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Angry Old Fat Dude here, and I've been especially steamed recently. Why? Because computers suck and everybody knows it, that's why.

How strange this is coming from a computer guy, right? 24 years in the industry. I was there at the birth of both the home computer and the publicly accessible Internet. You know what I never witnessed? The promise of a truly easy-to-use computer interface being fulfilled. If you've ever had to read instructions on how to simply make the computer do what it was designed for, then the computer isn't really easy to use.

You don't need to read a set of different instructions every year to operate a car. Even different makes and models of cars. They all work pretty much the same. They have practically the same interface.

How about other electronics? CD and DVD players work the same way, with the same sort of buttons coded in a universal fashion to tell the user how to operate the machine.

Before the smartphone, plain old phones all worked the same way. You input the unique number of the person you want to talk to, their phone makes a noise indicating that someone wants to talk to them, they pick up the phone and put it to their ears and mouths and you talk to them. This didn't change for over 100 years.

Now, hold on, you're probably saying "But AOFM, computers are open-ended devices! They're not designed with just one thing in mind! They can do ANYTHING!"

Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It's a machine that emulates other machines. To do this, a programmer must either utilize the most commonly attached devices - the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer - or propose an entirely new device - another machine to be bought, attached, and configured.

...continue reading "AOFM-MWU – It Should Just Work, Dammit"

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There's no doubt about who's winning the  American Indie Revolution.  The castle walls of the old publishing royals stand in ruins.  Even former staunch allies like Barnes & Noble have defected to the insurgent writers.   

“Digital publishing and digital book selling will soon become the most explosive development in the history of our industry and will sweep aside those who aren’t participating,” Leonard Riggio, B&N's founder and chairman, said during a recent presentation highlighting the company's expanding forray into the digital market. 

The e-reader market is in the midst of a price war that is putting more and more of the devices into the hands of the book-buying American public.  Fewer readers visit the brick and mortar bookstores as more readers demand that the bookstores come to them, via their PCs, Macs, e-readers, iPods and cell phones.  Via America's strong and ever expanding wireless networks ebooks get delivered to readers instantly. 

When American publishers lost control of the distribution system, they lost control of the readers and the writers.  Today authors like Joe Konrath have chosen to forego offered publishing contracts for some books, electing to get them out in print and ebook format on their own, thank you very much.  Books of writers doing it their way are, more and more,  transitioning readers to expect stories undiluted by editorial changes demanded by publishers.  An American indie book or ebook is becoming an intimate experience shared only by the writer and the reader.    

But even in the present economic downturn, America's companies invested the time and resources to build the pipelines that allowed the Indie Revolt to succeed.   Those pipelines are being strengthened as demand encourages more investment.  Our writers can now write their books, publish them, sell them to readers and get paid via those same magic pipelines that funnel money directly into their bank accounts. 

In the heady atmosphere of power and possibility now held by the creators themselves, it becomes rather easy to forget that America's Indie Revolt is not yet the world's.  Imagine an American publisher today saying the following:  “Everyone knows that almost all publishers cheat their authors on their royalty payments, and there’s ­nothing the authors can do about it.”

...continue reading "America’s Indie Revolt: Why It Matters & Will It Spread"

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

--  An excerpt from the second paragraph of the United States of America's Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.

Happy Birthday, America!

 

Also, this.

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Well, the cover that Mary Anne wanted for one of her serialized e-books is done; I have finally completed it. Behold, the first man-titty cover from Quacking Alone Romances - click the thumbnail, look upon it, and despair:

Click for larger image

I feel soooooooooo dirty. I think I need to loofah my entire body with a Black & Decker belt sander now.

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It's a buyer's market for almost everything, right? 

So, lets say you are better off than most of us (me, especially) and you decide that this is the time to buy a house.  You hire a realtor and she drives you out to Neighborhood A to see a traditional ranch.   It turns out to be too traditional for you, but on your way to Neighborhood B to see the next house on the realtor's list you pass a cunning little craftsman with a "For Sale" sign in the yard.  It has charm and character and doesn't look turned out of a cookie cutter. 

So you draw your realtor's attention to it and tell her you want to see that house.  She hems and haws and tries to evade but when you insist, the realtor finally gives you an answer.  "No," the realtor says, "you can't see that house. "  She's already met with the committee at the office.  They reviewed who you were and what you would like and dislike and composed a list of acceptable houses.  The craftsman wasn't on the list so it's not for you. 

In reality, that scenario may not have happened to you on a house hunt, but in the past it happened every single time a reader walked into a bookstore.  All of the books on the shelves had been screened for the readers by the publishing royals - agents, editors and publishing companies.  The royals decided what readers should want and only put the acceptable books out there for the bookstores to stock and sell.  So if a reader wanted a book, he or she had to buy one of those in the store.  And when the sale was made, the royals patted each other on the shoulder and said, "See, we were right again."

...continue reading "What The Indie Revolution Means To Readers"

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Published on 1 Comment on AOFM-MWU – Gestalt, Zeitgeist, and Fruition

Hi. That Angry Guy here. Feeling better, hence more angry.

If you haven't heard about it yet, there is a huge price war going on among companies that sell e-reader devices. It seems that the Apple cart (via the iPad) has upset a bunch of people, mainly those people who thought they had the e-book and e-reader device market cornered.

I knew that the $400 price tags on Kindles wouldn't last long, because even though it put many different technologies together in a synergistic fashion, it was still a device with a singular purpose (as are its immediate competitors like the Nook) - in essence, a digital book.

The iPad, like the Amazon Kindle, didn't introduce any radical new technology; it assembled existing technologies into a neat little package that ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.

Tablet computers were conceptualized back in the days before GUIs were even invented, so Apple didn't invent the idea of a tablet computer.

Tablet computers, with varying degrees of interaction, had been manufactured by other companies since the early 1990s, so Apple didn't invent the form of a tablet computer.

But Apple did make a computer that utilized a number of robust interdependent technologies, and that computer had the right form and was introduced at the right time to break the collective inertia of the buying public.

And even though the competing devices may someday add other functions besides downloading and displaying e-books, the public perception of them is already set. The perception is that the Kindle, Nook, etc., are one-trick ponies whereas the iPad has no boundaries.

And, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, perception is reality.

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Published on 1 Comment on If Michael Jackson Wrote Romance Novels…

For the upcoming anniversary of Michael Jackson's passing, I repost the following which originally appeared on the blog shortly after his death.

 Okay, get your mind off of all the weirdness of MJ's latter years.  As for the criminal charges, don't go there.  Think about the music and the performances.  Get yourself in that mind space.  Maybe it'll help if you squeal "Ooh" and "I'm Bad" three or four times.  Okay, focused now? 

 His death was tragic. Having a creative force like his snuffed out so quickly, so needlessly has deprived the world of years of music and magic.  So while it's certainly his tragedy, his family's tragedy, it's also a loss for everyone who ever turned on a radio or downloaded music.  In the wake of the sudden loss there were many retrospectives and tributes.

As one of those tributes Fox re-broadcast the first American Idol finalist show of this season featuring the top 13 performing Michael Jackson songs.  I watch American Idol and enjoy seeing the group working and growing into music professionals.  It's always fun to see someone working to make their dream come true.  But I'd forgotten about that MJ show because, at the time, it was just another show.  Too bad it wasn't done later in the season with the gloved one giving the finalists performance critiques and suggestions. 

...continue reading "If Michael Jackson Wrote Romance Novels…"

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God knows, I understand that even in good times people need weekends to stay sane.  In my world of today, which is the polar opposite of "good times," sanity is mostly a fond memory, but I still need my weekends.  My family and that little two-day break from work are the only things keeping me from jumping. 

So I rarely hope anybody else has their tailhook at their desk over a weekend, especially a holiday weekend.  Rarely.  But this weekend is an exception.   This weekend every darned programmer and web guru in the Amazonian Kingdom best be chained to their desks - including the fathers in the group.   At least one of 'em deserves to be chained, and with a big new system change-over coming at the end of June where the whole staff is most likely working on bits and pieces of the new system, someone supervising the chain-deserving code monkey didn't do his or her job.  Somebody screwed up royally. 

Amazon's DTP Platform publishes Kindle pieces from indie authors and includes a dashboard to monitor sales.  The numbers don't go backwards unless there was a return or two OR unless a code monkey didn't do his job right.  Early Thursday evening (June 17th) over about a two hour span, the DTP numbers of indie authors went backwards without any returns.  Sales disappeared. 

...continue reading "Amazon’s FUBAR Agitates The Already Agitated"

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Published on 1 Comment on AOFM-MWU – Our First Shopping Trip

Mary Anne and I weren't always married, though it seems like it after 20+ years. I still had a lot to learn about women when she and I first got married. One of those things I had to learn was how women had an entirely different methodology for shopping than men.

I found it best to think about it in terms of our hunter-gatherer ancestry. Men were the hunters; the first thing we saw that could provide the necessary meat for the tribe was the first thing we stabbed to death and brought home. We knew the general locations where those meals on legs could be found, so we just went there, waited for them to show up, go Stone Age on their asses, and then, VOILA, lunchtime.

Men today shop the same way, except huge discount stores make it so much easier to spot that button-down oxford shirt, sneak up on it, spear it, and drag it back to our caves.

Women? That's a whole different game. One that men will never understand, except to note it somehow evolved from jabbering at each other while wandering among groves of fruit trees.

As an example of what happens when these worlds collide, I present an account of my first married shopping trip with Mary Anne:

...continue reading "AOFM-MWU – Our First Shopping Trip"

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Is having breakfast for supper a Southern thing? 

Last night I decided that I wanted breakfast for supper.  Okay, maybe recalling that IHOP has those cheesecake stacker pancakes right now had something to do with it.  The other factor - if one needs more than the idea of cheesecake as an incentive - was that at suppertime we could get into IHOP.  You've got to remember that the family Graham resides in Myrtle Beach which is a tourist town. 

Tourists, God love 'em, come down on vacation talking a good game.  You'll hear them in line at the grocery store or passing by at the mall talking about how stupid folks are to travel to somewhere different and still eat at the chain restaurants.  Like I said, they talk a good game.  Anybody who lives in Myrtle and has tried to get into an Olive Garden for supper or an IHOP for breakfast knows that it's all talk.  Locals will drive up to those places, see the throngs crowding around, and leave and go somewhere else.

So there was a stroke of genius in my madness last night.  It occurred to me that maybe breakfast for supper was a Southern thing and maybe IHOP wouldn't be crowded.  And EUREKA!!  Once in a great while - I'm right.  It was so not crowded that my kids, seeing the nearly empty parking lot, wondered if it was open.  But it was and not only did I get my cheesecake stackers (strawberry), but we were seated in a nearly empty section that allowed the family to have a loud and raucous debate.  (Apologies to the one smart diner - a single man - who decided to leave and likely swore off the ideas of marriage and children for life.)

Mr. Quack brought up a debate we'd been having at home as he is in the throes of designing the man tittie cover for the serialization of my WIP, a regency historical.  He doesn't get my reference to "Eden Without The Apple."  He's also convinced that readers wouldn't get it either and would be confused by theological implications.  I replied that women drawn in by  man titties wouldn't be thinking about the Bible at the time. 

...continue reading "IHOP Insanity and Its Aftermath"