The Starship Cat
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "starshipcat" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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05:53 pm
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Whew!
Very relieved to read on Yahoo! News that the 6-year-old boy who was thought to have been on that runaway balloon in Colorado was actually in the garage the whole time, safe but apparently scared he was in bigtime trouble. I'd had visions of somebody finding his little broken body on the ground somewhere along its path, and I'm just glad that it isn't the case.
I can say from personal experience that bright kids get into an awful lot of trouble, usually out of curiosity. What'll happen if I do this? What will that do if I try this? When I think of all the things my brothers and I tried to do when we were kids growing up on the farm, it's a real wonder that all of us made it through with both eyes and all ten fingers and toes.
And even so, I still think that the risks were worth it. Mom and Dad made sure we stayed away from the really, truly dangerous stuff, but they let us have space to be kids and to run around and play without being constantly minutely monitored. And they weren't regarded as neglectful parents for letting us take those risks, the way they probably would be now.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  relieved
Current Music: "I'm a Boy" by The Who
Tags: childhood, news
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04:44 pm
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Extinction
Not in the biological sense, but the behaviorological.
Positive reinforcements will tend to cause a given behavior to persist and strengthen, while negative reinforcements or non-reinforcement will tend to extinguish a behavior.
If you want someone to keep trying at a difficult task, you need to provide positive reinforcements for trying, even if the results are not perfect. If you treat trying and failing with the same harsh boot-stomping that you give not even trying, don't be surprised if people stop trying. It's not because they're lazy or don't care, but because their brains aren't getting that boost of neurotransmitters that comes from positive reinforcement, they aren't building the linkages that lead the desired behavior to persist and strengthen, hopefully toward the final goal.
Now I'm not talking about lavishing praise on every fumbling attempt and making people feel wonderful because they're just bothering to try. But at least acknowledging that they're trying does make a person feel like they've gotten something out of that failed attempt beside great big boot-prints all over them because they didn't do it perfectly the first time. Which makes it a lot more likely that they'll take the risk of trying yet again, rather than deciding that it's better to just keep one's head down, one's mouth shut, and hope that nobody will notice and call them down as a rotten person.
Most people aren't masochists. They don't deliberately seek out pain for its own sake. Instead, they accept that pain is going to be part of the process of gaining a positive goal. And most people, in order to persist in a difficult and painful undertaking, need to see some recognizable payoff along the way.
Wanting people to change is often a reasonable request, but demanding they do so according to a set of rules that contradicts the known science of human behavior is a recipe for failure. Science is one of those things that will not bow to the demands of politics. Genetics in the Soviet Union was set back decades by the demands for a Marxist biology, and the peoples of the old USSR reaped the results in the form of poor harvests and crop failures.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: politics, psychology, science
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04:50 pm
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Writer's Block: Youthful Transgressions
Not pushing harder to get to go to the Summer Language School at Middlebury during my undergraduate years. If I had, I probably would've been able to get my Russian language skills up to where they needed to be to pursue the advanced degree in Russian literature that was my real ambition, instead of being convinced to settle for a degree in library science and being left forever longing for the possibilities I lost.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  gloomy
Tags: writer's block
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12:01 pm
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When You've Been Writing for Decades
you tend to get a lot of "legacy code" in your stories. Stuff that you came up with when you were a teenager, that made complete sense to your adolescent mind, but which doesn't work so well to your middle-aged mind.
And sometimes it works the other way, and you read an older version of a story and can't recapture what you were imagining at the time. Last night, curious about just how I had portrayed a character that's become important in my current WIP, I pulled out a version from the late 1980's, only to be surprised that there was basically no physical description at all of the character in question. As a result, I keep wanting to visualize him as he's portrayed in the current version, as a tiny, delicate man, yet the reactions of the other characters to him in the old version clearly show that he must be a man of ordinary appearance, in no way remarkable other than his good looks. But my current understanding of this character has completely blotted out my memories of how I saw him back when I was doing my undergrad work.
Have some of you out there had similar experiences with stories and worlds on which you've been working for years? Feel free to share!
Current Location: home
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: John Mayer "Bigger than My Body"
Tags: writing
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03:03 pm
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Now That's Annoying
Recently the PRAM battery on my trusty old Mac G3/233 failed, and as I was getting tired of having to reset the date and time every time I unplugged it because a storm was going through, I finally went up to Batteries Plus and picked up a replacement PRAM battery. It's a desktop case, so I figured I'd have an easy time replacing the PRAM battery. After all, it's got to be easier than doing it on the iMac.
So I get the case open and pull and replace the battery. Then I put everything back together and start it up. The LED lights up, but no startup chime. The screen comes on OK, but when I check the Monitors and Sound panel, there's a blank space for sound output. It's like the computer's forgotten it has the capacity for sound.
I reset the PRAM using the old trusty command-control-P-R trick, but just succeed in screwing up some other settings. On the advice of my brother the computer engineer, I pull and reseat the Personality Card. Still no sound when I restart it. I even tried the long-delayed upgrade to OS 8.5, but only succeeded in making it unable to surf the Internet via the LAN (although it can still print to the LAN printer).
So I am no longer able to play CD's on that machine while I write (it's the machine I use for most of my writing for the simple reason that it can run Word 98 natively, rather than in the Classic Compatibility Layer as I do with my various OS X machines). And I really need that background music when I'm writing. I really hate the thought of having to set up the old mini-boombox and listen to radio while I'm writing. I'd really like to figure out what's screwed up the sound in the G3/233 and get it working again so I can listen to CD the way I prefer.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  annoyed
Current Music: whatever's on the Weather Channel right now
Tags: computers
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07:36 pm
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Amazon Messes with the Marketplace System Yet Again
Wasn't one nasty, time-gobbling change enough for Amazon? The new, more rigorous uploading system has been one gigantic aggravation for me, enormously expanding the amount of time per book I have to expend in order to get inventory added to Amazon's database so they can be purchased. I've got a pile of books I need to process that have been sitting for weeks because I simply can't get together the necessary chunk of time to start tackling them.
Now Amazon is going to add additional chunks of time I must spend every time I actually sell a book, as they're moving to the Charge When Shipped system. This means that every time I sell a book, I have to click a "confirm shipped" button and enter the tracking information -- which means that once I get done printing up all my PayPal postage labels, I have to go through my listings a second time and copy the tracking numbers from my PayPal receipts into the little boxes on the forms -- one for each item sold. More and more time that has to be poured into the same task for the same return, time that I really need to be able to put into other ventures.
The more time I have to spend dealing with Amazon for the same number of sales, the less my hourly rate of return on my work becomes. But as long as my time is regarded as having no intrinsic value, as being essentially a free good, it's hard to argue with the "something is better than nothing" mentality and point out that I'm in the position of a lioness chasing mice -- my effort is producing to little return to live on, but is consuming the resources I need in order to pursue more lucrative ventures.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: "Taking Care of Business" by BTO
Tags: amazon.com, business
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12:36 pm
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Aggravation
What do you do when willpower won't?
I've got a set of articles that are actually overdue now, that my brain simply does not want to deal with. The harder I try to force it to come to grips with the project, the harder it refuses. It's like trying to put something in a clenched fist.
It's not that the subject material is incredibly hard or anything -- it's just that my mind isn't interested in it right now, and trying to force it to come to grips with it and produce the articles has instead reinforced the notion that this is a horrible, hideous, unbearable chore, so that the harder I try, the worse the problem becomes.
Normally I have no trouble working on a deadline, but when my brain decides it doesn't want to deal with an assignment, no amount of forcing myself will get it to unclench and produce words. I still have vivid memories of an incident from my freshman year at the University of Illinois. I was taking a course on the literature and culture of the Soviet Union (back in the days when there still was a Soviet Union), and I had an assignment to write a five-page paper on Yuri Olesha's Envy. Except when I sat down to write, my brain simply declined to work. By main effort I was able to produce two pages of unadorned facts which were pretty much copied from my lecture notes, but I couldn't expand upon them to produce an essay that flowed.
Finally it was time to turn it in and I still didn't have a proper essay, so I just went ahead and turned in those two pages. It was so awful that the professor read the first paragraph aloud as an example of how not to begin one's assignment. No attribution, so nobody else knew who was the lousy student on display, but I still sat there mortified to know how terribly I'd failed in his eyes. (Remarkably enough, that incident did not turn me against him -- far from it, once I overcame my initial shyness in the face of his erudition, I ended up spending a lot of time hanging around him and even let him read a bunch of my fiction).
Current Location: home
Current Mood: aggravated
Tags: business, writing
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06:24 pm
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Happy Surprise
Today as I was checking my e-mail, I see one with the subject being the title of a book that I'd just sold online. My first thought was, oh no, what's gone wrong now?
Imagine my surprise when I opened it to find the customer thanking me for getting it to them so quickly and in excellent condition.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Tags: business
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01:29 pm
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Nibble, Nibble, Nibble
The last few days seem to be prime "nibbled to death by ducks" territory. No major catastrophes, but just constant trifling annoyances that have to be dealt with. Like a zipper breaking, or the shift key on the keyboard of the G3/233 computer going out as I sit down to write some articles I want to get out of the way.
At least I do have several extra ADB keyboards (I started collecting them when it became obvious that no one would be making them any more), but you can't swap ADB devices on the fly, unlike USB. So I have to turn off the computer, switch keyboards, and then turn it back on and wait for it to start up. Time consuming and tedious, especially since several of the keyboards turn out to have problems, meaning I have to repeat the process until I find one that works.
And of course I'm now wondering what's going to give out next -- is it just a bunch of little problems, or are we ramping up to a major disaster?
And of course there's the usual constant demands on my time, with everybody letting me know how much they want accomplished, but never considering how long it takes to get all of it done.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: annoyed
Tags: poverty
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11:54 am
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I So Do Not Need This
As if life isn't unpleasant enough already, today I get a message from a customer that a book they sent us arrived pretty much destroyed by the US postal service. It was a brand new book when it left my hands last week, but from the description of the damage, it sounds like we'll be lucky if it still meets Amazon's minimum acceptability guidelines, so we'll be lucky if we can even recover the money we paid to buy the book in the first place, assuming we can even relist it at all.
In the old days, Amazon would let customers make an A to Z Guarantee claim and would refund their money without penalizing the seller. A couple of years ago they decided that we as sellers are to accept returns on these claims and consider the losses just a cost of doing business, and if we send the customer to them for an A to Z Guarantee claim, it will count against us, both in terms of the money being taken from our seller account and in terms of a ding on our record -- too many of those and a seller can get kicked off the Marketplace program. But refunds also count against your performance rating, so it seems to be a lose-lose situation.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: annoyed
Tags: business
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02:28 pm
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Has Amazon Gone Completely Nuts?
I'm sure everybody's familiar with the Amazonfail fiasco of last week, when Amazon.com suddenly delisted a whole bunch of books with GLBT content, even dry histories and medical texts, under the rubric that they were trying to make sure that offensive adult material wasn't popping up in searches for innocuous subjects. Apparently it was the result of some very badly badly thought-out decisions in their IT department rather than any active malice, but it sure does raise questions about their current level of competence.
And now it seems that they've made a real mess of the Marketplace program, which allows third-party sellers to offer their books and other wares via Amazon search pages. In particular, they've changed the rules for uploading files of listings such that enormously large numbers of them get rejected for incredibly picky issues that were never a problem before, resulting in the need to invest enormous amounts of time to find the reasons for the problem and correct them. To the point that the work and hassle starts to outweigh the income you can hope to realize for selling the books involved.
This is really bad for me because the bookselling is one of the few things that I've been able to actually have real success at. Sure, the income plateaued out at a rather skinny trickle, but at least it didn't fall flat on its face like so many other things I've tried. And the trickle has held reasonably steady even with the troubles that have befallen the economy, which is better than I can say for my ready-reference article-writing business (the only other thing that I've had any real success with -- and it's gone from a small but decent income to bits and pieces now and then).
At least the books that are currently listed on Amazon are not affected, but as they're sold, our sales will steadily diminish unless we can replenish our listings with new acquisitions. So we have to decide whether continuing to list on Amazon is worth the hassle of dealing with their crazy new system. Because quite honestly I don't know if any other bookselling venue is going to be any better. I know from experience that eBay is really only good for unique or unusual items that will sell quickly, not the business model we've been using with the Amazon Marketplace of listing several thousand books and having them up until they finally find that one person out there who's looking for them. And I sure as heck know that trying to set up our own bookselling site wouldn't be worth the enormous amounts of time we'd have to invest in getting it up and running -- nobody but our tiny circleof friends would know or care that we're there.
The other alternative is to give up on the bookselling altogether, liquidate our stock except for a small amount for selling at what few in-person events we still attend, and start looking for something else that might just give us some small bit of success. But I'm pretty much at a loss as to what else to try, and it's really hard to have people give me all kinds of suggestions for stuff that I've already tried and failed miserably at, because they tend to hear "I've tried that already and it fell flat on its face" as rejecting their advice, but it's annoying to have to waste time going through the motions of trying it yet again just so they can see it fall flat on its face.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: "Taking Care of Business" by BTO
Tags: amazon.com, bookselling, business
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09:27 pm
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Job Seeker Beware
I've just posted an essay on my economic survival blog about fake work-at-home opportunities. Unfortunately, as the economic slump worsens and more people lose their jobs, these kinds of scams will thrive all the more on people's desperation to bring in some money. I've started to see far too many suspicious ads on Facebook, promising big bucks for what's supposed to be simple jobs you can do at home.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: "Sexy Sadie" by the Beatles
Tags: business
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09:26 pm
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Snap ping
I just saw on Yahoo! news there's been a second shooting rampage in just a matter of days. The first one happened in a church in Maryville, a small town in Illinois just east of St. Louis -- we once stayed in a motel there when we were attending Archon. The latest one involved a shooter who moved between several Arkansas towns.
When people are at the end of their rope, some will lash out in anger and frustration, trying to punish the perceived sources of their problems. Others will turn it inward, blaming themselves for their problems, until it becomes too much to bear and they simply fall apart. I once watched a co-worker go into a nervous breakdown on the job. She literally couldn't take the stress of multiple conflicting demands for action any more, and there she stood shaking and sobbing until the managers hustled her to the back area where there was no chance of customers seeing. I felt sympathetic for her, because there were many times that the only thing that kept me from doing likewise was the fear that my parents would decide that I needed to be "helped" by having my stories destroyed to "bring her back down to earth."
I know the horror of running out of cope capacity first hand. I still remember sitting and staring at the computer for hour upon hour, trying to force my unwilling brain to concentrate on the student essays in front of me enough to grind out the final grades. I tried to hang on to the end of my teaching assignment with U of Phoenix, but as the weeks went by, dragging my mind through the process of grading each assignment grew steadily harder. And then it finally ran out and no amount of willpower would compel my brain to make sense of the words in front of my eyes.
I only wonder how many people will reach the end of their rope and come apart as things get worse. And even when they don't lash out, when they quietly come apart in the privacy of their homes or the back room of a workplace, there is still pain for others, just a different sort.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: "They're Coming to Take Me Away"
Tags: crime, disaster
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09:02 pm
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New Book Reviews Up!
I just posted a whole bunch of new book reviews at The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf.
If you see something that strikes a chord with you, please blog about it and include a link to that review. The more people who know about my review site, the better.
Thanks!
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  accomplished
Tags: reading, writing
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08:20 pm
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Nwe Book Reviews Up
I just put up a set of new book reviews at my book review site.
I also put up a blog entry about the new direction John Ringo seems to be taking his Legacy of the Aldenata series.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: busy
Tags: reading
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08:55 pm
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Unbelievably Bad
I'd acquired some bundles of Private Label Rights articles through various online giveaways, and once I got approved for Google's AdSense program, I thought I could just quick give them a light rewrite (since Google penalizes duplicate content and rewards originality) and put up mini-sites to start earning money. Until I got them unzipped and saw just how badly they'd been written.
Oh, the facts are straight. But the prose is mind-numbingly bad. As in, Good grief, did they hire a fourth-grader to write these things? As in, were some of these articles written in a foreign language and then translated by Babelfish?
As in, there is no way on this green Earth that my name is going on any of these articles until they are thoroughly rewritten, and put into idiomatic English of a reasonably appropriate register.
So I think that it's going to be a little longer than I'd planned before I have those AdSense sites up and can start driving traffic to them.
But at least once they're done, they should be good, creditable sites that I will be proud to have my name on, and hopefully they will rank well and get a decent amount of traffic.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: nauseated
Tags: business, internet, writing
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07:24 pm
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An Open Letter to Buyers of Used Books on the Amazon Marketplace
Please take a moment to carefully read the description of a book, particularly when it is a detailed one. We don't write them for our health, and it is really annoying to have someone buy a book, then write an intensely angry letter at us complaining about an issue that is clearly stated -- and especially to have the person deny that the issue in question was described.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: frustrated
Tags: bookselling, business
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06:54 pm
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Things that Go Bump in the Night
I'd just written some thoughts on the problem of reconciling certain aspects of vampire lore with our knowledge of modern physics, and as I did, I realized that a lot of the traditional stock of "scary things" pose a similar challenge to the writer who would set them in the present day. How can a vampire be visible to direct vision but cast no reflection? Why should silver be particularly dangerous to a werewolf, as opposed to other, more durable or more reactive metals?
Current Location: home
Current Music: "Year of the Knife" by Tears for Fears
Tags: reading, writing
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04:23 pm
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Repeat After Me
Dune is not Star Wars
Dune is not Star Wars
Dune is not Star Wars
Ye ghods and little fishies, but I wish that Kevin J. Anderson would just go back to writing Star Wars tie-ins, instead of continuing to co-write indigestible tripe passing itself off as authentic Dune. At least he's reasonably good at the former.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: orchestral theme from Star Wars
Tags: reading
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02:31 pm
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Annoyance
I was going to sit down and write up a review of a collection of short stories that I thought I remembered reading some time ago. However, when I actually opened up the book, I realized I had absolutely no recollection of any of the stories. Either I was wrong about having read them, or they made so little impression upon me that the time which has since passed has completely erased my memories of plot, characters, and other aspects of a work of fiction upon which a reviewer usually comments.
So it looks like I'm going to need to completely re-read that entire collection in order to get my review of it read. At least this weekend I'm going to have plenty of reading time, since I'm visiting extended family who don't have Internet, and am able to get on the Web only when we're at the library.
Current Location: Allen County Public Library
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: "Biscuit Head" by the Spin Doctors
Tags: memory, reading
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