It had to be done. Again.
Yesterday, I spent the entire day cleaning my office. It was a disaster.
This is a time-lapse of the process. I used a 10.5mm fisheye lens to get my whole office in the picture. I shot one frame every 30 seconds, then compiled them at 15 frames per second in QuickTime. The result compresses about 8 hours of time into 1 minute.
NOW I can get back to work!
And why I might buy one anyway.
As an avid reader, I’ve been attracted to the idea of an ebook reader for years. But until this past autumn, I haven’t really found one I thought I’d actively use.
Before that were offerings from Sony, which seemed to fall far short of what I thought was a good design. The blinking page turns would drive me batty, since I knew I could go through an average page in 10-20 seconds. (Have I mentioned that I read very fast?)
Kindle came out and lots of people loved it, but I was turned off by Amazon.com’s aggressive marketing, limited format support, and high book prices. (Like many other book buyers, I don’t feel that an ebook’s cost should be anywhere near the cost of its printed version.) And when Amazon snatched purchased books off of Kindles without warning, I started wondering what other kind of access Amazon had and whether it would use it.
Then Barnes and Noble introduced its Nook. Or at least it announced it. It seemed more in line with what I was looking for in size, cost (for the unit and books), features, and flexibility. I visited B&N stores regularly to get my hands on one and give it a try. No joy there. Even after November 30, when the units were supposed to be available for purchase, I could not seem to find one. And I certainly wasn’t going to buy one until I either read a lot of reviews about it or had some quality time with a demo unit. I did see a few reviews and they were, for the most part, positive. But I still wasn’t prepared to buy one until I could walk away from the store with it.
Christmas came. My husband decided to buy one for me. Of course, he couldn’t get his hands on one, either. But he ordered one online. They said it would ship in January. He asked for some kind of card he could give me on Christmas Day, in its place. They charged him $4 for a card that looked like a nook. And that’s what I opened on Christmas Day.
A few days later, he checked with B&N again to see when the Nook would arrive. They projected the end of January.
FAIL
This week, the Apple Tablet rumors have been in full swing. I’ve been wanting an Apple Tablet — or at least thinking I wanted an Apple Tablet; more on that in a moment — since last spring. I actually put off the purchase of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, hoping a Mac netbook would become available before then. Apple kept insisting they weren’t going to develop a netbook. I caved and bought the 13-inch MacBook Pro to replace a 15-inch MacBook Pro and the 12-inch PowerBook before it. (I still have both of those; anyone want to buy one?)
So here I sit, on January 6, expecting a Nook right around the same time that Apple might announce something infinitely better.
Or not.
The way I see it, Apple could do one of two things:
Indeed, my situation today has a lot in common with the iPhone announcement and release. Back then, I was in the market for my first smartphone. My Motorola flip phone was four years old (at least) and I wanted to tap into the basic computing power of a smart phone to store contact information, calendar events, and simple applications that would help me as a pilot (weather, flight planning, etc.). It was vital that the phone be able to communicate with my Macs to exchange information. When the iPhone came out, it looked like a dream come true.
Yet just days before people started lining up to buy iPhones, I bought my Palm Treo 700p. At the time, it was a better decision for me. Two years later, I updated to a Blackberry Storm. Again, it was better for me.
You see, unlike so many other people, I don’t buy the hot new gadget just because it’s a hot new gadget. I buy it because it meets my needs. The iPhone doesn’t meet my needs. I need a carrier with coverage in remote places. Verizon is that carrier. (Hell, AT&T can’t even get a good signal at my house.) I’m not interested in dropping $1.99 every few days or weeks on cool apps I don’t need or playing games on my phone. I’m not interested in being able to join wi-fi networks — in the very remote places I go, I consider myself lucky to have a cell signal at all. I need “tethering” to get my computer on the Internet via my cell phone’s Internet connection. The Treo and the Storm both support that through Verizon; I just learned that the iPhone still does not via AT&T. I’m not interested in jailbreaking a phone to add features that the maker and carrier don’t want me to have. I want a fully functioning, fully supported smartphone that does exactly what I need it to do, right out of the box. That’s why I don’t have an iPhone.
Now before you iPhone lovers get your panties in a bunch, just remember that I’m talking about my needs and wants. Not yours. Yes, your iPhone is very cool. Yes, I wish it met my needs. But although it might be perfect for you, it simply doesn’t meet my needs. I made my decision. Don’t waste your time and mine blasting me in Comments because I haven’t drunk the iPhone Kool-Aid and sacrificed my needs so I can be cool, too.
And that brings up one of two points in this post:
It’s because I’m willing to wait and see what might be available soon that I’m in a good position to get what I want instead of compromising on features. I like immediate gratification as much as the next geek, but after buying so many gadgets over the years — heck, I still have a Newton MessagePad on the shelf! — I’ve learned not to rush out and buy what might be the next great thing. I’m willing to wait, at least until April or May, to make my ebook reader purchase.
Whether it’s an Apple Tablet or a Nook or something else that materializes between now and then remains to be seen.
But one thing’s for certain: it will be the right purchase decision for me.
And why I probably won’t regret it.
Moments ago, I put my signature on a contract to create a series of videos based on one of my books. Details beyond that are neither prudent nor required for this blog post. Let’s just say that the book is one of my better-selling efforts and the publisher is one that I’ve enjoyed a good relationship with for a while.
The contract, however, sucked.
My main concerns with the contract fall into two areas:
You might be asking why I would sign such a thing. After all, why should I give away all rights in a work I create? After 20 years in the business of writing technical books, don’t I have enough of a track record or reputation or following or whatever to successfully push back and keep some of those rights?
My response: Why would I want to?
Let’s face it — what is the life of a computer book these days? I feel fortunate when I see sales on a book that’s a year old. What good is having the rights revert back to me on a book that’s too stale to sell? Especially when I’ve already written and published the revision?
And do I really think I can sell something better than the marketing machine that my publisher controls? While I don’t think they do as well as they could, they certainly do better than I could.
But the real reason I signed without dwelling on it was the money. There. I said it.
The contract did not offer an advance against royalties. It offered a grant to compensate me for production expenses. The difference between the two is huge:
The royalty rates in this particular contract weren’t the greatest, but they weren’t bad. If this works out well and they want me to do another one, I think I can push a bit harder for better royalties or perhaps a larger grant. But not this first time.
You see, this is the first project of this kind at this particular publisher. We’re all sailing uncharted waters here.
And that’s probably the third reason I signed. I wanted an opportunity to try this.
Publishing is changing.
I remember the day about 10 years ago when I received six book contracts in the mail. All on the same day. The total advances for those books exceeded what a lot of people I knew earned in a year. And that year, I wrote ten books.
Things are different today. Titles that I thought would last forever — Microsoft Word for Windows Visual QuickStart Guide comes to mind — have died. Too much competition, not enough novice users needing a book, too much online reference material. The Internet’s free access to information is cutting into the royalties of the writers who used to get paid to write the same material. Paper and shipping is expensive. Ebooks have a lower perceived value than their printed counterparts. Brick and mortar bookstores have limited shelf space and a fading customer base. All this spells hard times for the folks who do the kind of writing I do: computer how-to books for the beginning to intermediate user.
When opportunity knocks, I answer the door. If the deal looks good, I shake hands, accept the offered check, and get to work. Even if the deal isn’t as good as I’d like it to be, I’m more likely to take it than I was 10 years ago.
After all, who knows when I’ll hear another knock on my door?
One new photo a day.
About a year and a half ago, I discovered the Monotone theme for WordPress. Monotone is a unique theme in that it can “see” the colors in a photo, choose one, and use that color as a background. The results can be quite spectacular when used as a theme for a photo blog.
Indeed, the theme is designed for just that. It’s minimalistic and doesn’t even support WordPress widgets. It showcases the photo, which it protects from right-click saving, and offers room beneath it for a description. There’s also the usual post date, category, and tags, as well as big navigation buttons. Navigation can also be achieved by clicking the left or right side of the image.
Back in the summer of 2008, I put quite a few images online in a photo blog called Maria’s Pix that I created with Monotone. But then I discovered Zenfolio as a gallery/selling tool and simply stopped posting new photos. The site languished, unchanged, for over a year. It even became inaccessible as my ISP changed my DNS record and I didn’t update the subdomain to the new IP address.
But yesterday I decided to revive Maria’s Pix, partly as an experiment to see if I could do what so many photographers — amateur and professional — try to do: post a photo a day.
While updating the blog to prepare it for its re-unveiling, I discovered another theme by the same theme author, Duotone. Like Monotone, Duotone matches photo colors. But it goes a step further by taking a second color and using it as a page background, thus eliminating the unimpressive white background found in Monotone. I downloaded it, installed it, and activated it.
And found that it displayed PHP errors instead of photos.
Apparently there’s an incompatibility between Duotone and WordPress 2.9, which is the latest version (as I write this). While some folks more knowledgeable about PHP than I’ll ever be offered some hacks to fix the problem, the only thing the hacks did for me was remove the errors. The pictures did not appear.
I switched back to Monotone.
Eventually, Duotone will be fixed and I’ll begin using it. I like it because it supports widgets, so I can add a bit of other information under the photo. I believe it reads EXIF info, too, so I won’t have to manually insert photo info. We’ll see.
Until then, I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix — at least once in a while — to see a few of my better photos.
Sure wish they knew how to practice what they preach.
Last week, one of my blog posts, “The Bible in the Refrigerator,” was stolen and printed word-for-word, almost in its entirety, in an RV blog. Closer examination of that blog showed that the blogger has built his site primarily by stealing content from other bloggers and newspaper Web sites and reprinting it on his site. He uses about 75-90% of the blog text and puts a “read more” link at the end. He seems to think that this is “fair use” and was very nasty to me in e-mail message when I asked him to take it down. At least one of the other victims I exchanged e-mail with has gone after him. I’m not quite done with him yet, either. I’ll likely start legal proceedings and sue both him and his deep-pocket sponsors. As a writer, I don’t take copyright infringement lightly.
But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the mean-hearted, nasty comments posted on his blog and mine by “Christians” who felt offended by my post.
Evidently, freedom of speech does not extend to the freedom to voice your own opinion in your own blog unless that opinion matches those of the angry, close-minded people who read it. The comments ranged from polite attempts to get me to read the bible — which I have, at least in part — to the funniest of all, which told me I’d burn in hell.
It seems to me that if people are seriously following the teachings of their lord and savior Jesus Christ, they should think twice before spewing hatred toward their fellow humans. Not only are they exposing themselves to ridicule for being hypocrites, but they’re making their fellow Christians look bad, too.
What would Jesus do? I don’t know, but I don’t think he’d act like the nasty, angry Christians who commented on my blog.