Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as “Your Money Is Your Voice”

Good, Nice, Professional

centaur 0


20160108_205536.jpg

One of the things they tell you in the writing community is “Good, nice, professional: you need to be at least two of the three.”

What this means is, the writing community is filled good writers, nice people, and competent workers, but it’s also filled with crappy writers, genuine assholes, and flakey losers. You can get away with being one of the bad things: you can be a so-so writer, but be nice to people and turn things in on time, or you can be an asshole but produce great work in a timely fashion, or you can be good and nice but fail to deliver, and people will forgive most of those things and you will proceed, and succeed.

Douglas Adams is perhaps the best known "flakey, but good and nice” guy. The world’s oldest angry young man, the hardworking Harlan Ellison, was known as “asshole, but good and professional” until he gaffed the Last Dangerous Visions anthology project. I won’t disparage another writer’s work, but as a publisher and anthology editor, I can tell you that I’m much more likely to accommodate an author who I know will deliver than an awesome one I can’t count on - and I can tell you that I’ve heard the same from other publishers of anthologies.

This came up because I just had to essentially back out of a project. You need to roll with the punches on an editor’s comments, but what I just received was a request for a spec rewrite more than four months after the article had been approved, and that after a fairly intensive editorial round. That made me mad - but in a broader sense, I understand how it happened: the editor got feedback on another project and wanted to forestall that happening to my article. But I’d moved on from the project, and am neck deep in edits in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which was supposed to be out last year.

I swallowed my anger, thought carefully about the overall problem, and realized that despite what I perceived as an irregularity of process the editor is just trying to do the best job they can the best way they know how. I further realized the primary reason I couldn’t respond was simply my lack of time. If the request had landed in a dead zone, I’d have gladly have given it a shot.

So I wrote the editor what I hoped was a polite but firm note, emphasizing the problem was essentially my other committments. The editor got back to me promptly and was accommodating. I also discussed the problem with one of my fellow authors, who stepped up with suggestions, and we may bring him on board as a co-author so he can take this article the rest of the way.

I’m always angry, and I easily could have blown my stack and really ticked the editor off. But being nice, and being professional, I helped solve a problem, rather than creating a new one. As to whether my article was good … eh, if it ever gets released, be it authored, co-authored, or just salsa on this blog if rejected ... I’ll let you be the judge.

-the Centaur

Back to the Future with the Old Reader

centaur 0

theoldreader.png

As I mentioned in a previous post, Google Reader is going away. If you don't use RSS feeds, this service may be mystifying to you, but think of it this way: imagine, instead of getting a bunch of Facebook, Google+ or Twitter randomized micro-posts, you could get a steady stream of high-quality articles just from the people you like and admire? Yeah. RSS. It's like that.

So anyway, the Reader shutdown. I have a lot of thoughts about that, as do many other people, but the first one is: what the heck do I do? I use Reader on average about seven times a day. I'm certainly not going to hope Google change their minds, and even if they do, my trust is gone. Fortunately, there are a number of alternatives, which people have blogged about here and here.

The one I want to report on today is The Old Reader, the first one I tried. AWESOME. In more detail, this is what I found:

  • It has most, though not all, features of Google Reader. It's got creaky corners that sometimes make it look like features are broken, but as I've dug into it, almost everything is there and works pretty great.
  • It was able to import all my feeds I exported via Google Takeout. Their servers are pretty slow, so it actually took a few days, and they did it two passes. But they sent me an email when it was done, and they got everything.
  • The team is insanely responsive. They're just three guys - but when I found a problem with the Add Subscription button, they fixed it in just a couple of days. Amazing. More responsive than other companies I know.

There are drawbacks, most notably: they don't yet have an equivalent for Google Takeout's OPML export. But, they are only three guys. They just started taking money, which is a good sign that they might stay around. Here's hoping they are able to build a business on this, and that they have the same commitment to openness that Google had.

I plan to try other feed readers, as I can't be trapped into one product as I was before, but kudos to The Old Reader team for quickly and painlessly rescuing me from the First Great Internet Apocalypse of 2013. I feel like I'm just using Reader, except now I have a warm fuzzy that my beloved service isn't going to get neglected until it withers away.

-the Centaur

Back it up (WAS Waiting waiting waiting)

centaur 0
[caption id="attachment_780" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Backing Up As We Speak"]The Iomega Drive from Fry's[/caption]

[ Waiting waiting waiting ... ] at Fry's Electronics, because the deal on the USB hard drive I decided to get to improve my offsite backup was, indeed, too good to be true - WHOA!  They just gave me another 5$ discount for waiting! Go Fry's!

So now we're backing backing backing... -the Centaur

This is Xeriscape

centaur 1
Xeriscaped Succulents in Bloom

My wife and I are xeriscaping our lawn - transforming it from a green sucker-of-water into a still-green landscape of native plants that require little or no water. Lawns consume a lot of water, and this is one way we can make a difference that both saves the environment and saves money.

But a xeriscaped lawn isn't always just dirt, or just brown, or even just green. Here you see the succulents we've planted in fantastic bloom, which require almost no watering during the course of the year. During the day their flowers open in a brilliant polychromatic display; at night they close up.

Xeriscaped Succulents and Path to Olive Tree

We've also used low-water plants and trees, either existing ones or new ones planted that will require little to no water. Unfortunately new trees require some water to get started, and so the grass that would not grow before has come back with a vengeance (as you can see in the upper left).

Xeriscaped Succulents, Olive Tree and Gardener

We've made the problem a little harder on ourselves by using reclaimed materials as much as possible, letting plants grow out to fill the space rather than buying more, planting from cuttings, using no artificial fertilizer, and using almost no artificial pesticides (other than slug pellets, which we could not avoid using as they love succulents). So it's taking some time ... we're in the start of the second year of our front yard landscaping.

But after that first year, it's starting to bear fruit. Already the result is a wonderful Seussical landscape that requires little to no watering. Who knows what it will look like after another year.

-the Centaur

Pictured: our front lawn, with closeups of the flowering succulents (grown into the space on their own), a medium shot of the path (made from reclaimed wood chips), and a long shot of the tree (saved from death with a little mulching), the path and the gardener.

Aptera, Not Yet In the Wild

centaur 1
Aptera is the manufacturer of an innovative new aerodynamic electric car which has appeared in the press recently. Now I've had a chance to see one in real life when on Earth Day they brought a couple of their test models to the parking lot of the Search Engine That Starts With a G:



These cars will go on sale in November, starting at $25,000ish for the base electric model, something higher for a gas model, and up to $40,000 for a series gas-electric hybrid that runs entirely on its electric motors until the battery runs out, at which point a generator kicks in.



I wasn't one of the lucky few who got test drives, and the $1M prototype wasn't set up for people to sit in it, but from what I saw of the cockpit it looked comfortable. There wasn't a lot of space in the back, however:



Aptera's car is interesting in that it is a three wheeler. Part of the reason for this is aerodynamics: Aptera started with the most aerodynamic car it could and then has been adjusting it to make it more livable, rather than start with an old style car and bubblifying it.



What's fun is watching these cars drive. I saw one slicing past me on the road as I was driving up to the demonstration in my beloved but gas-guzzling Nissan Pathfinder, and it was going so fast it looked like a bat out of hell. But they're almost completely silent:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rElKY6nBn_s]

I'm not sure it's my next car - I plan to test drive a Tesla shortly. But I'm definitely thinking about it, even though it is definitely 1.0 technology that will have a few kinks to it.

The series hybrid is most intriguing to me: if you drive to and from work everyday and charge up at work or at night, the gas motor will never have to kick in. If you want to take a road trip, however, you don't have to worry about running out of power and looking for a place to charge: the generator kicks in and you can drive it like a normal car - that is, just like a super efficient normal car that gets an equivalent of a kajillion miles per gallon.

-Anthony