Cyberherbalist's Blog

Alaa Wardi is an Iranian muscian based in Saudi Arabia.  He makes some of the best a capella works around.  Many in Engllish and Arabic, but here’s a new offering in French (with a bit of an Arabic flavor in parts).

Way Cool!

As I said in my earlier post, I tried to get some standard publisher to take on my sister-in-law’s book, but nobody was interested.  I let the matter lie until just recently when I became aware that self-publishing had matured greatly since the time I had tried to get a standard publisher interested.  This where I became aware of CreateSpace.

Since Amazon.com is the best outlet, for sheer worldwide coverage, and CreateSpace is the house self-publisher, I decided to give them a shot.

But first, I decided to make a trial.

I have an autobiography, which isn’t finished (because I am not done, either).  But the section devoted to my life up to the end of the 6th grade is pretty much done, I decided to use CreateSpace to publish it — just so I could see what kind of work they do.  Here’s a link to the first part of my autobiography:

http://www.createspace.com/4317285

After uploading the book, I ordered a “proof” copy and found it to be a quality paperback!  That was great, but would CreateSpace trade honestly with me?  I put this to an experiment.

The experiment involved ordering several copies of the book through both Amazon and CreateSpace itself, and seeing what happened.  I had my brother and sister assist with this, and the results were: CreateSpace reported on all sales.  So my one suspicion, that they would perhaps under-report sales, cheating me out of royalties, seemed to be allayed.

So we got a publisher!  This means that the books will be appearing before the end of the year.

I thought it would be instructive to post an image of my CreateSpace dashboard with the report of sales:

s

I can identify these as:

• First five orders are a bulk order of five that I put in myself through Amazon.
• Next one is an order I put in through JnJStore, which appears to be an Amazon surrogate, since it is attributed to Amazon, and its price was 10 cents less than the Amazon discounted price.  This seems to be a sly way to give the buyer alternative price points — and note that my royalty is the same in this case.
• Next one, the 26th, is the order my sister put in
• The last one is the order my brother put in.  Note that it is “eStore”, meaning direct through CreateSpace’s own market.  And note further that the royalty is one whole dollar more than through Amazon directly.

This confirms nicely (to me, anyway) that CreateSpace quickly attributes orders to authors, and attributes them correctly.  I’m satisfied.

A long time ago, in 1980, I got lucky and married a very fine woman who made my subsequent life more fulfilled than I ever imagined it could be. Not long after I became acquainted with her, I found out that one of her older sisters, Rita, had written a book about their family’s experiences at the end of World War II in Germany. She had submitted her book to a few publishers by this time, but there had been no interest. I did have a cursory look at the book, and I could see why publishers might not be interested, and that was that the book desparately needed the services of an editor; it was a great story, but not well written, and to a certain extent it needed to be completely re-written. But who would do it? I had no time for it, and back in those days I wouldn’t have described myself as a writer. And we had no money to pay anyone to do it, and neither did my sister-in-law. And so it lay.

Fast forward 25 years to 2005, and with all our children now raised, it suddenly occurred to me that I now had time that I could devote to the project of editing the book into some kind of shape. After all that time I had also added “writing” to my skillset, and though I wouldn’t compare myself with the likes of Tom Clancy, it seemed to me that I could give it a try. So off I went.

To make a long story short, over the next seven years I rewrote the book six times. When I finished the sixth version last year, it was 20% longer than the original, and in my humble opinion I thought I had turned it into a decent piece of work. My wife, however, did not like it. In her opinion, she thought I had turned it into a travelogue-cum-history-lesson, with her sister’s raw emotion wrung all out of it (I had other opinions that strongly suggested she was wrong, but…). I had been ignoring her complaints all along, and I didn’t agree with her, but she finally convinced me that I ought to go back and rewrite the book, as her sister had written it, without going off into flights of geography and history that I, at least, had thought made it even more interesting.

Well, I thought, after six run-throughs, why not do it one more time?

But there was a complication! About five years ago, my sister-in-law sent us a copy of a trascript she had typed up from a tape-recorded monologue that her mother had given her in 1978, in German, This transcript contained some of the story that my sister-in-law recounted, but because her mother had been taken by the Soviets for forced labor in the Ural Mountains for 3 1/2 years, it contained a whole huge pile of other stuff that clearly belonged in this book as well. But how do I put it in? The seventh version of the original book was 246 pages, and were I to add this new material, this would bring the work to close to 400 pages! After some discussion, we decided to publish them as two separate books.

My search for a publisher was the next step, but I will not describe that here. Suffice it to say that I sent submission packages to about 30 publishers for Rita’s book, but there were no takers. If you can’t publish ONE book, how do you expect to publish TWO?

Good question!

Here’s the provisional covers for these two books:

I am currently working on a project with a deadline in my day job, and I am having fun with it. Well, mostly. There was this little problem I was having that was beginning to make me quite frustrated. And you know that frustration occasionally results in a computer programmer putting his or her fist through the monitor display, right? Well, I guess that’s a favorite meme; nobody really does this, right? Gosh, I hope not. It wouldn’t be so dangerous these days, what with LED monitors and all, but in earlier ages when we had glass monitor screens we risked serious cuts and bruises.

I was trying to enforce some encapsulation by working with two different VS2012 solutions at the same time. Since I was planning to use a particular set of class libraries in multiple related projects, I wanted to make them into common components. No sense reinventing wheels. So here I was with the common component libraries in one solution and the application using those libraries in the other. The user application had references to the DLLs of the class library, and to the point, the references pointed to the Release folders of the class libraries. Since I was developing both pretty much at the some time (though the class libraries started life and got their major form prior to the user application), I would occasionally find I needed to go back to the class libraries to make tweaks and corrections. Then I would test the user application to see how well the changes worked. The user application was being neatly used as a test bed for the common libraries — meaning the next time I use them, which will be in a follow-on project this week, they will have been largely debugged. Two birds with one stone.

This worked out mostly OK, but I started noticing that sometimes my class library changes weren’t taking effect. I’d make changes, rebuild the libraries, and the changes wouldn’t take effect! But then again, sometimes they would! I was nearing the peak frustration level, with my dual monitors beginning to cringe in anticipation of the inevitable shattering blow from my Fist of Steel®, when suddenly it popped in there as to what was going on.

Aaarrrgggghhhh!

Here I was, rebuilding my libraries with the new changes, and failing to rebuild my user application! Of course the changes weren’t taking effect! The user application was never referring to the DLLs in the Release folders of the class libraries, it was referring to the copies of the DLLs it had placed in its own bin folder! And since I had not rebuilt the user application to pull the class libarary changes into the user application’s bin folver, OF COURSE it continued to use the old versions of the libaries.

In a certain sense I was creating my very own Hell. A versioning Hell. Complete with red-tinged, tailed demons wielding pitchforks. Jabbing me into a towering frustration! But realization is power, and so the demons are now banished to the nether regions. And all is now blue-sky with chirping birds again.

Gosh, I hope I remember this next time.

First of all, I am an Anglophile.  Which, for those of you who have mislaid your dictionaries, means that I like British stuff. I even lived there for almost three years once!  Love the place, and would like to visit it again one of these days.

Second, I am glad that the new Prince is born.  Long live Prince whatever-his-name-will-be!

Finally, I am also glad that finally we can put the front-page and TV coverage of this whole thing to rest.  I hope, anyway.  It grows tiresome.

Yes, he’s third in line to the throne.  But is he likely to inherit?  That’s an intriguing question.  There have been many royal princes who have been in direct line to the throne who have never actually inherited.  I believe that Prince X will live to be King X, however, because the history of his recent family seems to support it.

Queen Elizabeth is presently 87.  She is well past the median lifespan of women of her age cohort, but her health is apparently quite good, and her mother lived to see her 101st birthday.  It’s hard to factor in her father’s longevity, since he died at age 56 due to environmental effects — he was a heavy smoker and the strain of reigning during World War II took its toll on his health.  Elizabeth has no intention of abdicating, like a few of her fellow European monarchs have done, but this might change if her health deteriorates.  But I don’t know how to bet on that one. Anyone want to start up a pool on how soon Prince Charles, her heir apparent, might inherit?  It is entirely possible that she could outlive Charles, who is now 64.   If she lived to her mother’s age, Charles would be 79.  This would be 2027. At that time, William would be 45 and Prince X would be 14.

One thing of interest here is that the birth of Prince X marks the first time since the reign of Queen Victoria that the reigning monarch and three generations of heirs have been alive at the same time.

79 would be an amazing age to become King.  Let’s assume that Elizabeth leaves the throne (by death or abdication) at her calculated age expectation of 93.  This would be 2019.  Charles would be King at 71.  His calculated age expectancy is 82, making William inherit in 2032.  William would therefore succeed to the throne at age 48, giving him a fair amount of time to reign, and lots of time for Prince X to be prepared to reign.  If William lived until 88 (calculated life expectancy) this means that he would reign for 40 years, and Prince X would succeed him in his turn at age 57 in 2070.

Unfortunately, my calculated life expectancy is 81, meaning that I will likely die during the reign of King William V.  Assuming he chooses William as his regnal name, instead of one of his other Christian names, which are Arthur, Philip, and Louis.

That is a rather interesting set of names he could choose from (although I do believe he need not be limited to them — he’d be the King after all, and could pick something else entirely, or so I suppose).   Arthur Pendragon (of Round Table fame) is a legendary figure, and did not rule all of England, but only a small portion of it, assuming he existed at all.  So William could be Arthur for real, with no need for a numeral after his name.  Or would he prefer to give a nod to Pendragon by being Arthur II?  Interesting question.

As to Louis, Louis VIII of France briefly ruled about half of England from 1216 to 1217, but he was never crowned, and in signing the Treaty of Lambeth in 1217, Louis conceded that he had never been the legitimate king of England.  So, William could be King Louis.

And then there is Philip.  Under the terms of the marriage treaty between Philip I of Naples (Philip II of Spain from 15 January 1556) and Queen Mary I, Philip was to enjoy Mary’s titles and honours for as long as their marriage should last.  And the Pope recognized both Philip and Mary as legitimate King and Queen of England.  So if William chose Philip as his regnal name, he would be Philip II.

And so there we have it.  Much ado about nothing, although I did have fun investigating all the possibilities.

Jenna Wortham of the New York Times seems to think that new technology should be cheap enough for poor people to afford it. My first question is: Why?

Headlines are not normally created by the journalist, but are apportioned by editors who sometimes miss the point. Jenna’s article, which in the NYT has the headline “More Tech Magic, if You Can Afford It“, in my local newspaper is headlined “Tech magic comes at a price out of reach for many”. But in this case, the editors in question did get the point Ms. Wortham intended.

While writing about Google Glass, she reports handing her demo device back to the Google employee “…with the sinking feeling that it could be a while before I’d be that close to them again.”

And why would she have such a feeling? She writes:

That’s because they cost $1,500, and they are being made available largely to developers and people who are eager to figure out how to build applications for them.

Her entire article rants on and on about how wonderful the new technology is and how terrible it is that poor people won’t be able to afford it. Until the price does down. And even when the price does go down, how terrible it will be that the poor won’t be able to afford the newest versions, since the price for the latest and greatest will be higher than state-of-the-art.

But what the heck is she complaining about? It’s not fair! That’s what. “…it would be a shame if the only people who participate in this leap forward are those who can afford it.” Bat puckey. Cannot “the poor” wait five minutes until they CAN afford it? Apparently this is a tragedy. She agrees with Anil Dash, an entrepreneur and blogger who raised similar concerns last year in a post titled “You Can’t Start the Revolution From the Country Club.” She nods sagely in agreement with Dash’s pathetic premise, and except for the obvious fact that this premise is completely false, we might be tempted to go along with it, too. You can take it to the bank that technological revolutions almost always start from the so-called “country club”. The fact is simply this: if the “country club” doesn’t adopt the new technology at its inception, then nobody else is getting it either. It turns light outside when the sun comes up. No sooner. Deal with it. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t give you an entitlement to have it otherwise.

And fairness? What is it about certain people that they think that being poor gives one rights superior to the better off, who have to work for what they get, too? Oh, sure, you work at a dead-end job, a job that you qualified yourself for by spending your time goofing off instead of getting an education that would make it possible for you have a better job. Therefore you are entitled to the same choices in life as someone who put business before pleasure and prepared for the future?

Please spare me. I can sympathize with someone affected by breaks that resulted from circumstances truly beyond their control, but most people are poor because of choices they themselves made, or are in situations that they could, with some effort, work themselves out of. Ms. Wortham’s own experience shows clearly that being poor is, with some effort, only a temporary condition. She says she couldn’t afford that iPhone because she was working in a poorly-paying job. But now she can afford one. Does she think she’s the exception?

I’ve been poor, and I’ve been moderately well-off. I knew precisely why it was that way at every point. There was no-one to blame but myself, and I would have felt ashamed of myself for blaming anyone else but myself, and I would have felt like a fool for asking for extraordinary consideration for my condition. “Hey, Steve Jobs, I can’t afford that nice new iPhone because I’ve gotten myself into overwhelming debt due to wanting crap I couldn’t afford, so you must sell me one for one-third it’s retail value (or better yet gimme one for free). That would be fairer, wouldn’t it?”

Maybe my desire for an iPhone (or a Windows Phone) should lead me to better my condition so I CAN afford one.