Blackmoor Vituperative

I have decided to start a diet. I am tired of being fat, and I obviously do not have the motivation to work out like a fiend. After careful consideration of my lifestyle, I designed a diet for myself. I am calling it The Bloody Mary Diet. Each day, my main food intake will be:

• two slices of high-fiber bread
• one can of premium white tuna
• two glasses of spicy V8 juice (sometimes with a splash of vodka)

I may augment this from time to time with a modest serving of dinner, but I am going to drastically reduce the size of my portions.

Some good information in this article. I have a novella that I had planned to release in the nearish future. I was just going to give it away under a Creative Commons license, but maybe I will try selling it, instead. If I am lucky, maybe I will be able to buy a pizza with the profits.

A while back I wrote a column entitled “Self-Publishing: 25 things you need to know,” which was mostly about how to create and sell your own paper book. Since then a lot of folks have asked me to do something similar for e-books, so I have.

I begin with one caveat: The whole e-book market is rapidly evolving and a lot of self-publishing companies are offering e-book deals bundled into their print book publishing packages, which makes them harder to break out and evaluate. It’s all quite complicated, and in an effort to sort through the confusion, I’ve decided to offer a few basic tips and present what I think are some of the best options out there for creating an e-book quickly and easily. As things change–and they will–I’ll do my best to keep this column up to date.

Read more…

Philip Berne has an interesting opinion piece on SlashGear about the death of journalism as a profession. Have expertise and informed opinions become irrelevant?

Shooters head to the range during the summer, and it’s also when children will be spending more time at home. So now’s the time to review the rules of safety both when out shooting and when storing firearms in the home. Watch this short video on shooting-range safety and review the range of safety materials available from the NSSF.

• Watch a short range-safety video.
• Review safety-education materials available from NSSF.
• Find a shooting range near you.

Be safe.

All of us are like excited children when turned loose for a fun-filled day at an amusement park. The commotion of the enthusiastic crowd combines with mouthwatering scents of delicious snacks waiting to be gobbled up, and then mingles with flashing lights and pounding music from rides and attractions. Yet when an amusement park becomes abandoned and an eerie silence descends to blanket the decay, the atmosphere seems to twist and takes on a nightmarish vibe. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, leaving Six Flags as another of its victims. Here are 69 uber-creepy urban exploration photographs as we tour the abandoned amusement park Six Flags New Orleans.

(from Uber Creepy Tour: Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans, Web Urbanist)

You may be surprised to know that I have not always loved my job. Yes, it’s true. There have been days when I feel unappreciated, overworked, underpaid, disrespected… days when I just want to chuck my keyboard in a trash bin and go apply at the closest Starbucks.

Today is not one of those days. I am actually feeling pretty good about what I do for a living, and I am optimistic about the future. However, burnout is a real danger in IT, and it can have real effects on one’s health, happiness, and relationships. Tech Republic has an article about it. Why not read it, and take the burnout assessment quiz? It couldn’t hurt.

I currently am owed about $4000 from two clients that haven’t paid. One paid half up front for a web site, and I have been trying for a month to turn the web site over to them and get the other half of my payment, and they keep putting me off. The other client, for whom I did some programming work, bounced a check for $2000 three weeks ago, has promised to pay that and the rest of what they owe, but hasn’t paid yet, and never answers their phone or email.

I am pretty close to shutting down the first client’s web site, and turning over the second client to a collection agency. I think I will wait until Monday and try to get somewhere with each of them one more time before I do that.

Why won’t people honor their agreements?

Today has been a very good day. I have hardly coughed at all, and my ribs are not hurting anywhere near as much as they did yesterday. I put the last coat of clear lacquer on my steampunk nerf gun (photos of that are forthcoming, once I assemble it). I had lunch with a friend (Greek food, yum!), and we chatted about our respective IT projects. The client that bounced a $2000 check to me has promised to pay that and everything else they owe (knock on wood). Best of all, I put in a full day working on a project for a new client (not the one that bounced the check), doing work I enjoy a great deal.

Everything’s going so well!

I got my start in computers by writing small applications in Basic, and then Visual Basic. In the late 1980s, I wrote a program that backed up selected directories by copying them, zipping them up, and writing them to floppy disks. In the early 1990s, I wrote macros to integrate PGP and Microsoft Word. I also wrote a reasonably popular dice-rolling program (I was one of the first few thousand people to do so). However, I got my start working in IT by doing web design. My friend Nathan told me about NCSA Mosaic in early 1993, and within two months of the release of Mosaic, I was creating web pages. (It still amazes me that the web took off like it did — I just thought it was a neat toy.)

I eventually migrated from what I call “front end” work (the part of a web site people can see), to “back end” work (the stuff behind the scenes that actually makes a web site work — setting up databases, writing scripts, managing servers, and so on). One reason for this is that I am not a graphic designer — I am simply not an artist. Another reason is that as more people learned how to do “web design”, I could maintain my value by doing something more difficult (difficult for other people; not necessarily difficult for me).

However, the number one reason I moved away from web design and toward back end work is because I had too many web clients who made my job difficult. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But a lot of them. What do I mean by “difficult”? I mean this.

I have been unemployed for a full year, subsisting on freelance and consulting work. As of this moment, all of my job leads have led nowhere.

Time to redouble my efforts and find some new job leads!

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward!