Look at the headbumps, the rubbing, the goofery. These guys enjoy each other.
AdministriviaComputer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMiddle KingdomsOnline lifeYoung Wizards
Just a few things in passing
Work day, busy busy. But first:
At the Ebooks Direct store we now have Microsoft Reader versions (the .lit format) of The Door into Fire, The Door into Shadow, The Door into Sunset, and the Tale of the Five Omnibus. (I was holding off on the conversion to .lit because I didn’t have the reader and wasn’t sure how they’d convert. Seems they look OK, so here they are.) Just use the pulldown menu on each page and the .lit version will reveal itself. …We’ll start rolling out .lit versions of the Young Wizards international editions and the various other books shortly. Also: in couple of weeks we’ll be putting up the revised edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, with a cover that more accurately supports its identity as an urban-fantasy police procedural (yes, with a love interest, but what do you call Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle, then? Chopped liver?).
BTW, Microsoft: what is this dumb stunt of emailing me a video about “how the Declaration of Independence would have looked if the Founding Fathers had had Word”? They had something way better than Word, people. They had the words. Here are a few of them for you: Consanguinity. Usurpations. Conjured. Despotism. Inestimable. Perfidy. And possibly the best one in that document: Unalienable. …Seriously, someone over there must have sent that email out before their blood caffeine level got high enough for them to realize how witless it would look in retrospect.
And by the way: WIL WHEATON IS NOT A DICK. Pass it on. (frowning at some people’s behavior) Seriously: there’s no excuse for it. And it doesn’t have to be like that. I remember how when George Takei came out for a Trek/media convention in Dublin some years back, he was briefly astounded at not being dogpiled at breakfast even though he was surrounded by a breakfast room full of eager fans. It was explained to him that nobody was going to bother him as long as he was obviously eating and reading his newspaper. When he stopped one or both of those behaviors, then people would approach him. And that’s just how it happened, though he wasn’t mobbed then, either: folks came up and visited him by ones and twos and threes at decent intervals. …A pity this kind of behavior can’t spread westward. In any case, Wil did exactly right. And good on Felicia for having been proactive.
Meanwhile: the main Young Wizards website has had a makeover. There may be a few pages that haven’t been optimized for the new layout yet (mostly in terms of images having their background colors changed, etc.) but Lee the Web Lady will hunt them down and sort them out over the next couple of days. Final issue: how to get the slider to fade rather than slide, if possible. (Probably some fiddly little jQuery thing. To be handled sooner or later…)
And finally: the Door into Starlight issue — bumping this a bit so that I can be sure everybody interested has had a chance to respond. If you’ve seen it already, apologies: please ignore it. (And thanks again to all those who have responded.) If you haven’t, leave a note in the comments, or Tweet with a link to the original message, or share it on G+ or Facebook. Thanks!
…Yeah, you heard that right. This is apparently a pre-alpha, meaning that everything about it may have already changed.
Nevertheless, I’m going to go off somewhere quietly now and clutch my head. DUELING PONIES. (There are even banjos in the background music.) (Disclosure: I keep a casual eye on Pony business, as I’ve worked with them in the past.)
ETA, May 31, 1315 UTC: Due to our Shopify facility inadvertently being set for the wrong time zone, the 20% discount offer described below terminated too early. So we’ve reset it and extended the offer to last until 0001 Pacific time on June 1. Sorry for the mix-up!
***
Okay, so it’s a “soft opening.”
Those of you who’ve been following the do-it-yourself-ebook-publishing saga here will know that for the past six months or so, Lee the Tech Lady and I have been in a more or less constant battle of wits with the Zen Cart software we installed at the turn of the year. After a while it became obvious to both of us (and also, tangentially, to Peter, who had to watch me wandering around tearing my hair and muttering) that Zen Cart was winning. This is not good. Software should not get in the way of what you’re trying to do. And software should definitely not make you feel stupid.
But things have taken a better turn. We found out about Shopify, and it took me very little time to realize that this was what we needed. It’s taken a week or so to set up the new store, but it’s been a relatively pain-free week — in the same way that putting a BandAid on a scratch compares favorably to brain surgery (which dealing with Zen Cart often resembled).
So here’s the new store’s address:
It’s not yet in its final state — we have some design issues we’re still dealing with — but it looks OK, and all the products are in place. And we have a few opening-day specials for those of you who enjoy such things.
First of all, for those of you who’d like to help us test out our shopping cart to make sure that it works with real money (not that I have any serious doubts in this case, but you never know…), we’ve made available as a standalone purchase the very very short story “The Rizzoli Bag”, which has been used to test our cart before. This will cost you USD $0.05, aka Five Cents or even a Nickel (call it 3p Sterling). And also available as a standalone again (as it was during St. Patrick’s Day week) is the much longer short story “Herself,” which we’re offering for USD $0.99 or ninety-nine cents.
Finally, should anything else in the store take your fancy — such as the Young Wizards International editions (for readers outside the US and Canada only) or the ebook versions of the Door Into… series, for this weekend only we’re offering you a 20% discount for purchases of USD$10.00 or more. This offer runs out on May 31st, but you can use it two times between now and then. Just quote the coupon code somethingweekend at checkout.
Young Wizards fans may also want to visit the page with details about the new revised Millennium Editions of books 1-4 — the first cover rough/template is up. (No art yet: that’ll be along in June.)
ETA: Due to a couple of incorrect settings at the store, the first few orders had to be hand-approved after payment was made. Since then we’ve changed the settings so that authorization, payment and order fulfillment (meaning the link to your file being emailed to you) should all happen automatically. Sorry about the hiccup.
As regards the old store: we won’t be closing it just yet, but we’ll be freezing it so that no new orders can be placed there; and we’ve removed its link from the DianeDuane.com site and the YoungWizards.com site. As soon as all present order issues with the Zen Cart store are complete, we’ll send out one final email to the old store’s users with the new shop’s address so that they can get re-download links from the new Shopify facility if they need them.)
Anyway, thanks, everybody! And those of you who’ve seen this posting via Twitter, please feel free to retweet it if you have a mind.
Our good friend Torsten Dewi has just launched a redesign / restyle on his popular German blog, Wortvogel.de, where he posts trenchant and intelligent film reviews, slices of local life, and episodes from his daily business as TV, film and media fan par excellence.
Torsten is a busy guy. He was instrumental in keeping me and Peter sane on The Ring (aka Der Ring des Nibelungs aka Sword of Xanten aka Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King); he was instrumental in introducing Germany to the concept of the telenovela: he has done a heap of TV-movie work and magazine work, and he’s much in demand at conventions in Germany as one of those people who — though they’re friendly in the bar and chatty on the dais — knows where the bodies are buried.
And he is a sterling person all around, so all of you who read German should stop over and have a look at Wortvogel.de, now that its already huge pile of content has been freshened up by the classy new look. So do run over and have a look.
The long-suffering Lee the Tech Lady and I have been working with Zen Cart at the DianeDuane.com online shop for almost six months now, and the reviews are, well, kind of mixed. While Zen Cart works well enough, the learning curve has been annoyingly steep, and the thing has more controls than the Space Shuttle (with as many ways for things to go extremely wrong if you mis-set something). So I’ve been looking for another solution for a while, but none of the host of stores and carts out there at the moment quite clicked for me.
Then the other day I stumbled across a blog posting by an old acquaintance, Joey deVilla, otherwise known all over the Net as the Accordion Guy. The posting was about Joey being photographed for his new “electronic business card” at Shopify. And immediately I became intrigued, because if there’s one thing I know about Joey it’s that he’s a really smart guy, and if he’s working for Shopify, it must really have something going for it.
So today we’ll be starting the process of setting up a store at Shopify, using their free 30-day trial offer, and we’ll see how things go. I’ll amend this post to include the address when we’ve got something in there. (Young Wizards fans: most likely one of the very first items to appear will be the new International ebook edition of A Wizard Abroad, which is now ready to go on sale.)
More on this very shortly.
I was checking on something over at EuropeanCuisines.com and found (via Woopra) that someone from Belgium was looking at a recipe. Hardly an unusual occurrence by itself, as EC.com is normally moderately busy and has visitors from all over the world. (I remember the time I found someone from Ulan Bator looking at Peter’s Mum’s soda bread recipe. I wound up having to show her Outer Mongolia on a map, as neither of us was absolutely sure of its exact location that early in the morning.)
Now, Woopra also shows you (if it has enough info) where in the world each visitor is surfing in from. In this case, it showed me the words “Erps-kwerps”.
What??
Yet here it is: Erps-kwerps.
What a world.
It’s always fun when someone exactly gets what you were trying to do. 🙂
“”Omnitopia Dawn, dot Hack, and also, surprisingly, Fantasy in Death by J.D. Robb, all have an element in common, that of using video gaming worlds to affect the so-called “real” world. But J.D. Robb uses the next step in virtual reality as a murder weapon. In dot Hack, the theme is mind control. But Omnitopia Dawn is much more deeply layered. The company behind the game is intended as a jab at high tech companies with their own internal geek culture, like Apple, Google, and even Microsoft back in the day.
“But in Omnitopia Dawn, the real world is going to be affected in real ways, not virtual ones. Real competitors of the corporation behind Omnitopia plan to use the launch of the next upgrade to launch a very real attack on Omnitopia’s servers using very real viruses, denial of service attacks and other tools that read like natural progressions from today’s headlines. And the intent behind these attacks is to steal very real money from the company, and if possible to drive Omnitopia out of business, so that its competitors win.”
…The real meat, for me, though, was closer to the end of the review. Thanks, Marlene! You hit one of the underlying issues of the book right on.
…Well, I think it’s pretty, anyway. And I like the way it rolls up and makes a stand for the iPad. Whenever the day rolls ’round that I have cash to spare for an iPad, I’d definitely be getting this for it. (Hmm… they could even engrave the Apple without a Bite on it…)
Gee, I thought everybody had seen this by now. … Of this indispensable piece of kit for the more tech-oriented wizard, the Errantry Concordance says:
“An instance or implementation of the Wizard’s Manual installed in a suitably adapted iPod. Such devices, when running in Manual mode, routinely display the Apple Without a Bite. WizPods may be assumed to be part of the same digital wizardry initiative that Tom Swale alludes to in HW.
“In everyday use WizPods mimic the look-and-feel of the unmodified devices and support all their usual functions. However, since each WizPod also contains an inbuilt “stand-alone” temporospatial claudication, the devices are able to unfold to many times their apparent external size to display data, and are especially useful for working with spell diagrams which are better rendered in 3D format. Data storage is also managed through the claudication via intuitive on-demand streaming swap-in / swap-out to a closed-continuum “hotvoid” space, theoretically implying near-infinite storage for a WizPod’s total contents. Onboard storage is handled by an Alterf Technology-sourced SentientManagement quark-trap lattice solid rated at 120 yottabytes (though theoretically capable of much more if you ask it nicely).
“Wizardly implementations of the iPod began appearing simultaneously with the debut of the so-called 4G models. There is speculation as to why rollout was delayed this long, but the consensus seems to be that the Powers that Be were waiting for the hardware to become sufficiently widespread that it no longer provoked much comment. Since then a regular progression of new WizPods have appeared in tandem with their less wizardly cousins, but none with quite the ballyhoo of the new 6G WizPod, or WizPod Touch, which appears above / to the left. This model introduced the new touch interface as well as numerous new software features…”
More data at the full Concordance entry, naturally.
Per a notification from Lee the Tech Lady:
“Just a quick note to let everyone know: our ISP is going to be upgrading the software underlying all the YW.com sites tonight, some time between 11 PM EDT Thursday evening and 4 AM EDT Friday morning. (For the techies among you: the servers have been running MySQL 5.0.x, and are being upgraded to v.5.1 overnight).
“The various servers supporting our sites will be shut down for at least ten minutes at some point during this period: then the databases will remain inaccessible for a while as they’re updated to MySQL 5.1. The total outages should not be more than 40 minutes but ideally should be less. We have backups of all the databases just in case anything gets squirrely, but are hoping they won’t be needed.”
This outage will affect YoungWizards.com, the Young Wizards Discussion Forums,, and the Errantry Concordance encyclopedia / wiki site.