoped nothing fell.
“How do you get up to this window?” he asked.
“On a ladder,” I replied yet again.
“What size ladder?”
“My husband uses an extension ladder. We have one you can use.”
He put the other panel back in place. “I don’t know why anyone would build a house like this,” he muttered as he led the way out of the bathroom.
My patience was stretching thin. “People don’t usually design houses just to make it convenient to replace windows,” I told him.
He went downstairs, outside, and around the side of the house. I followed. He looked up at the bathroom window, which had to be at least 20 feet off the ground. Then he looked at the comparatively short climb to the garage roof.
“Once you get up there,” I told him, you can walk on the garage roof pretty easily.
He looked at the situation for another moment, then suddenly said, “I can’t help you, lady.”
I don’t know if he was expecting me to argue or beg with him, but if he was, he was disappointed.
“Okay, thanks for your time,” I said quickly. “You can find your way out? Be careful backing up.”
And then I went into the house, leaving him find his way back to wherever it is he’d come from.
Of course, since the old guy is the only glass replacement option in Wickenburg — or at least the only one my husband could find — we’ll have to get someone up from Phoenix to do the job. But that’s typical here. No matter how much you try to spend money locally, you just can’t get what you need.