Category: Burningbird

Categories
Burningbird

All green

I would be adding more photos to Tin Foil Project, but the weather has been abysmal. Either extremely hot and humid, or thunderstorms, and now we’re looking at flash floods combined with thunderstorms and a tropical storm across the entire eastern portion of the country. Rather furious weekend, weather wise.

I made a version of the Tin Foil Project stylesheet for this weblog, as part of the switcher. I like the green background, and the faint image to the side. However, I have modified the overall look from Tin Foil Project, adding in a bit more color and other odds and ends. And I’ve disconnected the items much more than any of the other styles.

I know I do owe Danny Ayers an apology for doing a ‘green’ weblog when I said I wouldn’t. But at least it wasn’t the green that Danny dislikes. That one is very close to one of the colors published as part of the color forecasting done yearly. It’s called soho green, described as … A fusion of bronze and gold creates this 21st century neutral, elemental and enduring.

My color of green was from using a wonderful little shareware tool Color Cop to sample the colors in this photo. The colors from all my sites are found using this digital color eyedropper.

I used to worry about ‘web safe’ colors until a wise man told me that most monitors can handle millions of colors, and why limit myself to a couple of hundred? Now I test my colors on my Dell laptop, my TiBook, and sometimes the computer at the library. If it looks okay, then I don’t worry about other monitors. I figure if a color comes out glaringly wrong in someone else’s monitor, they’ll just assume I have taste as abysmal as the weather. Most importantly, it doesn’t stop their ability to read the text.

Categories
Just Shelley

Relative terms

It’s dangerous to use relative terms such as hot, cold, sweet, salty, better, or worse. Doing so leaves the door open to miscommunications.

For instance, I found today that my interpretation of the word ’short’ doesn’t agree with my hair stylist’s interpretation of the word ’short’. My idea was shoulder length, layered (since my hair is thick and wavy); her’s was Anne Heche.

Categories
Burningbird

Complementary or clashing

Yesterday I took several photos during an afternoon’s hot, humid shooting at the Botanical Gardens. The dragonflies were thick as ticks, and by the time I was done, my face was red, my shirt soaking wet.

When I uploaded the photos, into a post called Shape and Color, I tested the page in Preview using Fire & Ice stylesheet. The photos looked awful with the coloring and the photos on the side. I tried them with Route 66, and Burningbird of Happiness, but none of the stylesheets looked good. Even Random Shot, though relatively neutral in coloring, was too ‘busy’, with the photos on the side and in the post.

When I tried Lemon Shake-Ups, ahhh! Quick, close it! My eyes are bleeding!

None of my stylesheets is really set up for photos, especially when my photos can range from pink pastel to vivid orange and lime green. In addition, photos in the posts wreck havoc with that micreant browser, Internet Explorer.

I had planned on creating the Tin Foil Project for photo projects, and as my test weblog for upgrading from WordPress 1.2 to 1.3. However, in order to display some of the later summer floral shoots, I’ve decided to move up the time line. Check out the site.

I experimented with colors for the background, including the traditional black, white, and gray used for many photo albums. However, I felt that the black washed out the colors, and white was too bright–both created too much contrast at times. I also thought the grays reduced the brightness of the colors, or at least this is what I perceived from my inexpert viewpoint.

(ed. Or maybe what it all reduces to, is I wanted to try something new.)

I then remembered something my a karate teacher I had years ago in Arizona told me. He was a master carpenter, actually getting a MFA based on his furniture making. His thesis work was this incredible cabinet created for his dojo that featured inlay woods and hand smithed silver work – an amazing piece of craftsmanship.

Anyway, I noticed that one of the pieces he made for his home had a painted background behind the shelves rather than being finished wood. It was a pale gray/green color, relatively neutral in tone. I asked him about this at the time and he said that many cabinet makers will use a green backdrop because it complements most colors, without dimming them, contrasting too heavily, or causing the colors to seem to shift.

Considering that nature herself uses green as a backdrop for many of her brighter works, what he said made a lot of sense. So I spent today experimenting around with green colors, until reached what you see. Hopefully the photos are enhanced by the color, and the background images, which are transparent black & white merged into backgrounds the same color as the web page.

One issue I’m still dealing with is a slight margin of color around the images creating a faint line in the page. However, I think I can manage to eliminate it with PhotoShop.

The only time I’ll use photos at Burningbird, now, will be smaller ones complementary to a story. Any writing featuring larger numbers of photos, or photo posts only will be posted at Tin Foil. This means much of my photographical and sensory work will shift to that weblog.

(Eventually I’ll have functions that will list recent writing across all the weblogs (Practical RDF, Tin Foil Project, and Burningbird) ; comments, too, if I can manage it.)

If you have a moment, let me know what you think.

Categories
Books Writing

Free of the toothless sharks

Now that the book deal I had spent four month wrangling over has fallen through, I pulled the about page until I can figure out what it will say.

(Oh, did you miss that particular rant? You’ve got to move quick in the Burningbird world, or you’ll miss the good stuff. You can, however, still catch the link in Bloglines.)

After spending over a year with two publishers that have beat me about the psyche, eating away at my inspiration and enthusiasm like old, toothless sharks desperate for human juices, I don’t know if I want to consider myself a ‘technology writer’. Once I was a technology writer. Now, all I know is that I’m not a Wal-Mart worker.

Unlike the sharks, I’m not starving to death, thanks to contract PHP/MySQL and other work (helped in part by recommendations of a friend made through this weblog). I guess that makes me a member of an endangered species, a Woman in Technology; but it doesn’t make me a Technology Writer.

I could go elsewhere, look for another other publisher. I could also pull my fingernails out one by one, or have a dentist drill my teeth without Novocain.

I’ve talked about quitting the comp book biz before, but in the back of my mind, it was always there. Writing computer books isn’t just part of my income, it’s part of my identity. I feel like I’ve lost part of my identity, but I don’t know if this is a bad thing.

Without worrying about a computer book, there’s more time for walks. More time for pics. More time for my balcony garden, or bookbinding, or other interests. More time to write just for the fun of it. And no worries about offending–or trying to attract–any publisher or technology group, so I am free to write whatever I want.

No more sucking up to the toothless sharks.

Categories
Books Writing

Book publishers suck

I’ve been in negotiations for over four months with a publisher on a book. After the last book deal fell through with negative reprecussions for me, I’ve been more wary when it comes to contracts.

One issue with the new publisher has been about a clause in the contract that the publisher could bill me for royalities paid out if the books are returned.

With my previous books, the publisher holds a percentage of royalities aside for coverage of book returns; or hold royalities for 3-9 months for the same reason. They also keep most of the profits from the book. In exchange, the author isn’t suddenly presented with a bill when they’re expecting a royalty check.

I’ve earned out my royalities and advances on all the books I’ve authored or co-authored but Developing ASP Components, second edition (because Microsoft came out with a new architecture just as we went to print), and the recent Practical RDF (I have hopes I’ll earn out the advance on this one, but slowly). Both of these books have been with O’Reilly Publishing (who has an uncomplicated contract without a lot of ‘gotcha’ clauses about billing the author, may I add).

However, the publisher I’ve been dealing with not only wanted to hold payouts for several months, reserve 25% of the royalities for return, but they also wanted to bill me for any returns beyond that. Paired with very low royality–eight percent–I had to decline. Disappointing, and discouraging, but these things happen.

Now it gets good.

I didn’t hear anything more for about a month or so. Then, out of the blue this last week the publisher came back and said they would strike this clause, in addition to paying half the indexing fee (having me pay all the indexing fee was something else I wasn’t happy about). It wasn’t a great deal, but I’ve spent so much time on this, I said I would agree and asked to see the new contract.

Well today, I heard that the publishing company has decided to keep the clause in after all, but that they “never invoke it, so it doesn’t mean anything”. If a clause in a contract doesn’t mean anything, why keep it in the contract? Do they think me stupid?

Needless to say, that’s the end of my relationship with this publisher.

This is two bad experiences with publishers in a row trying to get a book out, and spending over a year in the process. Frankly, the news today was like getting sucker punched.