Category: Burningbird

Categories
Just Shelley

Decisions Decisions

There is nothing more implacable than a decision waiting to be made.

It can shake you out of sleep, pulling the covers off, forcing you out of bed and to your feet. It can hover around you during your waking hours, beating at you with tiny, subliminal fists of frustration.

As time passes the decision grows and swells, bulges from barely sensed speck to overshadowing monster. Your attempts to fend it off become weaker as it smothers you in it’s soft folds, pushes you against the wall, and rolls over you as you try to run.

Poets write of Decision. In The Road Not Taken Frost wrote:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler

The poem ends with “…and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

In this poem Frost sees Decision as noble — Man choosing to follow his own path rather than following the crowd. Compare this to Dorothy Parker’s caustic and brutally direct ‘Resume’:

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

No nobility here — life as a lesser of evils.

Not all decisions are the same. Whether to choose strawberry ice cream or chocolate is but a moment’s thought; after all, one can choose chocolate tomorrow when choosing strawberry today. There are an infinite number of these decisions made in a life.

Some decisions, though, can only be made after sleepless nights, and days spent in thought—little scales in your mind working overtime. To have a child or not. To marry or not. To make this move, buy this house, take this job, follow this path. Or not.

Regardless of the magnitude or its impact, once the the decision is made, you’re free of the weight, the monster has rolled on. This leaves plenty of room for Decision’s younger brother, Regret.

Categories
Burningbird

New page New Start

My web sites are undergoing a redesign, including this new page, which will eventually feature a lot more than what you see at the moment.

Until everything is up and running, you can access current material at the following focused sub-sites:

If you’re currently subscribed to any of my feeds, you don’t need to do a thing. I am redirecting the feed locations, which should cause your feed readers to update to the new location.

Categories
Burningbird

Under construction

I couldn’t resist the title. Just be glad I refrained from using one of the old animated “Under Construction” GIFs.

Since I’m no longer on the hook for anything related to HTML5 and RDFa, I can return to my books. Books, plural, as I hope to be starting a new book within the “traditional” publishing track, soon.

I doubt I’ll have much to say over the next few months. Just a heads up that the site may look odd or not work at times, as I try out some new stuff. No worries, it hasn’t been taken over by aliens.

Categories
Writing

Whiteness

I don’t know if I’m the only one seeing a white page on the site, but since the upgrade to 6.11 in Drupal, I’ve had problems accessing all my sites. The problem could also be my hosting, and I’m currently exploring the possibility of moving. However, the problem has become much, much worse with the 6.11 upgrade. If you’ve had problems accessing the site, let me know.

I now have seven Drupal installations, though two are “stealth”. One I’m using to write my new book. I stripped away all styling and then designed a Drupal theme that supports ePub. I’ll be adding a second theme that supports Mobi/Amazon, and possibly a third that supports a PDF book. One of the advantages of being comfortable with XHTML is that you can take your mad XHTML markup skillz to the eBook world with only a little effort. Once I’ve published the book, and know the themes are working 100% I’ll upload them to the Drupal theme site, for people who want to use Drupal to write eBooks.

I will say that self-publishing is a different world now. There are so many resources. One wall I hit, though, was getting an ISBN. I could swear these were free at one time, but now, ISBNs in the US have been “contracted out” from the government to a privately owned monopoly.

You don’t need an ISBN for an eBook, though some sellers prefer ones. But if you’re going hard copy as well as eBook, which I am, you’ll have to have one. You can also “borrow” an ISBN from some distribution companies, but they don’t recommend this approach, because you’re then stuck with them as publisher. You can also buy a single ISBN, but it’s a lot cheaper just to buy a block of ten, and then if you need a new ISBN for another edition, or a new book, you have it.

It’s just that having to buy an ISBN wasn’t a cost I was expecting. Again, these are free throughout the world. Only in America do we contract what should be universally accessible to monopolies. How else to explain our cable systems?

Regardless of the unexpected expenses, there’s something very rich, and satisfying, about having some control in all aspects of my book. O’Reilly is a good publisher, and the company has been generous with me, but I’ve always felt out of the loop with my books. For instance, I didn’t know my books were going to be published to the Kindle until after the fact. I didn’t know they were all being released as DRM free ebooks on the Kindle until after the fact. I’m happy about the books being offered DRM free, but I sure would have appreciated a quick note before hand.

(Not to mention having some say in the cover, formatting, and subtitles…)

No, the success or failure of a self-published book is really dependent on the author. This is both scary, and wonderful.

Categories
Copyright Writing

My DRM-free self

O’Reilly now has DRM free versions of some of its book available for the Kindle. Among the books are my own Painting the Web, Learning JavaScript, second edition, Practical RDF, and Adding Ajax.

O’Reilly has been offering DRM free versions of the books at the O’Reilly site, but it’s only been lately that authors have been able to provide DRM free books at Amazon. Why is this important? Because all you have to do is change the book’s extension to .mobi to read the book on your Sony or other MobiPocket capable eBook reader. In other words: Some Amazon store books can be read on other eBook readers other than the Kindle, iPhone, and iTouch.

Teleread and MobileRead have started a campaign to make these DRM free books more easy to find. If a book is DRM free, just tag it “drmfree” at the Amazon site. It tickled me to be the first to tag my own books.

My books being offered DRM free doesn’t change how I feel about copyright. I still believe in the importance of copyrights. My books are still copyrighted, at least until the publishers and I decide the time is ripe to release them into the public domain. I am dependent on the royalties I make from my books, and I lose money through piracy of my books. But I have never believed in DRM, which only hurts the legitimate owners.

I’m currently working on my first self-publishing book, which I’ll be releasing as a Kindle, as well as in other formats. Regardless of how I distribute the book, not one version of the book will have DRM.