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.

South Island holiday

We've been on holiday for the last fortnight, travelling around the South Island, from Dunedin to Christchurch (with a couple of overnight stops between) up the Kaikoura Coast, to Blenheim, Nelson and back down through the middle of the upper part of the island, a trip we've done before but had pretty much forgotten - in terms of what kind of scenery it was, and so forth.  In fact the last time we did that trip we had my 13 or 14-year-old son with me and we spent much of the time trying to remember all the names of the various bridges, rivers, culverts and so on, linking them together in a great long sequence.

It obviously wasn't very effective, as I didn't recognise a single name as we drove by this time!

I'm finding it tricky coming back to my usual PC keyboard; I've been typing on an iPad, and the difference is considerable.  The iPad keyboard is smaller, and it's very easy to hit the wrong key (though at least it does a good deal of correcting for you as you go along, some of it rather random).  Plus, a number of items are in different places, and at present I'm still reaching for where things are on the iPad rather than the keyboard.  That's the least of any problems.

Just before we went away we tried to scan something onto the computer.  My older printer, which is the one with the scanner, refused to do it.  Another older computer, attached to the laptop, refused to do it.  Obviously both of them felt they were in retirement mode, and didn't need to keep working the way they used to. (My current printer is a Speed King, printing out reams of pages at a great pace.  But that's all it's capable of doing.)

Perhaps I need to investigate some print shop websites to see if I can dispense with printers altogether!

Anyway, our trip around the South Island was full of highlights.  I've kept a diary of the day to day activities and people we met (and animals - there were several that made some brief impact) and I'll post some of those on the other blog at some point in the next week.

More on printers

I think people who use computers probably have fewer problems, on average, with their computers than with their printers. I've written about printers on a number of occasions: they certainly provide more to write about than computers do. So far.

I've had Epson printers and Canon printers (currently have one of these) and a Dell printer, and dot matrix printers (exceptionally reliable machines, but not much use for the age of the Internet) and some other printer beginning with H (not a Hewlitt Packard).

My brand new Canon printer MG5150 has been announcing over the last day or so that the black ink was getting low - would I like to go online and order a new cartridge? Well, I could have done, but one of the reasons I bought this machine was so that I could buy cartridges from Cartridge World - they're usually better in price, and they do refills.

Anyway, I went to CW today and bought a new black cartridge. I said I thought it was rather odd that the printer seemed to be using the small black cartridge instead of the big one (Canon provides two black cartridges in this model: one that is used with the colour cartridges and one that's your day to day text printing). The bloke behind the counter asked me what I was printing out? I said mostly 'music files' (by which I meant Sibelius files). He scoffed: you can't print music files. Well, that's right - even I know you can't print MP3 files and such. I said it was printed music from Sibelius. He said I should be turning them into pdfs first otherwise they print out as graphics. I said I thought this a little odd, as I'd never had to do this before. He said I hadn't had a printer with two black cartridges before.

Hmmm.

Anyway, I got home only to discover that I'd misread the information the printer had sent me and that it was the large cartridge which had run out. Which meant that the printer was using the large ordinary everyday cartridge for printing my Sibelius files. LOL.

Rang my daughter to see if she could pick me up a large cartridge. She went into the shop and they told her that the factory that produced these cartridges, in Japan, had been demolished in the earthquake/tsunami. No cartridges available. However, they could refill the cartridge but it wouldn't show up on my printer as being full (!)

Well, this was better than nothing, so in the end I made another trip to town (so much for saving petrol) and gave them the cartridge to refill. Told them that I'd made a mistake about which cartridge was being used for the music files, and the feller behind the counter still manage to make it sound as though he'd been right all along. Cheeky beggar!

New rhythms

Second day of retirement and I''m still finding what the new rhythm to daily life might look like. There hasn't been a chance to gauge this yet, as nothing has been quite what might be termed normal, and perhaps that's good. Maybe that's what the new rhythm will be.

Anyway, among other things yesterday involved the purchase of a new printer, since the Dell model that came (if I remember rightly free with the computer I'm currently working on) has not only decided it doesn't like scanning, it doesn't like copying either. At least it used to do copying, but this part of the system seems to have been recently wiped from its skill list.

We'd talked about getting another printer, mainly because the cartridges for the Dell can only be purchased online from Dell themselves, and have to come from overseas (believe it or not). The last lot took over a month to arrive, even though they'd been paid for at the beginning of the order. Furthermore they're fearfully expensive - this is perhaps why the printer is free - and no one is doing refill versions here as yet. In fact, they may not at all.

So we bought a new printer from Harvey Norman, the place where we'd got the last one - which worked tirelessly until it just clogged up its inards one day. This is a Canon Pixma MG 5150. I think it's going to be okay, but when I first tried to print something yesterday - which had both colour and black text in it - the colour printed fine; the black was non-existent.

We went through all sorts of processes trying to discover what might be the problem, and even rang Canon (who, unlike Dell, actually have people on the ground in NZ). She suggested nozzle cleaning and that sort of thing - which hadn't at that point occurred to me (I won't be applying for power engineer jobs in my retirement; at least not in the IT area) - but that made no difference.

There was plainly something wrong with the black cartridge, even though you could detect ink when you tested it out manually on your finger.

I took it back to the shop, and discovered another gent with the same problem. His machine was being tested when I arrived. We agreed on every point, in particular the lack of black print, and finally the person doing the testing in the shop agreed that there was obviously something faulty with the cartridge. In fact there was something faulty with the black cartridge in both machines, but he had to go through the whole rigamarole of testing my machine as well before he was satisfied this was the case. Good grief.

Anyway, I didn't get much chance to check out the printer after that, because I had to go out and play at the first of two concerts at Brooklands Retirement home in Mosgiel.

Today's 'retirement' has consisted of my wife having a birthday, walking down to see my grandson play soccer, (yesterday I walked up the hill from South Dunedin: not far, but pretty steep); buying a couple of folders for more music, and some sox from The Warehouse - only to discover when I got outside that they were the heel-less kind, which I don't wear. So I had to go and replace them.

Back home and preparation for a family picnic out at Mosgiel (again - but not at Brooklands) where we ate and played games and generally had a great family outing. Home for a long overdue snooze, interrupted by some of the people for next week's concert arriving for a practice. (Yesterday I also spent some time with a tuba player who's playing at the brass band comps in Roxburgh next weekend. I'm accompanying him and several others - though not the guy whose music almost made me despair when I first saw it: the bulk of it goes at crochet equals 176, which seems fine for the soloist who only ever plays one note at a time, but is a bit of a nightmare for the accompanist whose flinging notes around all over the place. I was working hard to simplify it and still make it sound reasonable when he rang to say he wasn't going to have time to practice it properly. Great relief.)

After a walk on the St Kilda beach tonight with the dog, we came home and played Settlers with my daughter and her friend. As always, lots of cheating going on from two of the participants (not me!)

Earthquakes, winds and printers

The earthquake that hit Christchurch yesterday has left an appalling mess, but amazingly, there was no loss of life, thank the Lord - though there were some near misses.

Tonight here in Dunedin, we're having gale force winds; they've been thumping against the house since before tea time, and apparently there are tree branches littering the roads. Our neighbour's fence has collapsed, and if the wind keeps up that won't be the only thing.

The worse part about this wind is that it's supposed to be travelling up the island and will hit Christchurch tonight, or tomorrow. Hopefully it'll wear itself out before then.

On another (non-weather related) front altogether, one of the things about writing blogs regularly is that you forget what you've written a couple of years ago, and when you go back things seem quite fresh to you. For instance, to take a random post, a couple of years I wrote a piece on the WorkReport blog entitled, Poking around the printing world. It discusses a day I had a great deal of problem with the printer that used to be in the office where I work (we've since replaced it, thank goodness). While I don't mention color printing (note the American spelling - that's for those people who think this is the way the word should be spelt), I do go into some detail about the frustrations that the printer was causing. There was a time when I threatened to toss it out the window - we're on the fifth floor - just to let it know it was way out of favour. I never got to do that and see what state the thing would have been in after its lengthy fall - unfortunately. We're too frugal to consider throwing a piece of equipment out the window just to see the mess, however satisfying it would have been!

When I bought the computer I'm typing this on, we got a printer thrown in. Dell were the people who supplied the computer and printer (by a series of confusions the printer arrived some weeks before anything else, and I'm sure I've written about it somewhere on one of my blogs). We installed the printer and it worked well - and then I rang Dell to find out how much the replacement cartridges would be. They were an exorbitant price, and at that time, because the printer model was new, they weren't even available in New Zealand. In the end we put the old printer back into use (it can use recycled cartridges without problem, and they're a great deal cheaper) and the brand new one is sitting on a shelf sulking.

The very first printer I had was a wonderful old dot matrix. We used to use them at work in the shop too. They were extraordinarily fast, rarely went wrong, and would happily print page after page without requiring replacement inks. I'd be using them still today if it wasn't for the fact that they wouldn't have a hope of printing out most stuff you want to print now. Which means that we have to use printers which use expensive cartridges which don't last a fraction of the time the ribbons that used to go in the dot matrix machines lasted.

Progress ain't always progress. But at least the newer buildings in Christchurch stand upright because of newer building codes. That's the sort of progress that's worth having.

Concert tonight

Concert tonight, and it's one of those waiting-around days, when you're not really sure what to do with yourself. I've done some practice, though not as much as yesterday, and played through some other music to try and stop myself feeling a bit stale at working on the same pieces over and over. (The thing is, if they're not right now they certainly won't be any better tonight!) But I need to have my fingers up and running when I start, as there won't be any second chances. (Although, at the last concert, one of the singers missed an entry twice, and we finished up doing the first 10 bars or so three times...!)

So:
I've done the Sudoku in the Otago Daily Times, and the easier of the two cryptic crosswords;
we've been to the e-day and taken an older printer there and a couple of cellphones (and met my son, who was volunteering);
we've done the food shopping for the week, plus getting some items for the supper tonight;
I've planted a bunch of dahlias in the garden by the drive;
I've listened to my daughter bewailing the problems she's had with what was a very expensive digital camera with a great movie function that she can't edit on her laptop. This problem has been going on since she got the camera, and is now exacerbated by the fact that the video section of the camera is virtually full and she can't download the video - even the software's not working properly. At the moment she's managing to get it backed up to my PC, but it's going to take all night by the looks of it...!

I wonder if this is how Mozart, or Beethoven or some other equally esteemed composer spent their Saturday before going off to the Konzerthaus...?


My photo of dahlias in our garden towards the end of summer, along with the red stalks of the silver beet.