Progress on the next book

Making good progress on my prostate book, and hopefully will get it off to a friend who has an editorial eye some time this week. Hopefully, too, this time it'll get published initially without mistakes. Grimhilda! went out thoroughly proof-read, we thought, and with all the typos sorted out. Nope. The same friend, when he read it, discovered a bunch more - lots of them minor and mostly unnoticeable - but there all the same. It takes a fresh eye to see them sometimes.

Anyway, one of the things I've still got to sort out is a cover for the book. I saw a great photo that's doing the rounds of the Internet (see at the right) which, with a few alterations of the words and a couple of additions (such as the name of the author) would have been ideal. But I couldn't find the owner of it, and those who'd used it seemed to think it was available for anyone to use. I'd like to be sure of that first.

Apparently it's been used as a political poster by the US Tea Party, amongst other things, although now that I go to find a version used by them I can't see it anymore!

PIffle

When someone tells me I can own some of the most expensive real estate in Miami (or anyone else) I tend to look at them and say, If you say so. Plainly they haven't realised that my pension hasn't increased that much - although it is getting a little rise at the beginning of next month, of a bout $4 a fortnight. That means I can afford to go out and buy one more coffee every two weeks. 

Anyway, One Sothebys in Sunny Isles Beach is the one claiming I'm only a few dollars away from residing in a super expensive location. Why go so far, I ask myself? If I want an expensive location, I can go to Auckland, where a house that my grandmother would have thought rough and ready is going for more than half a million dollars. 

Much of this prime real estate in Miami doesn't come with your own backyard and swimming pool. Nope, it consists of an apartment in a high rise: you may be up on the 31st floor. Yes the view is lovely but you can't open the windows in case you fall out. 

New Zealanders haven't yet got to the point of thinking that an apartment up on the somethingth floor is a good idea; for them it's the old eighth of an acre (or its current metric equivalent), a place where you can plant a few veges, or mow the lawns, or pull the car apart, or dig in some lovely bushes that will one day knock over the fence between you and your neighbour. 

Piffle to living in a high rise, I say!

Uploading to Smashwords

I'm just about to upload my book, Grimhilda!, to Smashwords. Or rather, I was going to, except that I needed to ask them one question, and now have to wait until they get back to me. Which hopefully won't be more than 24 hours.

It's been an interesting process. The original document I used for uploading to Kindle wasn't able to be used for the Smashwords site, not even as an epub version. I had to strip the Word doc right down to the bare bones and start again, which was a bit of a pain, as it meant putting in italics and bolds and such all over again, and reformatting the headings and taking out colour. This version is the super simplified one, but at least it should be of a quality that it will adapt to any e-reader going, pretty much. That's the Smashword promise.

I spent Friday reading through the enormous Smashwords instruction page - I'd already worked my way through the e-book, Smashwords Style Guide, while reformatting the book, so I was familiar with a lot of what was in the instructions page, but there seemed to be considerably more detail, and repetition. Anyway, I went through it and marked it and made notes and updated some things on my file, and so on. All in all, I'm hoping that the document I now have should be ready to be uploaded without any hitch. But we'll see. Both the book and the instructions page warn that it's normal for the first upload to produce a few Autovettor 'errors' which have to be repaired before you can proceed.

Patience is required. At least I'm not waiting around for months before the book appears. That's one of the great wonders of the digital age that we can produce books (of varying kinds) in such a short time. Such services as Eoncode web to print solutions make the process remarkably speedy. Of course, you still have to have something ready for the printer that will pass muster, but that's all part of the learning process. This year has been full of learning curves, and I don't suppose they're over yet.

Chess online

I've been playing chess online with one of my sons, and with a young fellow in India, via Chess.com. The games we've been playing have been spread out over days, because I'm not always ready to commit to spending a half an hour playing someone in real time. I've done this once or twice and find the pressure rather high!

But the long slow games, rather like the old correspondence chess, which my father used to play in his heyday, are difficult to keep track of, for me. I don't have the greatest of chess brains, and can't come back to a board and remember how I got to where I am and what I planned to do next. Chess.com allows you to play back through your moves, which is helpful, but I still make more mistakes than I would in a face-to-face game. (Although my face-to-face games seem to have got worse since I started playing online.)

I need the concentrated focus that comes with a game where you're playing a real live opponent and can see what they're doing with their body language. That shouldn't make a difference, but it does. I guess it's a bit like poker, where you're trying to read what's going on in the mind why the way the other player's body moves.

Years ago I used to be involved in a chess club here in Dunedin, but only in their round robin games that various four-men groups would play around the city. This part of the club was called Chess for Fun. I had one opponent who could spend long minutes at a time sweating over the right move, breathing heavily, and oblivious to the rest of the world. It wasn't fun to play with someone going so slow, but on the other hand I did win one or two games against him, as I recall. Much to my surprise and his, since he was a much more experienced player.

Tuxedos

Even though I've been involved in many theatre shows and concert performances over the years I've never actually owned a tuxedo. I'm not even sure if I've ever worn one, though it's possible I have at some time and have now forgotten. Furthermore if I've made it this far without needing a tux, it's unlikely that I'll have a need for the services of such a site as www.tuxedosonline.com at any time in the future.

I'd like to wear one, although the figure isn't quite as outstanding as it once was. (Or perhaps that should be it's more outstanding than it once was.) It helps also to have the kind of build that a tux suits: someone who's heading for 5'9 and up is preferable. Us smaller blokes look just a teensy-bit not so hot.

So if I haven't used a tux, what have I worn? Well, for the most part I've got away with wearing a decent suit. Things have changed over the time I've been performing, and tuxes are quite so de rigueur as they once were. For the most parts my suits have been unostentatious, but I did have a light blue suit back in the seventies. I loved it, even though a friend of ours called it my 'pansy-blue' suit. He was obviously jealous.

I got married in a light purple suit, and occasionally wore this for some years after, until it decided I was too large for it. (I was a skinnymalink when I got married.) But I still have the shirt I wore on my wedding day: it's purple too, a great colour, but regrettably rather too seventies to wear any more. Such is life. And fashion.

Upside-down bucket list

Somewhere, possibly, there's an administration officer of a retirement village making use of a senior housing software program which will enable him or her to decide how much it will cost to house me in the year 2000 and whatever, and whether I'm going to be worth it to them to take in and care for.

There have been a few things in my life that I've said I really don't want to do, an kind of upside-down bucket list. One of them I talk about in my prostate book, which hopefully will be appearing by May/June this year; you'll have to wait and buy the book to find out what that was, because somehow it managed to take itself off my upside-down bucket list and put itself on my bucket list, where it didn't belong.

One of the other things is I don't want to do is go into a retirement home. I've had some experience of these: my wife worked in one for a number of years, and I've seen people who seemed lively and full of beans go into them and wind up sitting in a chair ground down by the general depression of the place.

Yes, I know that's not how they're advertised. But like it or not, retirement homes are the one of the last stages before departing the earth entirely, and if none of get out of this life alive, then a retirement home is where that not-getting-out starts for many.

Yes, they advertise swimming pools, with jaunty silver-haired people diving and rollicking about; they show the same silver-haired people enjoying the privacy of their own home or the social club atmosphere of the communal area. They show the extensive library, the gym, the whatever else is fashionable.

They don't show the hospital area, or the constant roll call of missing faces - turnover is high in retirement homes.

I realise I may not have a choice about going into one of these places - or worse, into a rest home. Circumstances may decide things for me. Perhaps if I take it off my upside-down bucket list and put it on my bucket list, fate will get fooled and let me depart in my own bed in my own home.

Time will tell.

The Death of Dalziel

I only really discovered the writer Reginald Hill last year, after reading Exit Lines, one of the Dalziel and Pascoe series of crime novels. I had read a book of short stories, some of which were a little odd, some brilliant, and of course I'd seen some episodes of the TV series on DVD. So I was familiar with Hill, in a sense.

Not every Dalziel and Pascoe book is created equally. I tried two others last year and couldn't get into either of them. Hill likes to vary his style quite a bit, and one of these started out as a Grand Guignol piece that didn't suit my taste at all. The other began with two or three men being killed before the first couple of pages were out, and again that didn't seem like Hill's best work, but I could have been just not in the mood.

Anyway, while we were in Christchurch we came across a secondhand copy of The Death of Dalziel, a story, as you might guess, that was written late in Hill's career. No point killing off one of your main characters if you're planning on more episodes. This book is vintage Hill: the wit, the literary quotes, the scatological humour that just avoids the gross and no more, the superb pace, the beautifully-drawn characters - from the well-known duo, to those who feature regularly, to those who were new altogether.

The book has a wonderfully convoluted plot, and shows that Hill as a master of his craft in every respect. Early in the piece, Dalziel and Pascoe are checking out a set of terrace houses that are on their last legs, and in which PC Hector (the world's dullest policeman, who also featured in Exit Lines) thinks he's seen someone threatening someone else with a pistol. Just as Dalziel decides to explore the situation, the place explodes, setting fire to all the terrace houses, and almost killing Dalziel in the process. At this point Dalziel retires from action in the book, and is only seen, as it were, inside his head - he's in a coma for most of the story. Pascoe is forced to take over in his place after recovering from his own injuries, and then finds himself in the middle of all sorts of shenanigans with Muslims, ex-SAS soldiers, the secret force that's supposed to be dealing with terrorism, Knights Templar, a TV chat show that goes wrong, assassinations and more. 400 pages and not one that's inessential.

Promoting Grimhilda!

I've been working hard on promoting my ebook, Grimhilda!, but it takes a lot of time, of course. Still, the great advantage of ebooks is that you don't have piles of unsold stock lying around eating up your income.

At present the book is restricted to Kindle, but from the 20th April will be available much more widely. I'm hoping this will make a difference in its sales. I've been working with a company called Wheelers, too. They supply ebooks to libraries around NZ, and possibly Australia. (I think they supply to Australia, but trying to find where I saw that is proving a little difficult.) They've been very friendly and helpful, and respond quickly to emails. Grimhilda! is now in their capable hands and hopefully will begin to make her way around some of the NZ libraries from mid-April onwards.

I won't restrict my next book to Kindle - it's restricted to them for the first three months, if you choose that option, an option that's supposed to make it more visible, but obviously hasn't. Some advice I got from elsewhere has suggested that even though Kindle appears to be top-dog in the ebook world, it isn't, in fact, and there are a wide number of other opportunities out there. I'm preparing Grimhilda! for Smashwords too, at the moment, so it's all go.

I've hammered away at promoting on Twitter and Facebook, and have had some interest there...and a few sales. It's slow, but then Grimhilda! is competing against thousands upon thousands of other titles around the world, so she's got her work cut out.

Sales here in Dunedin have been rather sluggish, which surprised me considering that the musical version was presented here, and had good feedback. Several people have told me they'll get a copy, but it's easy to say that and then forget. Perhaps I should purchase a number of large vinyl banners and get the City Council to hang them from their banner poles around the city. Might be a slightly expensive option, considering the skimpiness of my advertising budget!

The other thing that's held up promotion has been the writing of my other book, on my experience of having a prostate operation. It's difficult to write and promote at the same time, something I've always had a problem with. I'm better at writing than promoting, although I do the latter because I have to, and a great deal of the promotion for the musical version of Grimhilda! fell into in my hands. A steep learning curve, as the cliche goes.

Anyway, that's where things are at present.  No doubt there'll be more news in due course!

Physio

Back to the physio today, after ten days of not seeing him. I've improved and then gone backwards, and then improved and then gone backwards. Several times. A bit erratic, you might say.

I put my back out over a month ago, was in agony for a day, sort of came right, but my right leg played up as a result, and when I got an appointment with the osteopath on the Monday morning (friends in high places) he realigned me, but it didn't fix the leg. Sent me to the physio in the same clinic.

Apart from sticking several needles in me in an acupuncturist sort of way, and manipulating various muscles, the physio has given me different exercises which I've been doing quite a bit. They've helped, there's no doubt. But I think he's been taking it quietly, not wanting to overload me.

Dog in shades due to Dunedin sun

Today I went for a walk with the dog before heading down to town to see the physio. It turned out to be a disaster on one hand, because my leg, which has been behaving itself increasingly, decided to go on strike, and I struggled to get back home from the walk. The dog was very patient with my extraordinary slowness. On the other hand it meant I was able to pinpoint more readily exactly where it hurts when this walking problem occurs (it doesn't happen every time I walk, for some reason) and that was useful. For me, if not for the physio, who might have wondered if I wasn't conjuring a bunch of new pains up for him, to keep him happy.

I don't really think that's how he saw it. But he introduced a couple of new exercises, both of which involved staring at myself in the mirror while trying to do what he asked. The mirror made things doubly uninspiring: seeing some old bloke struggling to do something relatively simple is embarrassing. And I seemed to be at cross purposes with him on one of the exercises in particular - what he called forward seemed to me to be backward. Anyway, hopefully I've got the hang of it now.

Came home feeling somewhat better but worn out. Time for an afternoon kip, I think.

Mattresses

One of my projects, when I finish all the others, is to write a book on memorisation, and techniques for memorising things, such as poems, Scripture, play scripts, speeches. I haven't yet seen a book that really gets to grips with most of these, though it may be out there hiding from me.

I was reminded of this (memory technique!) by seeing the phrase memory foam topper. I had to go and check it out. Turns out it merely means material that, when you put your hand behind it, retains the shape of your hand. Or, more correctly, when you're trying to get to sleep, it takes on the contours of your body. It sort of sounds useful, though I'm not entirely convinced. In the same advertising there's something called convoluted toppers, which turn out to look like a large extended egg carton that you sleep on. You can use the peaks up or down, depending on your preference. I don't see me sleeping on this stuff personally, although no doubt there are people who swear by it. I'd probably have nightmares about being an egg whose shell was breaking.

We've got a good solid mattress on our bed that we've now had for a number of years; it has give in it, but not enough to give way, so you're always feeling firmly supported. The bed at our daughter's house in Christchurch (where we were babysitting for the last few days) is similar: you have none of that awful sinking feeling when you get into it. The mattress we had for a number of years (before the current one) used to throw us together in the middle of the bed. This has its points but isn't ideal long-term.

I'm not sure that mattresses that take on the shape of your body are actually better for you than ones that give you firm support. Each to his/her own, I guess.

Sticky

Blogger is very sticky these days. Yes, I know, all you people who use that other popular site (so popular the name has gone right out of my head) will all say that I should switch to WordPress - just remembered it.

But WordPress has that annoying thing that when you want to comment and then find out who else comments, you have to sign up to the individual blog post. Weird. Blogger will tell you if you're getting comments.

When I say 'sticky' I mean that it opens up and then waits and waits and...waits. And then you type in your blog post, and save or publish and it waits and waits....waits. You want to go to the page you've just uploaded. W&W&W.

It can't just be that my computer is getting a little antiquated, because there are plenty of other programmes that work well. Maybe they're not so big and bulky as Blogger? I don't know, but it didn't used to happen with this programme, and I've been using it for a very long time - Internet-wise.

Anyway, rant, rant, rant (or R,R,R, if you insist on saving space).

Quite Interesting

Now here's a line to conjure with. It's like some sort of code: Seagull Entourage CW GT QI Acoustic-electric guitar at Guitar Center.

Let's take it one step at a time: Seagull. Well, we know what that is: a bird of various sizes and shapes that tend to congregate near the sea. Some congregate near humans if the latter are eating. They congregate until it's the seagulls that are eating and not the humans.

Entourage: a congregation of seagulls following the leader. And congregating.

CW: This could stand for anything, but here are some possibilities. A TV Network producing such hits as Arrow, Beauty and the Beast, etc. An abbreviation for Morse Telegraphy. (Yup, I wondered why too.) There are about forty others listed, including some that seem to make no more sense that the Morse one. Cook Islands?

GT: My favourite meaning for this acronym is GigaTexel which apparently means one billion filtered textured pixels. You really wanted to know that, didn't you.

QI - Only about twenty listed for QI. Plainly not such a popular combination of letters.  However, it's quite interesting that QI is an acronym for Quite Interesting. I think.

So, some marketing person put all these things together and connected them to an acoustic guitar. The world is full of puzzles. Including why someone would write a blog post about it. There is a reason for that.

Travelling on the long-distance bus

We went to Christchurch and back on the bus. Six hour trip. First time we've used it together, I think, and my first time since I had a very unpleasant experience of not taking the opportunity in Ashburton to go to the loo, and then finding I was very sore when I got to ChCh an hour and a half later. Though admittedly this was in the days before I had my prostate operation, so that would have been part of the problem. (My book on my prostate operation experiences is well on its way - should be out by mid-year, I'd expect). [Update 2020 - this book is now available on Amazon.]

The driver of the northbound bus (from Dunedin to Christchurch, for those who don't know what I'm talking about) was very pleasant, did a bit of spiel about different towns and gave us the list of rules without being too high-handed about it. These included what you couldn't eat on the bus (which turned out to be a bit of a nuisance as we'd brought lunch with us and coffee, and had to wait till we got to Oamaru, about an hour and a half into the trip, before we could get our lunch) and the fact that you needed to wear the seatbelts provided. It's the law in NZ he reminded us. Law or not, very few people put their seatbelts on.

The driver on the southbound trip was much more blunt, and when I asked if he stopped anywhere for comfort stops and a bit of stretching the legs, he replied, Nope. Stopping in Timaru for twenty minutes. This was about half way on a six hour trip, so if you were desperate you would have had to have made a considerable fuss to get him to stop for you. The other driver had made five-minute stops at reasonable intervals, which made sense to me. Driver number two was troubled by the fact that he had a lot of pickups along the way, and a detour to Waimate, so comfort stops were out of the question. As it was he made it into Dunedin a quarter of an hour ahead of time. And never mentioned seatbelts.

It's certainly more relaxing on a bus; if you want, you can look at the scenery. Or you can go to sleep (though sleeping upright has never been a great preference for me), or you can read, or can listen to a CD story, or...whatever takes your fancy within the confines of the space allotted to two passengers. No problems with driving, or other drivers, or sitting with the foot on the accelerator for six hours at a time. And the luggage allowance is far superior to that allowed when travelling by air. No restrictions, effectively. You can take what you want inside the bus, and leave the rest in the bus hold. A European couple who were travelling with two small children, managed to get two very large bike-cum-stroller thing in the hold, though I think it was a bit of a pinch. But there would have been plenty of room for the kitchen sink, if you so desired.

We were untroubled by any difficult or noisy passengers, except in the last hour or so when two male students sitting on either side of the aisle just behind us (with two young girls - not connected to either of them - seated in the adjacent window seats) began to talk about things that shouldn't be spoken about in public. They'd been discussing all sorts of other young male interests before that, mostly geek sort of stuff, but then one of them got onto his private life, and not only did he reveal more than anyone wanted to hear, his vocabulary whittled down to what my wife said was only five or six basic words. That might have been a slight exaggeration, but it was certainly surprising that someone was so unaware of other people that he could speak so openly without any sense that it might offend those around him. Fortunately the general noise in the bus obliterated some of it, but not completely. Amazing how self-focused some people are that they don't think that their words are being heard by far more than the intended recipient.

A brief aside

Save on Bose headphones. What does this mean, save power? save amps? save your ears? Evangelise through Bose headphones?

What are Bose headphones anyway?  Well, apparently they come in all shapes and sizes, a headphone to suit every mood. The one that intrigues me is the noise-cancelling headphone. Doesn't that seem a little contradictory?

This is what comes of being literal about the language, instead of digging beneath the words and finding out what new meaning has been assigned to old words. Of course, English being what it is, few words get the chance to retain their meanings long before they’re off ganderflanking about and getting themselves a verbal rebore.

Exile

We watched the three-part TV film, Exile, on DVD over the last couple of days. A seriously gloomy piece, but aided by a neat mystery that can only be solved if a man with Alzheimer's can be persuaded to reveal a secret. Improbable, I suspect, but the cast made it work.

John Simm plays a washed-out journalist who returns to his home town only to find that his father (Jim Broadbent) has developed Alzheimer's. His long-suffering sister (Olivia Colman) has been caring for the old man, and is at the end of her tether. She's not impressed to have her wastrel of a brother dragging her down further, and basically tells him to shape up or ship out.

He starts off badly but gradually picks up some of the slack, and then begins to try and find out why his father became so violently angry with him eighteen years before, an event that caused him to leave home. Alongside this, he starts an affair with his former best friend’s wife, causing ructions in a different area.

The film could have been very downbeat, but the casting is excellent, with the three leads at the top of their games, and there are enough twists and turns in the story to keep you guessing till the end.

And while we're on lists...

What you see below is a copy of the Popular Posts from this blog, as at the 9th March, 2014. Yet there's something rather strange about this. These posts show up almost all the time, as though they were continually being viewed. The reality is somewhat different. When I look at the stats for yesterday, which should give us some indication as to popularity, only one of these posts appears, and that's the first. Buechner on Marriage is also there, but well down the list. It seems to me that these 'popular posts' get up on the list at some point and then just stay there.  Here's yesterday's list of top five posts, all but the first being quite recent arrivals.

Commonplace post 13 Feb 2011,	62
Wimpy keyboards 8 Mar 2014,	34
Irritation in #gigatowndunedin 8 Mar 2014,	31
Making mugs of us all 8 Mar 2014,	17
The Best Offer 7 Mar 2014,	17

POPULAR POSTS

• 

  Commonplace post

  One of the fun things about Google desktop, and also about Evernote, the programme that allows you to store virtually everything you like ...
• 

  Skinny ties

  Phew, nearly had heart failure... Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but when I saw a site advertising skinny ties I certainly g...
• 

  Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus

  Went to see the Zirka Circus with some members of my family today. Very noisy, music-wise, but the music itself was good and very suitabl...
• 

  Some Presbyterian views on the Christchurch earthquake

  There have been some messages sent through to a group I'm on (and they've gone to other groups too, I understand) from two or three ...
• 

  James Berardinelli

  I found a bio of Berardinelli on the Rotten Tomatoes site . I've taken the liberty of quoting it here, almost in full: ...born in Septem...
• Mrs Chrissy Johnson

  I find it hard to believe that a post I wrote back in 2007,  partly on the city of Boise in Idaho (where the young lady one of my sons is d...
• 

  The Graveyard Book

  I picked up Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book while in the children's library the other day (all the best fiction is in the child...
• Circus Aotearoa

  Last year my daughter, grandson and I caught up with the Zirka Circus , a mostly Asian troupe. This was a circus that relied heavily on ...
• 

  Two and a half movies

  From the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.   One might say. I watched about two-thirds of Peter Watkins ' 1974 made-for-TV mov...
• Buechner on Marriage

  I've been reading Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark again, after a break of several years. It’s an alphabetised collect...

You have to wonder...

I get Google ads alongside my Gmail, something that doesn't bother me in the slightest, because most of the time I barely notice them. (I can read a newspaper and miss most of the advertising.)

But I have to wonder at the the appropriateness of the some of the ads that do turn up. Alongside a poem in an email today were the ads listed below. The poem was about seeing dance in every movement of life, and it's a nice piece by Mitch Roberson called Every Day We Are Dancers. The bit about the two men carrying a huge mirror across the road is particularly neat. 

So let's look at these ads, and see if Google has lost the plot or not in its ad placement. 

Building Report

Leak and Building Inspections. Free Treated Timber Testing Service

leakdetective.co.nz

Okay, there's a mention of a building in the poem, so perhaps this is apt - there's another building ad further down, but nowhere is there any mention of leakage. Unless the fact that the poem starts off in a shower is the connection. 

Publish Your First Book

Get Matched With A Publishing Professional. Get Started Now!

www.newwriterpublisher.com

There are two ads relating to books, but the poem doesn't have time for anything but for itself to be read. 

Bad Credit Car Loans NZ

Instant Approval - Guaranteed! Apply Online Now.

www.aquacars.co.nz

The only mention of a car is in the middle of the word, macarena.  Bit of a long shot, that one. 

Windows 7 Driver Download

Windows 7 Drivers Latest Download. Microsoft Certified. (Recommended)

www.windows-7.driverupdate.net

No windows, drivers, or downloads in the poem. Not even someone driving down the street. 

Leaky Building/Reclad

Specialist construction services helping people with leaky buildings

www.formedevelopments.co.nz

"Is Your Computer Slow?"

In 2 min,Restore your Speed. Fix error messages! - [ Free Download ]

speedycomputer.com

Slow computers are completely missing from Mr Roberson's poem. 

Read Free eBooks

Download From Our Free eReader & Get Six Great Classics for Free!

www.thereadingroom.com

Manage your own cafe/bar?

Learn Cafe Admin, Barista Skills, Wine Lists, 10 Weekends

foodandwine.co.nz

As are cares and bars. 

Hmm, it looks as if Google bummed out almost completely on this one. Maybe it's Have a random Google ad Day. 

Wimpy keyboards

I've always been dissatisfied with keyboards as replacements for pianos. None of the ones I've come across have had that feel of weight that's needed for someone who's played real pianos his whole life. We bought a Casio piano to use for the rehearsals of Grimhilda! back in 2012, and it was effective enough, but it lacked something. It hadn't been to to gym to build its muscles.

What I think it lacks, along with most keyboard pianos, is that sense of standing up to the strain of a pianist fighting to produce the right sounds. When it comes to something soft, keyboards aren't too bad, especially ones like the excellent Casio PX850. But when it comes to taking the full weight of a long-experienced pianist hammering at them, nothing beats a real piano, an instrument that stands up and takes a beating without whimpering. (Totally unconnected to this, why is wimp spelled without an 'h' when whimpering has one?)

A pianist at full throttle needs something that will not only give its all in terms of the music, but also won't buckle under pressure. The last thing you need is the feeling that your keyboard is trying to run away when you're giving it a fistful of fortissimo chords.

Book preparation

Took some time off yesterday from the prostate book. It's heading towards its final form, I think, and I need to step back a bit and get some different perspective on it.

In the interim, I began work on preparing my other book, Grimhilda!, for publication on Smashwords. This turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected, and I had to work through their manual very slowly to work out what I need to do to ensure the book format is right for their processing. (The 'meatgrinder' as the writer calls it.)

Firstly I had to pare the whole text back to its bare bones, which is a bit annoying, as not only does all the formatting go, but italics go as well, and will have to be replaced manually. However, Smashwords works from a Word document, surprisingly, rather than an epub version, and the Word version has to be as simple as...no colours, no large fonts, or peculiar ones, no this, no that. It's because Smashwords takes your file and distributes it to a wide range of e-formats. The simpler the original file is, the better. It's noticeable that the look of Grimhilda! on the iPad is different to the look of it on Kindle. Certain things change. So I won't be trying to do anything fancy this time; just keeping it simple and hoping that that will do the trick.

I want to get it up and running by mid-April, at the latest, so I thought I'd better get on and get started. Just as well I did. It's going to take longer than I anticipated!

Making mugs of us all

In my last post I referred to some scammers trying to make mugs out of us with their late night nonsense. Mugs come in all shapes and sizes, of course, and these days have all kinds of things printed on them (not human mugs, I mean). Mugs with logos can be found here, and these days it's rare to find a mug that isn't printed on, with either some sloppy message, or a pussycat or a puppy, or with something rude, or something that says how wonderful the person drinking from the mug is, or what other people think about them and so on.

I was going to say that mugs like the plain ones in the picture below are rare, but in fact in my cupboard I have several plain white mugs. So maybe not everyone is bombarded with mugs designed to please or annoy or humour us.

The woman in the picture below seems to me to be drinking from an empty cup: either that or else she was just about to spill the last of her coffee all down her chin. Was she distracted by something on the horizon, or did the photographer say to her, look as though you're drinking something and she suddenly couldn't remember how you actually did that...especially when your cup was empty?

And why does she have her left arm slung behind her?  Perhaps her boyfriend was pulling her arm, saying, 'Hurry up and finish your coffee before we both get unfashionable sunburn.'  Perhaps she was leaning on a rock and suddenly felt something squidgy and wet, and crawling, under her hand, which is why she's frowning, rather than enjoying that drink she so loves - according to the words on the mug. We'll probably never know.

I think what the picture most says to me is, don't drink out of a cup that's telling the world something you can't live up to. Better to stick to a plain cup and forget all the pseud messages cups and mugs come with these days, like the one on a cup my wife bought at a fair in Queenstown, which says: Caution! next mood swing 6 mins.

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia

Irritation in #gigatowndunedin

We don't tend to stay up late these days. Even with a nap in the afternoon, we're still often tired by the time 10.30-11.00 comes round.

So you can imagine our irritation at being woken around 11.30, three nights running, by someone ringing us to tell us that our computer isn't working properly, and that they can fix it for us. You know the routine: this is a scam, and once they get you to open up your computer they ask for your credit card to deal with the cost of the issue. And then start using your credit card details fraudulently.

What fool of a scam company thinks it's a good idea to ring people at this time of night? Don't they have a world clock on their own computers that tell them what time it is in our country?

They've had a short shift each time they've rung, a short and increasingly grumpy one. I'm thinking of leaving the phone off the hook overnight from now on. But then of course if we have a real phone call, an emergency perhaps, we'd miss it.

Even more ridiculous than the late night scams was the text message I got yesterday informing me that I'd won £125,000,000 in some mobile number lottery. One hundred and twenty-five million pounds? The credibility of this text is instantly undermined by the sheer size of the prize. Who gives away that much money in a lottery? If they'd suggested I'd won a thousand pounds I might have had second thoughts about how genuine the text was. But vast sums being allotted to me out of the blue - sorry, it just doesn't work. I've been around the world too long.

If you're going to scam us old people, then you're going to have to use your brain. I know some people fall for these things, but all your past scams have made me a lot more suspicious. But I'm not actually asking you to work harder at trying to fool me. I'd much prefer that you went and did something of value with your life, something that actually contributes to the good of society.

Trio sets

I was just telling someone on Twitter today that my first fiancee broke off our engagement on the minuscule pretext that I ate apples too loudly. I think the real reason was that her brothers had arrived from South Africa to warn her off matching herself up with a no-hoper from NZ, and any excuse was good enough. Ce la vie.

Why do I mention this, because you can get trio sets from Reeds.com. Okay, you say, what are 'trio sets'? Are they string trio players doing a 'set' of popular classics? Not quite, I reply. In fact, all I know is that trio sets have something to do with engagement rings,

A bit more investigation shows that the trio consists of an engagement ring for the fiancee, and a wedding ring each for the bride and groom. Obvious, really. Naturally they come in diamonds. What else?

Now here's a marketing idea. And it would be an encouragement for the young couple to stay together too. Each major wedding anniversary - the silver, gold, ruby, etc - would be commemorated by yet another ring for the bride that fitted the original trio set. If the groom was keen, he could have one too. They probably wouldn't run out of fingers...

The Best Offer

There are spoilers here.

We watched a strange movie last night: The Best Offer. It was made in Italy by Italians, for the most part, although the leading roles were mostly taken by English-speaking actors.

It concerns an ageing and wealthy art auctioneer who is so full of himself that arrogance reeks from him. Not only that he's been running a little scam for decades in which a friend of his bids for art works that the auctioneer is actually buying. And in the first scene we see him snapping up what appears to be a worthless piece of wood because he knows that underneath the grime is a valuable painting - snapping it up in the sense of saying that he'll take it off the hands of the unknowing owners.

Geoffrey Rush plays the auctioneer and plays him brilliantly. But I suspect that the scriptwriter had someone younger in mind; there are elements of the story that seem a little awry as a result of this piece of casting. Rush's character Virgil Oldman (did you get it? - not obvious at all) has never been in love. He can't even bear to touch other people, and wears gloves all the time. A young woman calls him and asks that he make an inventory of the furniture and art works in her parents' home. He goes to the house, but she never turns up for meetings, always having some excuse on the phone. She continues to persuade him to go ahead with the inventory, and then one day he discovers that she actually lives in the large house, behind a false wall. He pretends to have left the house, but stays behind to see her. She has claimed that she has a form of agoraphobia, that renders her unable to leave the house and not to be good with people, face to face.

In a secondary element to the story, Oldman, on his visits to the house, keeps finding more and more pieces of something mechanical, dating from the 19th century. He takes it to a young engineer friend of his (a man who has no problem attracting young women) and gradually the engineer (Jim Sturgess) puts together an automaton, one that was known to have spoken to customers and given them answers to their questions. The engineer, incidentally, never seems to have any customers in his shop, and does all the work for Oldman for free...

The audience's suspicions have by this time been aroused that there's something not quite right about the girl, or the relationship she's formed with Oldman, or even, perhaps about the young engineer. Things seem to be fitting together too nicely. And in the end that's exactly the case: the whole thing is a scam against the auctioneer, and the biter is bit.

If it wasn't for the acting, especially Rush's, the film would fall apart. Most of it turns out to be nonsense, but it's beautifully done, the visual elements are extraordinary (especially the room full of paintings of women that Rush has hidden in his own house), and it sustains its major hoax until near the end. Even if you're suspicious about it all, you won't necessarily figure it all out.

The director and writer is Giuseppe Tornatore, who made Cinema Paradiso. That film was so long that it's never been seen in its entirety. Even the shortened version now available on DVD is stretched out. And Best Offer is overlong too; there are some moments, especially towards the end, when you just want it to reach its point and stop. But it's too beautiful, like most of the works of art that appear in it.

Junk mail jobs

I guess there are printing companies that have gone out of business around the country, though with one exception I'm hard-pressed to think of any, but there must be some printing companies out there still doing good business, because day after day my letter-box is full of advertising material, all of it in colour, and some of it quite substantial. 

The printers probably don't in the least bit care that most of the junk mail that arrives in our house goes straight in the recycling bin. My wife glances through some of it, when she can be bothered, but for the most part it comes in one door of the house and goes out the other. I guess advertisers wouldn't feel so happy about this, but if they continue to use such an antiquated and costly system of advertising then I suppose that's their lookout. 

But the printing companies must be rubbing their hands with glee. Not for them any scruples about the fact that all this paper and ink is mostly tossed in the rubbish, or that it's hardly useful for anything else (I've occasionally used it as internal wrapping paper in a parcel). For them it's all income, regular and well-paid. 

Yes, we could put up a sign saying, No Junk Mail, but what would be the point? It wouldn't stop the endless flow of stuff being delivered around the neighbourhood. I suppose there's a certain economic on-flow from it all: the people who deliver the junk mail, for a pittance; the paper and ink suppliers, the marketing teams who put the things together, and of course the printers, as I've already mentioned. Each of these would fall over without junk mail. So you might say the true value of junk mail isn't advertising but keeping people in jobs.