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Hobbyhorses and General Ranting

...Wrong lever.
Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeLife

Pulling The Lever

by Diane Duane

This post is as much a marker for me as anything else; the sign of a lot of (sometimes deeply annoying) work finished, and a return to more normal operations around here. I hope.

The DianeDuane.com main site and webspace got hacked in late March, and nearly all my time between then and now (except when I managed to wrestle away some writing time as well) has been spent putting that right. The complications were manifold. The site was on an old server host that couldn’t progress past using php 5.4, which is no longer secure against the depredations of naughty people.

So everything was going to have to be moved to a server that could handle php 7.x, which is the present supported and secure version. And all the website stuff presently stored in the old hosting space had to be either converted to handling php 7.x-and-better, or thrown out and replaced with something better.

This in itself should only have taken a matter of days to sort out. But the next, deeper layer of the problem was that the version of the Drupal platform on which the old main site was built — version 7.x — was aging out. Upgrading it to v.8, with v.9 already looming over the horizon in beta, was going to be just one straw too many on this camel’s back. And replacing the site in a new server but still running on D7 would just have been tempting Fate. What was hacked before could (and very probably would) be hacked again. …And: for some time I’d been thinking about moving the DD.com site over to WordPress, as it really better suited my needs than Drupal did, these days.

So, having made that choice (which I’d been putting off for a long time because implementing it was going to be such a pain in the butt)… the serious work began. Getting onto the people at FXDomains and explaining what I needed of them for this migration. (And a shout-out to the excellent Blake, who made that part of the work so easy.) Installing a fresh copy of WordPress over there to house the Drupal-to-WP migration of the main site. (Fortunately this blog has been running on WP for a long time now: migrating that would just be a case of migrating its database and directories to a new install running under php 7.x. This too had its complications, and involved a week of testing, swearing and kicking things. But it got sorted out at last.)

Dealing with the main site was more of a challenge, as it involved finding a theme I liked (in this case “Uptime” by TommusRhodus: I commend those folks to you for terrific and patient customer service), getting it up and running, and then cutting-and-pasting hundreds of pages of text and portfolio material into it. That work is still not complete — many entries in the new website are still missing metadata that for various reasons couldn’t be forced to follow over from the old Drupal install.  But it’s now complete enough to be going on with. More can be done casually, day by day, as opportunity presents itself.

And then, after everything was finally in place: the insertion of various security plugins, to keep this mess from happening again. Then: backups. Backups of backups. Several different modes of backups, to be sure, because DAMN I am not planning to have to do this crap to my own site again any time soon. I’m already now contemplating getting our last site that’s running Drupal off of there: and with that a long chapter will close. I’ve been running our household sites on Drupal since v4.7, but we’re done now; time’s too short and life’s too busy. Arrivaderci, old friend.

And with all the backups done, and the pages loading as fast as they’re likely to for the moment (though more work can and will be done on this), it’s time, as the woman said, to Throw The Lever. That you’re seeing this means it’s finally happened. May great Thoth the Webadmin of the Ennead, the divine Patcher of Code, prosper the undertaking.

…Now where were we before I was so rudely interrupted? I’m sure I was in the middle of writing something…

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Hiccup and Toothless
Hobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMedicine, nursing, healthObscure interests

The hiccup cure

by Diane Duane

First of all: why did I use the image above? Because I don’t like any of the stock art available for the term “hiccups”, and I do love Toothless and his boss. So if you think this is going to be anything to do with How To Train Your Dragon, please be disabused of the idea. This post is about curing hiccups.

It’s a copy of information that appears elsewhere about the one true “magic” trick I know. Somebody just retweeted the Google Plus post I did about it some years back, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a copy here at my own blog. Seems like an omission. So here it is.

Disclaimer: I know that this is one of those endlessly contentious subjects, and there will be people who rise up immediately and insist “That’s not how it works at all” and will cry BUSHWAH and so forth. I’m entirely happy for them to do that, and I wish for them that Their Mileage May Vary in peace, and that their hiccup cures may always work. As for this explanation: I trust my source implicitly — he was busy very effectively and good-naturedly saving lives on a 24-hour shift when I ran into him — and, most to the point, this strategy works: reliably, repeatedly, past any possible doubt of its effectiveness when considered statistically, and to the endless amazement of many skeptical (and badly hiccuping) people across two continents.*  Nuff said.

And now for the details on How To Cure Hiccups. ADDITIONAL AND IMPORTANT ADVISORY RIGHT UP FRONT: if you are on a sugar- or sodium-controlled diet of any kind, this solution is most likely not for you. Consult your physician before attempting it.

One afternoon [in 2011]  while working, I found myself listening to a local TV station’s “science lady” attempting to explain the cause of hiccups… and getting it all wrong. As usual, this event makes me want to share what I was long ago taught about the subject by a medical resident in the emergency room at New York Hospital (now Cornell/NYH Medical Center). He took five minutes to explain the physiological mechanisms behind hiccups, and then taught me a simple, foolproof three-step method for stopping them dead.

So here’s The Hiccup Cure. (And if you share this around, please do so in some way that will allow as many people as possible to see it, so that more folks can be spared the Curse of Hiccup Embarrassment. Thank You For Your Continued Support.) 🙂

The explanation: Hiccups are the result of an chemical imbalance in your blood — a temporary derangement of the normal acid/alkaline balance of your blood electrolytes. There are all kinds of reasons why this can happen all of a sudden, but the most common ones are talking too much while eating (my favorite), and eating or drinking too fast, and some kinds of emotional stress, and periods of sudden exercise (running for a bus, etc). Different causes tend to induce different kinds of imbalance, but the commonest ones are these:

(a) Respiratory acidosis — too much CO2 in the blood: and
(b) Respiratory alkalosis — too little CO2 in the blood.

When you get one or the other of these, the body’s tendency is to try to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs’ contents in and out a lot faster, so that if there isn’t enough CO2, some more can get into the bloodstream, and if there’s too much, some can get out.

The body doesn’t want to bother your conscious mind with this, so it handles the problem in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your diaphragm spasm repeatedly, compressing the lungs and trying to shove a significant percentage of their tidal volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.

Now, understanding this, you’d think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly, and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem right. Well, probably it will. But it takes forever, and you meanwhile are sitting there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can themselves keep making the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to take more drastic measures.

It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups themselves is to quickly increase the electrolyte imbalance significantly. The simple three-step intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn’t work, the less common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you’re most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and hiccuping.

Step 1: Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry, in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden extreme change in the blood chemistry, “calls off” the hiccups as ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The “spoonful of sugar” approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of hiccuppers.

If this doesn’t work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.

Step 2: Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It’s gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang, right away.

If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis, but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.

Step 3: Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it. (Or alternately, give them a small spoonful of vinegar if no lemon is available. But lemon works better.) Their hiccups will then vanish.

WARNING: It is vitally important to do these things in order and not try to cut back on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and you’ll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying, especially if you’re on a low-sodium diet or just don’t feel like retaining liters and liters of water the next day.

But if you follow these instructions faithfully, the hiccups will vanish. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with this routine.

A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane’s Law of Necessitative Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you’ll fall very low in their estimation if you don’t, they will always be alkalotic, and you will always have to run through all three stages, feeling dumber and more desperate every moment as you go along and nothing seems to be working. (This law first became plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my producer for the “Science Challenge” educational series I wrote at the BBC: if I hadn’t proven I was good at the science part by curing him, well, you can imagine.)

And a note in passing: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures are, in one way or another, attempting to exploit this electrolyte-shift mechanism (though most of them are fairly ineffective at it). Scaring the person (causes acidosis: see The Andromeda Strain), drinking water upside down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto), whatever: they are all merely thin pale versions of the One True Cure.

So there you have it. May it do you (and those around you) good.  🙂

*Still working on that third one.

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Hobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifePolitics

Mindfulness

by Diane Duane

It’s such an overused term, these last few years. It was originally a technique for achieving a fuller view of the world-as-it-is and a deeper sense of one’s place in that always-fugitive here and now.  But more recently it’s been co-opted as a technique for improving work output in corporate settings — a use that’s probably about as far from its original purpose as can be imagined.

The world shifts. You can try to avoid seeing how it’s shifted, how it keeps on shifting — but (in my experience, anyway) that’s a mistake. Turn your head away for too long and when you feel like turning it back again, some new and bigger shift has come that’s twice as hard to deal with as it would have been if you’d kept watching.

I don’t think anyone with interests based in the United States can have failed to notice, in the last week or so, how fast the status quo is shifting under all our feet. To say the trends are alarming is (for me) putting it pretty mildly.

The place where the effects of the shift are unfolding most rapidly is on Twitter. Now, normally Twitter is a place where I spend time in a relatively lighthearted mode, and so when I tweet and retweet there tends to be a lot of art and graphics and photos I like, and news about ongoing writing projects and sales at Ebooks Direct*, as well as Irish news and weird-or-strange news, and travel and cooking and other similar subjects that affect me personally at the European end of things.

Now, since the middle of last year, with the Brexit situation ongoing — and its fallout onto and into Ireland, like the results of a very very slowly growing mushroom cloud — and then the US election, the seriousness-level of my Twitter feed has been increasing. It’s been unavoidable, really, but I’ve tried to maintain a general balance.

The events of the last week have shifted my attention pretty hard, though, and this too is unavoidable. Even at a great distance, I take my US citizenship seriously. When I see the country I grew up in being twisted into unconscionable new shapes, my Twitter feed’s going to reflect my opinions about that and those of others I think need listening to.

I doubt that people who follow me because of an interest in my written work will jump ship just because I’m being mindful of something besides writing and mass media and entertainment. And what I am very mindful of right now is those people who went through the already-significant vetting it takes to get a green card in the post-2001 world, people who went abroad on holiday or to see relatives or for other reasons more urgent, and have suddenly discovered they can’t get home to their families again. I’m mindful of legally-issued court orders that US officials are refusing to obey. I’m mindful of spite and bigotry and stupidity running loose in places where they should never have been permitted access. I’m mindful of Angela Merkel having to explain the Geneva refugee convention to the present inhabitant of the Oval Office. I’m mindful of people who’ve escaped death in other countries and were hoping for peace and a chance to start over in the US, now most likely being shipped back — very possibly to their deaths — without due process. I’m mindful of all kinds of things, norms of law and behavior that we’ve taken for granted for a long time, apparently starting to unravel — thus demonstrating how institutions that seem robust may prove terrifyingly susceptible to accidental or purposeful sabotage by the reckless or thoughtless or cruel.

I have to be mindful of these things when I notice them, at the cost of betraying the priorities that make me write what I do, and the way I do. So if you’re someone who hangs around my Twitter feed mostly for entertainment and you find this level of mindfulness troubling, then I invite you to mute me for a while and come back later to see if the environment suits you better.

I make no guarantees about this, mind you. What passed for normalcy just a month ago now suddenly seems lost in a distant golden past — and if I bear weight on the concept of what might happen tomorrow, I can already hear thin ice cracking underfoot.  So I’ll react to new events as I must. But I can promise that I’ll keep on working, and keep letting folks know how it’s going when there’s news on something new. Right now it seems important — when anyone comes looking —  for me to be found at my post, doing what I’ve been doing for the last few decades: telling stories that will give both you and me something else to be mindful of… if only for short periods.

If (under the circumstances) your preference is to stop paying attention to my Twitter feed, then go well, and look out for yourself. You’ll be missed. If you’re sticking around, though, strap in and we’ll make what we can of the ride together. Your company’s very welcome, even if  things around here get so busy that I can’t tell you so myself.

And a final note, in a slightly more typical mode. Try this cupcake recipe; it’s really good even without the frosting. Nobody can be mindful all the time, and while I was in the middle of typing this up I said to myself, “Screw this, I need some chocolate.” …Also, hot tip: I didn’t have quite enough cocoa for the recipe, so Peter suggested I top up  the amount by adding Americano-style coffee powder. My God did that work out well. (I just had one with nothing but sour cream on it, and it was fabulous.) Give it a shot.

*Yes, we’re having one at the moment. Go take advantage if you like.

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Sycamore leave changing color
EuropeHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeIrelandRandom musings

The 5 Warning Signs of Autumn (Rural Ireland Edition)

by Diane Duane

This is about when it begins to happen.

The first part of October can be surprisingly dulcet in lreland, seeming more like an extension of September than anything else. The weather doesn’t often oblige with prolonged, still, modestly-warm periods of the “Indian summer” type, but at least it tends to settle a bit. Later in the month, though, comes the shift, when you know the true autumn is upon you.

Here are five ways to tell autumn has genuinely (in its sneaky way) arrived in the countryside here.

(5) You start hearing “Sure aren’t the [leaf] colors getting lovely” from the neighbors

I should say “neighbours”, really, in this instance. And “colours”. And you know what? They’re okay. (Meaning the colours. The neighbours are far better than okay: they’re brilliant.) But for those of us who come from places with hard winters, the colors are kind of… meh.

The problem comes in two parts: the local flora and the local climate. Even now, with climate change way too well in progress, Ireland hasn’t historically run to cold winters: the Jet Stream has seen to that. (When it’s been where it’s supposed to be, that is, at least judging in terms of the behavior of the last half a millennium or so. And don’t start with me right now if you’re one of those “The recent climate is a blip” people: just go have that conversation somewhere else if you’d be so kind.)

I say no more than necessary here of the godawful winters of 2011 and 2012, which dumped feet of snow all over everything (our little road never did get plowed in 2011, and thank God for our neighbors who would run us down to the shops or bring heating oil up for us in jerrycans to make sure our central wouldn’t conk out, because the fuel trucks couldn’t make it up the hill through the snow) and killed damn near every palm tree in the country. But those would be the serious exception to the rule, and the rule is: mild wet winters with temperatures that only rarely fall below freezing, even here on the high ground, and even then only for short periods.

Which brings us to the flora. Around here we’re short on the kinds of trees that develop great color. No maples here (though we have quite a lot of sycamore (the species is invasive, and has crowded out some of the trees that used to be more prevalent). Most of the rest of what we’ve got locally is oak and beech — a lot of beech. So the available colors are pretty much brown and yellow, with a bit of soft orange. And since what it takes to trigger the leaf chemistry that develops into dramatic autumn color is relatively cold weather, drama is pretty much what Irish autumn color lacks in a normal year. It’s nothing like the eye-vibrating yellows and reds that you can get on the East Coast of the US in autumn, even in the suburbs.

So our neighbors’ cries of delight leave me a little underwhelmed. After a few decades of practice I now find it possible to not immediately segue into mutters of “Are you kidding, this is nothing on Vermont, or even the Catskills…” and so on. But it’s a trial.

Well, this too will pass. And I’m not speaking figuratively, as in places up here the leaves are already saying “The hell with this, I’m done” and coming off the trees almost before they’re finishing acquiring what modest color they’re going to get. (Peter’s line is that there are only sixty days in a year when the beech trees surrounding us are not dropping their leaves. Sometimes I think he has a point.)

(4) Waking up the central heating

You wake up in the morning to find that too-familiar condensation inside those windows in the house that aren’t double-glazed, and say, “Uh oh. Time to turn it on…” For much of the year (in recent years) it seemed like sort of a game to see how long you could go without needing the central. Then fuel prices dropped and there was just a shade less virtue in gritting your teeth and Not Using Up The Oil. Now, though, you start doing calculations of whether you want to get the guys up for a delivery, or wait a bit longer and pay some other bill instead. The Lesser Calculus of Climate…

(3) Bed socks become a thing

Even with a good heavy duvet and a warm husband/wife/other, feet can get surprisingly cold without warning, these nights (especially when #4 hasn’t yet shifted to “oh go ahead, turn it on for a bit”). Or maybe you just run to cold feet normally, and taking the easy way out and shoving them up against a nice warm bit of your nice warm partner is not, um, particularly appreciated. So: time for the bed socks.

And then you go searching for them. But where the hell are they? You want the good ones, the soft fluffy ones that came from Marks & Spencer. Except they’re black, like an alarming amount of other clothing around this household, and therefore God Herself only knows where they are in a closet that’s full of black things already. And the ones you do find are those crap thermal socks from last year, the ones that were OK until you washed them. And they’re hot pink. Oh God what possessed you. “Where are the Marks ones!” the cry goes up. And Echo answereth not. Maybe you’ll find them by spring. Wait, is this a black one? Oh no, wait, it’s one of those ones with the rubber nonslip ribbing on the soles. And anyway, there’s only one of them; the other is missing. (And the rubber is hot pink. What were you thinking? Another question for the ages.)

Finally you just put on whatever you can find. Because, seriously, no one in their right mind would walk barefoot on the tiles in the kitchen, the way they’re feeling at the moment. And it’s only going to get worse.

(2) The sweaters / jumpers / pullies come out

In the Spring you folded them up and shoved them right to the back of the drawers / closet shelves. But now, especially if the conditions mentioned in #4 remain as yet unaltered, they’re starting to look awfully good. And admit it, when you were in town the other day you looked in the store windows in Grafton Street and began to lust after some of the sweaters you saw there. Not to mention the cashmere in the Hermès boutique in Brown Thomas. Insanity even to think of it at those prices, but it looked so lush. (Never mind. The wannabe-cashmere from Marks is still quite nice. In fact, you have some of that. Go put it on right now and then go on downstairs and make some tea.)

And finally and possibly most diagnostic of all around here:

(1) Microwaving the butter

Summer in Ireland is when you don’t have to microwave the butter after it’s been out on the counter all night.

But summer routinely doesn’t last long. And eventually one morning you realize that the toast would get torn to shreds by butter in the consistency it has at the moment. That’s when you know: Yes, autumn is truly here.

Ten seconds is about right for our present microwave. (Our old fan oven-microwave would let us do five, but alas it hasn’t been replaced as yet.) …At least you know by now how long it needs to hit that magic point between not-quite-enough-to-spread-yet and WHOOPS, okay, I’ll make some pasta con aglio-olio-e-peperoncini and pour this in it.

…And now you can butter your toast, and sit down and have your tea, and think about whether or not you really want to turn on the central.

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Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifethings that piss you offWindows

Do. Not. WANT.

by Diane Duane

ETA: Thanks to those who set me straight on the non-mandatory side of the upgrade. I’ll take refuge in Rick’s excuse here: “I was misinformed.” As for the rest of it, the “download opportunity” still behaves like malware: you should be able to decline the download. Not allowing your users to make the choice themselves is abysmally bad practice. 

I don’t often get stirred up enough to go into full-blown editorial mode, but today is one of the days when that seems to be happening.

A lot of you who have Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines will have noticed the appearance, earlier in the month, of a little white Windows logo in your system tray. This, when you click on it, munificently offers you a free upgrade to Windows 10. Those of you who have experimented with the thing will probably have noticed there is no way to get rid of the impending update download — or at least, no obvious way. And that it starts rolling out tomorrow, July 29th.

For those of you who do not want the 3-gig download and would like to turn it off, let me point you at this webpage:

How To Remove The Windows 10 GMX upgrade nonsense

This cranky and civic-minded person has laid out, step-by-step, a method by which you can get rid of that pestilent little icon in your tray and stop the unavoidable downloading and implementation of three gigabytes of material you don’t want and have no intention of using.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I understand perfectly well Microsoft’s rationale behind this, or at least their stated rationale; to keep security upgrades consistent across all the installs of their new OS. That said, rolling it out in this particular way is really unsavory. It smacks of the behavior of malware installers, rather than that of any responsible company with any kind of interest in keeping its customers on board.*

(Also, it’s worth noting in this context that many people who have already updated to 10 — particularly users with Nvidia graphics cards — have been reporting horrific driver problems with the new Windows version, secondary to this ill-thought-out policy of “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. Only just now has the beginnings of a fix for this particular problem begun to propagate, but this strikes me as a sign of more bad things to come, a slow-motion trainwreck better watched from outside it than inside.)

Now who knows, over the course of the next six months or so, when I get ready to build my new desktop machine, I may indeed go for Windows 10 — once I’ve had time to make the choice, the informed decision, as to whether it’s right for me, and whether I can find alternatives to the various programs whose function I like and would like to keep. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll go whole hog and just switch over to Apple. (I know a lot of you who’re Young Wizards fans, considering the frequent appearance of hardware with the Biteless Apple on it in the books, will be surprised that this is an issue for me at all. However, in this as in many other parts of my tech life, I am an amphibian and have for a long time worked happily on more than one side of the divide at the same time. But this present behavior of Microsoft’s is trying my patience way more than usual.)

Anyway, I’ve used the method detailed in the webpage above on my present Win7 desktop, and it seems to work perfectly. I strongly recommend that if you are ambivalent about the prospect of this forced update of your software, you go over there and have a look at it and decide whether it’s an option you’d like to avail of.

*I also understand that in recent online talks, Microsoft upper-level management have let it be known that people who find ways of avoiding this upgrade will eventually be cut off from normal product updates. And you know what? I can think of no quicker way for them to drive me straight into what Euripides called “the apple-laden land.” Yeah, there’s just one of me, and I doubt my loss is going to break Microsoft’s corporate heart. (shrug) No matter.

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book salesebooksHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifeOnline lifereading

When is a “library” not a library?

by Diane Duane

From over at the Tumblr:

freyaliesel:

o.o tuebl has all of Young Wizards in the library.

BEST NEWS EVER

It would be if (a) I’d given them permission to have the books, (b) I was getting paid anything for their presence there.

However, (a) I never have, and (b) I’m not.

ETA: To the person who commented on the Tumblr post saying, “writers get paid for libraries carrying their books?” Why, yes, we do. The libraries buy our books to lend out. And we’re glad to have the libraries lend them out as many times as they can after that, because that’s our mutual understanding of what libraries do. Public library sales are traditionally a significant part of any YA writer’s income. Sometimes as much as 10 to 20% of a smallish print run will go to libraries — sometimes more!* — and this can be a significant reason why early print runs of a book “earn out”, thus encouraging your publisher to buy your next book. So libraries, and librarians, are very much our friends. (They would be anyway. But this is an additional reason.)

Also: in some markets, like the UK and Ireland, the author earns additional royalties from the book being lent out by libraries — the more libraries buy and lend your book, the more money you get. This is never a huge sum, but it can be helpful even for the midlist writer. Peter and I just got a payment of this kind from one of our UK agents. It’s hardly a lottery win, but it means that we can replace our suddenly-dying clothes dryer this month instead of sometime in the spring.

Tuebl, however, is not a library in the commonly-understood sense (and certainly not in the public-library sense that Ben Franklin intended when he started the first one in Philly). Tuebl does not pay any writer up front for their books, or for the right to make them available for download. People upload books to Tuebl at will, frequently without any real concern about who owns the copyright. Tuebl then dodges this particular legal bullet by making the assertion that they assume only people who have the rights to upload material are doing so. (It would be really interesting to see how this “assumption” holds up in court when someone eventually gets around to challenging them on it.) Additionally, they offer authors some nebulous possibility of “earn(ing) money by giving your books away for free” — which may or may not work out in the long run: right now my preference is to let other writers do that and tell me how it worked out for them.**

If I’d decided to try this experiment for myself, the results, for good or ill, would be my problem to deal with. However, when people take it upon themselves to give away my work for free without my permission — while implying as hard as they can that it is happening with my permission — that gets up my nose enough for me to make an issue of it in public. In particular, I note that somebody or other (having perhaps mistaken me for a vast multinational publishing conglomerate) bought one of my books from my own store and uploaded it at Tuebl for people to download for free.

I sincerely hope people can understand how the above might make me cranky.

(sigh) Anyway. Onward to the next problem…

As an addeddum: someone else (anonymously) asks:

Regarding authors getting paid when a library houses their book(s), what happens when someone donates the book to them? do they still have to pay you?

In countries where “lending rights” laws obtain, yes they do. (In such countries, the money to pay the writers comes from the government. See, for example, this page at the UK site for this program.)

The basic idea behind these laws is that the book wouldn’t be there in the first place if a writer hadn’t spent the time and effort to write it (and also the money necessary to keep themselves alive while writing it), so the writer therefore deserves some return from the lending process, even if it’s just a small one. (The law establishes this as an intellectual property right: see this page for much more background info about how the Public Lending Right is handled across the 53 countries where it’s been implemented.)

Whether books are purchased by the libraries themselves or donated to them, they report their lending figures to the government body that acts as a clearing-house for the data, and this body sees to it that the legally-determined amount of money comes to the authors directly or through their chosen representatives.

 

*Indications are, from my early royalty statements, that something like 40% of the print run for the original (and now very hard to find) hardcover edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard went to US libraries. This enthusiastic uptake would have been instrumental in Dell agreeing to buy Deep Wizardry.

**Yes, I know about Neil Gaiman. Sadly (or perhaps fortunately, from Amanda Palmer’s point of view) we cannot all be Neil Gaiman.

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Candy Corn
FoodHalloweenHobbyhorses and General RantingHumorObscure interests

Halloween Candy: an idle personal overview

by Diane Duane

It was seeing this thing that got me thinking about the subject.

What surprised me after the fact was that the very sight of a “candy corn bar” provoked such a strong reaction from me (“EWWWWWWWWW”) despite my being long past trick-or-treating age.

This response poked me in the curiosity nerve, a little, so I went looking for evidence of whether other people shared anything like it — this idea that some Halloween candies were “right” and others “wrong”.

And a little research suggests there seems to be a bone-deep conservatism on this issue, combined with some regional implications, as various Worst Halloween Candy lists seem to have areas where they agree and then others where they diverge or disagree strongly. (As an example: lists at BC Living, HuffPo (in fact they have a few of these), TopTenz, Serious Eats, Complex, Nooga…) Google will guide you to more if you feel the need for a broader statistical sample.

I always took Halloween very seriously while I was still of participating age, as my family wasn’t particularly well off and there wasn’t that much candy in my lifestyle except at chocolate-heavy holidays like Easter and Christmas. (Fortunately I slipped out of this stage just barely before the OMG BAD PEOPLE ARE PUTTING RAZOR BLADES IN THE APPLES thing got started.* I didn’t mind the apples. I knew they were traditional.) (As they still are in Ireland, which is after all where it all began. Apples and peanuts have been the trick-or-treat staple here for many years: only now are the candies starting to creep into the Irish tradition.)

So for what it’s worth: looking over these lists, I find some common ground, but not complete agreement.

Stuff I liked:

  • Candy corn… legit candy corn. (And still do.)
  • Those marshmallow peanuts. (Don’t ask me why.)
  • Tootsie Rolls. (In the 60s they were better than they are now. There seems to be so much wax in them now that you could stick wicks in them and light them as candles in emergency situations.)
  • Full size candy bars. I was never a Snickers person: I prefer my peanuts separate from candy, as a rule. (Also, no Reese’s Cups for me: you can keep your peanut butter OUT of my chocolate, thank you very much. If I want peanut butter I’ll go make a sandwich.) …Three Musketeers was (and when in the US still is) my preferred bar. I had a brief flirtation with Baby Ruths but it never came to anything. The US Mars bar was and is different from the UK one, but I like them both. (And steal Peter’s occasionally.)
  • Licorice, especially the long “licorice whips.” Preferably the red ones, though I didn’t mind the black. I may be the only kid I knew at that period who actually liked licorice. (But then I liked spinach, and liver. Even from a young age I felt that normalcy was boring / for other people: it’s probably no surprise in retrospect that I should have become a Sherlock Holmes fan.)
  • Nonpareils. Those used to turn up in little boxes in my part of the NY metropolitan area. God, but I loved those things. (And if you handed me a bag of them now you’d get it back empty.)
  • M&Ms. Chocolate, not peanut. The same as the nonpareils. Then and now I could go through a bag of M&Ms with terrifying speed.
  • Candy cigarettes. My one attempt to become a smoker failed miserably — how could anyone do that, I thought at the time, it tasted awful!! — but there was just something about the texture of these things, the crunch, that I adored. Suck it until it was gone? You must be joking. Gone in three crunches.
  • Pixy Stix. Oh God I loved those. Strong sweet/sour contrasts have always been a draw for me.
  • Space Food Sticks! The chocolate ones. Wow I loved those too. Rare to get them in a Halloween haul, but when they turned up they were memorable.

Stuff I had no time for (and would swap with others who liked them):

  • Those Necco wafers. Not enough flavor.
  • Mary Janes. Boring.
  • Good and Plenty. Something about the candy shells always put me off. (Maybe they were distracting me from the licorice.)
  • Taffy candies generally, the exception being Bit O Honeys. Those were all right.
  • Lollipops in general. Normally too much work, not enough taste. Some Tootsie Pops made it over the bar, depending on the flavor.
  • Gum. Bubble, plain, whatever. Boring again.

Seasonal considerations: There were things I had no time for at Halloween because they were readily available at other times from the store up around the corner on Park Avenue:

  • The candy buttons.
  • The wax bottles containing dubious sweet liquids.
  • The wax lips.
  • Candy necklaces, bracelets, etc.
  • Those little wafer “flying saucers” with some kind of tiny hard candy inside them.

…Anyway. Enough of this: I haven’t even had all my breakfast yet.

(Meanwhile, for those of you who’re feeling nostalgic: have a look at OldTimeCandy.com. They have the stuff arranged by decades.)

*Has anyone ever actually found a razor blade in an apple? I mean, verifiably? With pictures? Or is this one of those Urban Myth Coinciding With Early TV/Mass Media Attention Causes Hospital X-Ray Departments Nationwide To Waste Millions Of Person-Hours On One Day Each Year things?

(See also People Being Gassed In Sleeper Compartments of European Trains And All Their Stuff Stolen. I went hunting for non-anecdotal data on this some years back and couldn’t find anything. My firm belief is that back in the day, numerous weary and stressed-out travelers were careless / clueless about making sure their sleeper compartments’ doors were actually locked before they went to sleep, and then desperately needed a face-saving excuse the morning after opportunistic thieves, or in some cases their fellow sleeper compartment occupiers, had ripped them off while they slept through it like the dead. “I mean, I’m a light sleeper, I would’ve heard anybody come in unless something else was going on. It must have been gas! Gas!” …But I digress.)

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Hobbyhorses and General RantingMediaRailWriting

The “Amtrak Residency”: Why I Think This Is A Really Bad Idea For A Writer

by Diane Duane

I’ve felt sorry for Amtrak for a long time. Economic pressures and the unique problems of any rail system based inside the US (where automobile travel has too long been the be-all and end-all) have turned it into a faint shadow of the formerly great passenger and freight rail lines that helped define the 19th and early 20th-century history of the US.

But I’m finished feeling sorry for it as of now. It’s no crime to have fallen on hard times. But offering people what seems to be something wonderful and then to have it look like they might be trying to take advantage of those who take up the offer? Not good.

On the face of it, it sounds like a lovely idea.

#AmtrakResidency was designed to allow creative professionals who are passionate about train travel and writing to work on their craft in an inspiring environment. Round-trip train travel will be provided on an Amtrak long-distance route. Each resident will be given a private sleeper car, equipped with a desk, a bed and a window to watch the American countryside roll by for inspiration. Routes will be determined based on availability.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and reviewed by a panel. Up to 24 writers will be selected for the program starting March 17, 2014 through March 31, 2015.  A passion for writing and an aspiration to travel with Amtrak for inspiration are the sole criteria for selection. Both emerging and established writers will be considered.

But then you read the terms and conditions, and the alarm bells go off big time.

Clause 5 is where the trouble starts. From the cautious writer’s point of view, clause 5 can be read as meaning: “When you turn in your application, gee, anything can happen to your original writing. Who knows? We have a billion PR people working for us whose work yours might be [airquotes] confused with [/airquotes]. By signing this you agree that should this happen, you have no recourse, and we never have to credit you or pay you one thin dime.”

Clause 5 by itself ought to be enough to make you walk away. But then comes clause 6, in which you assign to Amtrak the irrevocable world rights to all the data in your application including your writing, forever and a day. And the day after that.

I learned the lesson long ago both from other freelance writers and at my agent’s knee, and the lesson is as important now as it ever was — in this day of the effortless digital ripoff, perhaps way more so. The lesson is this: Never give anyone world rights to any of your writing.  Ever. Ever. Because who knows if that one piece of writing is the one that would have made you famous worldwide and rich beyond the dreams of avarice? Or  more to the point, what if they later do something with your writing that is absolutely opposite to your intentions and which you find harmful or offensive? You’d have no recourse there either. I wouldn’t sell anyone world rights to a story for a million dollars and that necklace of flawless cabochon emeralds I saw in the window at Harry Winston that one time. And sell away world rights to something for the price of a single train ticket? I don’t think so. They could plate the inside of that sleeper with platinum and lay on catering from Dallmayr and I still wouldn’t do it if it meant they got irrevocable world rights.

Better pay the ticket price yourself and keep the rights to your work in your own pocket than swap those rights for the chance at a single train ride, sleeper or not. (And something else to note here. There is no declaration of who owns the rights to the material you produce on this train trip. There is no way to tell what paperwork you’re going to be required to sign if you actually win. Oh, and did I mention the background checks they want to conduct on you first, to make sure you’re not some kind of crypto-crook who’s going to embarrass them? Clause 9.)

…Now, I hear they’re fixing clause 6 in some way or other (doubtless already having heard the first wave of complaints). That’s all well and good. But I haven’t heard a word about clause 5, which stinks to just as high a heaven.  And they originally thought clause 6 was fine as it was. That says way too much about their non-clarity on the concept of what belongs, or might reasonably be expected to belong, to writers.

So please, I beg of you, unless the legal language associated with this offer is amended, you should consider stepping away from the very large diesel-powered vehicle. I too am passionate about train travel and writing… way more than most people might guess on the first count. But this is not the way to go about it.

…Let me add, for clarity’s sake, that I think aiding writers to experience rail travel as a possible source for inspiration in their writing is a super idea. The people you meet who you’d never have met otherwise, the places you see from a train that you see from no other point of view (especially that strange opportunity to see, as it were, into the “back yards” of people’s lives)… they can make a huge difference to the work, no question, injecting the delightfully unexpected into the writing experience. But as usual with any abstract “good idea” when you try to drag it into real-world realization, the devil proves to be in the details. Sometimes, even with the best intentions in the world, implementation can get thorny, and unexpected consequences can get thrown up to complicate the issue.

I’m hardly insensible to the view that there’s nothing altrustic about this particular version of the sponsored-residency concept, and the way this whole business can be viewed as an opportunity for positive publicity for Amtrak. (I wouldn’t have used the word “stunt”, though here and there others have.) Never mind that for the moment. What I think Amtrak needs to deal with now is the apparent one-sidedness of the legal language attached to the opportunity — so that applicants will have some sense that there’s protection in it for them, their concerns, and their work, as well as for the company providing the opportunity.

I very much hope that happens.

Writing on the train on one’s own nickel: the Belfast-Dublin Enterprise, 2004

(CC train image at the top from Jack Snell on Flickr)

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DrinkHobbyhorses and General RantingHumorreligion

In the Afterlife After-Hours Bar

by Diane Duane

You know the place. It’s where deities and divinities and avatars go when they’ve clocked off and they need a casual after-work pint or a quick remedial stiff one or some casual conversation with their peers before going home to the family.

So Christ is sitting there nursing a nice Pinot Grigio (he gets so tired of red wine, you have no idea) and he’s saying to the gods and near-gods at the bar with him, “You know what really gets to me, though? The tat. The kitsch. The dashboard ornaments, the endless dodgy art — ”

“I saw that doll,” says somebody down the bar past Mithras and Izanagi: a god with his hood pulled up and a long cloak that looks and flows like shadow. “With the puffy sleeves and the crown.”

“The Infant of Prague, yeah. Take my advice, do not do apparitions after hours in Prague, it’s something about the beer they brew there, what those people will do to you after the fact just does not bear considering. But you know what’s worst? The ‘Sacred Heart.'” He actually does the air quotes, which leave little traces of (appropriately) red fire. “On the front of me, outside my clothes, like I’ve had some kind of bass-ackwards transplant. Usually with rays of light coming out of it. Aorta and vena cava and wobbly bits all aglow. There is nothing that does not appear on. Lunch boxes. Key chains. Night lights, do you believe that? How many kids’ nights have been ruined by having that thing glowing at them like a refugee from a Bill Cosby skit? You should see some of the stores at CafePress. I’m amazed they haven’t done My Sacred Spleen yet. Except probably none of them can figure out where it would go.” He rolls his eyes. “I have it way worse than any of you.”

Mutterings of agreement run up and down the bar. Then a voice speaks up.

“I got that beat.”

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Dough showing well developed gluten structure
cookingFoodHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeIrelandrecipes

Folklore, string structure, rye dough and Raymond Blanc (with afternotes on a bread recipe)

by Diane Duane

I was making bread the other day and suddenly found a finger in it.

…Cognitively speaking. (Not a real finger, don’t panic….) But writers’ brains are such strange places sometimes. Here’s today’s example.

My short-term memory is a constant joke around here. You can (as happened this morning) tell me that the weather station’s batteries are kaput and can’t be charged in the normal battery recharger, meaning they have to be put into one of the more technologically challenged ones…  and I will still, two hours later, look at the weather station and remark, “Oh look, its batteries have finally gone south” — to the sound of ironic laughter from Himself Upstairs. (And I’ll then recall the whole previous conversation perfectly well, but will have mislaid it between times.) Some of this is Not Paying Attention, but other aspects of it are just Sixtyish Brain Fail.

However. Ask me for a quote from a book I read forty years ago, and no problem, there it is. As you shall hear…

So I’m working with this recipe from Raymond Blanc for the first time, because the other evening I went to sleep with the TV running (I sometimes  do) and it was showing an episode of Blanc’s “Kitchen Secrets” series from last year, the one about bread. Now, bread is a passion with me. (A master post about this will turn up in a day or three so I don’t keep losing some of the links I keep looking for.) Bad bread is everywhere — I can’t think of another place where Sturgeon’s Law applies so rigorously; in bread’s case it’s because of the pestilent ubiquity of something called the Chorleywood Bread Process. (More about this in another post, but originally this process was devised as a way to make decent bread in large quantities from the soft wheats that are all that will grow in the British Isles. It uses yeast as a flavoring rather than as a way to develop the bread naturally: gluten is developed in this process by violent physical agitation and the addition of ever-increasing types and amounts of additives. Ick.)

Good bread, though, is something I can’t get enough of. This is one of the reasons I love Switzerland so much. (German bread is almost as good as Swiss, generally, but the Swiss in my opinion have a slight edge.) And any way to make good bread at home is worth knowing about. Add to that the fact that it’s Raymond Blanc sharing his method for pain de campagne on this particular show, and there’s no way I wasn’t going to try it out as soon as I was conscious again. (I really like Blanc. Not only does his passion for good food burn with a pure bright flame that should be visible from space, but he’s funny, dry, not afraid to make fun of himself, and he doesn’t seem to feel the need to prove how great a chef he is by screaming at people.)

So this recipe: like most good country breads of central Europe, rye flour is involved. And rye is typically such a nuisance to work with. It makes the dough sticky, it’s a pain to clean up, it gets everywhere. There I am at the worktop this morning, dealing with the quite sticky dough — look at the way the gluten’s got it stringing in the image underneath here, so lovely — scraping it out onto the floured work surface and starting to get to grips with it. Or it with me, because any dough with rye in it has a life of its own beyond that of the yeast. I slice the dough into four and start shaping it, and the usual struggle for domination begins. It’s climbing up my wrists, it’s trying to attach itself to my clothes, it’s under my nails. I look down at the hands and sigh and wonder where the nail brush is.

image

And suddenly I see, in the back of my head, the image of a woman’s severed finger, her pinky to be precise, with a signet ring on it. And a voice speaks up from the depths of time, as it were in narration, or sort of a caption, and it says:

“…This cannot be my wife’s finger, because it’s got rye dough underneath the fingernail, and my wife has never kneaded rye dough in her life.”

And I stop what I’m doing and my mouth falls open. Not so much with the thought “Where the hell did that come from?”, because I know where it came from: I’m kneading rye dough, and the association was instantaneous. The thought that is now making me crazy is, “What fairy tale is that?”

And instantly I despair, because if there’s one thing we have a lot of in this house, it’s books of legends and fairy tales. It is going to take forever to settle this issue, and it’s going to drive me crazy until I do.

…And of course the despair doesn’t last that long. In another time it would have, because I’d have had to go through all those books. But these days, Google Is Our Friend many times every day. So once I manage to get the dough shaped (two baguettes, two oval loaves) and put aside for the dough’s second rising, I go off to Google and search on the phrase “has been kneading rye dough”. Too precise. Knock it back to “kneading rye dough” and “fairy tale” and only one result comes up: a reference to the great Welsh epic tale, the Mabionigion.

So now I know where I am without really having to check the backstory (though I do anyway to see if I remember the setup correctly). And some detail comes up that makes me laugh, because the dialogue might as well have come out of Sherlock Holmes as out of the man who actually utters it, a Welsh Prince named Elphin.

The original material is here and on the page after. (It is, as I expected, Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, which goes back to 1849. (ETA: the pages aren’t displaying at the moment — you may need to check their cached versions at Google.)  But let me sum it up for you.

Elphin has been lucky enough to pull out of a weir in a river near his home a miraculous child, the (soon to be famous) prophet, bard and wizard Taliesin. Elphin takes the child home and he and his wife more or less adopt this prodigy (which frankly is a smart move). Then after a while Elphin has to go off to spend Christmas with his uncle, a petty king named Maelgwyn. There is a lot of sucking up to Maelgwyn by all and sundry during this period, especially on the subject of his queen, who is more beautiful and modest and graceful and blah de blah de blah than all the other women in the kingdom, or so everybody keeps telling Maelgwyn, this being the local level of Speaking Truth To Power, i.e. Not Very High.

Well, somewhere in this process — and it’s only fair to suggest, though gently, that these islands being what they are at Christmas, Drink Has Been Taken — somewhere in here, Elphin, who loves his wife a lot,  actually commits the tactical error of saying what he’s thinking: that his wife is pretty damn beautiful and graceful and modest and blah de blah de blah on her own, thank you very much, and at least as much so as the queen. …Well, you can see where this is going. Maelgwyn throws Elphin’s butt into the dungeon and sends a courtier off to see if Elphin’s wife is all she’s cracked up to be.

The man sent off to do this is a schmuck named Rhun (“the most graceless man in the world: there was neither wife nor maiden with whom he had held converse but he was afterwards evil-spoken of”). Rhun heads for Elphin’s castle with the intent to prove that Elphin’s wife is in fact not what she’s cracked up to be, thereby gaining favor with Maelgwyn.

It’s at this point that little Taliesin, who plainly has his prophecy engine fully engaged, tells Elphin’s wife that a jerk is heading in their direction to dishonor her. “So here,” says the baby prophet/bard, “is what you’re going to do. Find one of your housemaids. Dress her in your clothes and jewelry. Sit her down at table as if she was having dinner. Let Rhun the Jerk find her instead of you. What happens is not going to be pretty, sorry about that, but it’s her or you.”

And so it is done. Rhun shows up, finds this woman looking like Elphin’s noble wife and doing the things he thinks she should be doing, and he gets to work. She invites him to dinner (typical Celtic hospitality), indeed dinner and supper, and sometime during supper he drugs her wine. She falls over unconscious, and Rhun chops off her pinky — with Elphin’s signet ring on it — and bears it away as “proof” that Elphin’s wonderful wife got so plastered with a total stranger that she didn’t even feel this happening. (The implication being, of course, that he could have done, and maybe did do, all kinds of other things to her as well.)

So Rhun returns to his master, shows him the finger, and Maelgwyn is very pleased. He has Elphin brought up out of the dungeon and “chides him”, saying (I’m paraphrasing here), “Look, dummy, you ought to know that you can’t trust a woman any further than you can throw her, and here’s the proof: your wife’s finger, your signet ring, what can you possibly say?”

Elphin takes one look at the finger and says, “Lord, no question that’s my ring: everybody knows what that looks like. But as to the finger? A few things. First, this wouldn’t even stay on my wife’s thumb, her fingers are so small. But you can see from the marks how the thing’s been forced onto this finger. Second, my wife cuts her nails once a week: Saturday nights, actually. This nail hasn’t been trimmed for a month. And third… if you look under this nail, you’ll see that whoever it belonged to was kneading rye dough in the last three days. And my wife, being a gently-reared princess, has never kneaded rye dough in her natural life. Soooo…”

Needless to say, cheeking a King like this to his face gets Elphin’s butt chucked back in the dungeon again. But it’s all right, because Taliesin the Wonder Kid is on the case. He heads off to Maelgwyn’s castle, springs his foster-father, makes everyone else look profoundly stupid, and otherwise generally saves the day. (You still feel kind of sorry for the poor housemaid, though.)

…Meanwhile, all I can do is sit here and wonder at the human brain, which can pull a fairly complete memory of something like this out of the depths of decades‘ worth of time (because it has to be easily thirty years since I last read the Mabinogion through ) at the mere invocation of the phrase “kneading rye dough”.

Sheesh.

Anyway, now all I have to do is get the rest of the rye out from under my nails…

image

Now that I’ve made this recipe twice: just a thought or three (below the cut) for those of you who might be thinking of attempting it.

First of all: seriously, spring for bread flour if you’re going to make this. The first time I did the recipe it was with a standard Irish “strong white” flour. Not that the results weren’t just fine. But the second time, I used a flour that was a lot heavier on the hard wheat, and the results were significantly better.

Secondly, about the kneading times: This is serious business here. Blanc is very specific about the times in the basic recipe, and following them pays off. The first kneading period is more about mixing and letting the liquid be absorbed, as he says: the second is about developing the gluten in the flour. Then, after the first rise, even though the resulting dough is incredibly sloppy-looking, it is also surprisingly easy to manage once you start shaping it. Hint here: don’t be afraid to use a fair amount of extra flour to make the shaping easier, but at the same time try to knead as little of that extra flour into the shaped dough as you can. (This recipe has caused me to look at all other recipes I’ve used that have cautioned against “overkneading” and made me wonder whether I’ve actually been underkneading all this while.)

Another note: this dough flops out fairly flat as it rises the second time. If you want a higher-standing loaf, use a high-sided pan. (For the baguette above I used a specialist baguette pan.) You could do this recipe in standard loaf pans and it’d work fine, as far as I can tell. But you get more / better crust if you bake it naked. (NB: you would need four US-sized loaf pans if you choose to do it that way. Supported, no question that this dough would fill them.) Additionally: during the second rise I spritzed the loaves with water a few times (mostly because I was out of saran wrap / clingfilm with which to cover them, and had fallen back on damp towels tented over the loaves on upended glasses. This worked very well. May have made the crusts a little crisper as well).

Also, re pre-baking prep: You can eggwash the shaped dough before baking if you like, but it’s not necessary. The baguette above was baked naked and looks nice enough.  (Probably also more traditional that way: I doubt that pain de campagne is eggwashed when baked on its home ground.)

Re the yeast: Fresh works better if you can get it. Specifically, the bread’s flavor is improved.

Re additives: I put caraway in the baguettes the second time around (I’ve always been a sucker for a good Jewish rye, something which is a bit thin on the ground in Ireland). It worked brilliantly.

…So there you have it. This is a bread very much worth making. (I tell you… slices of that baguette still warm, with Boursin smeared all over them: OMNOMNOM.)

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AppleComputer stuffebooksEuropeHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeNewsOnline lifeTechnogeekeryTravel

A rant: iOS6 and Maps

by Diane Duane

If you’ve already heard enough about this, or just don’t care to hear a couple pages’ worth of venting right now, please avert your eyes now. Thank you.

…I’ve had a soft spot for Apple products for a long time, to the point where versions of them have for years appeared in my Young Wizards series as “the preferred devices of the Powers that Be”. (So everything that follows this should be read as “more in sorrow than in anger”, though there’s certainly some anger, make no mistake.) I worked with Apple computers myself in the ancient day (while not owning them) and recommended them wholeheartedly to friends. So it sometimes surprises my readership to find that until recently I’d never myself owned anything Apple-ish but an iPod.

A couple/few months ago this changed when the first serious Apple computing device came into the household, in the form of an iPad. We haven’t had it for very long (I say “we”, but the hard truth is that Peter hasn’t had much of a chance to get his hands on it) but I’ve been enjoying gradually learning its ways, and it makes my work a lot easier. It is peerless for e-reading purposes (especially using BlueFire Reader) and there’s nothing like it for proofreading prose: errors just seem to jump out for the catching.

And one of the great satisfactions of using the iPad, quite early on, was hitting “Maps” and having the house come up instantly, for we’re out in the middle of nowhere. And the pleasure hasn’t just been about finding my own place, but other places, in close detail. For both the working writer and the busy traveler, the Maps icon was a gateway to the most functional of joys. You could find your way in a strange place: you could work out where the nearest post office or cab rank was: you could read a map in the streets of a foreign city without instantly making yourself look like a tourist ready to be relieved of his or her valuables. (Easiest on the iPhone, of course, but there are ways to use the Pad less obviously for this too. Deep purses have their uses, and you could be looking for anything in there.) You could sit in a restaurant over a meal and scout around for interesting places to check out afterwards. Or you could just sit home and do research about the things your characters needed to be doing and seeing in a place you’d never been, moving easily between map view and street view as required.

…But not any more. If you’re alert to computing issues at all, you’ll surely have heard the noise over the last couple of days as regards what’s happened to Maps in the iPhone and iPad. There are explanations all over the place (here, for example) as to why Apple chose to make the change and so forth.

I don’t think this is a minor issue. Accurate and dependable GPS-friendly mapping to handheld and portable devices has become one of the most important reasons to have such a device in the first place. Jeez, if even Sherlock bloody Holmes needs such a thing to save his bacon sometimes, it should be an indicator of how vital such usage is for the rest of us mere mortals.

And what does iOS6 for the iPad and iPhone do with so vital a commodity? It throws out the best online mapping available, that of Google, and goes with a homebrew mapping application.

Baby. Bathwater. Especially since the Apple Maps facility is so not ready for prime time yet.

Once upon a time I knew that if I had both amnesia and the iPad, then Maps on the iPad could get me home. (Best memory of this: using Maps on the iPad in conjunction with the wonderful DB (German Rail) app, (yes, there’s an Android version too, we both have it on our HTC phones) which was given a start point somewhere in the middle of Germany and told “Get me home!” All by itself it got us as far as Dun Laoghaire Ferry Port and then threw its figurative hands in the air and said “All right, not even we can do anything with Irish Rail if they won’t run a rail link to a main ferry port, and they’ve made their bus schedule inaccessible to us, so  you’re on your own now.” But the Google Maps implementation in the Pad did the rest and found the best route back to the right spot on Unnamed Road Number 876,543. And all praise to Deutsche Bahn for whoever they got to build that app for them.) Anyway, once upon a time, the imagery was all clear, right down to a very close zoom, so close you could see not just our driveway but our backyard clothesline.

No chance of any more such happy homecomings, however. I don’t have a comparison shot of the previous view – I never thought I’d need it – but this is what our area looks like now:

The road in front of our house is gone. So are other minor roads in the area (and this is exactly the kind of help a traveler in these parts would seriously need). So is the house, as half the image (as you see) now renders it impossible to find due to poor quality. And what happened over to the left there? And why is the definition sharp again just half a mile away??

Now, yes, granted, this is rural Ireland, not exactly the most populated corner of the planet. But if you check the blog here, you’ll see that great cities have been affected the same way. The Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge has big problems. Freiburg in Breisgau, a vibrant and beautiful modern/medieval city in southwestern Germany, is now represented in places by postwar aerial imagery (take a look, you can see the bomb craters). Berlin has relocated itself to Antarctica.  Something really strange has happened to the Schuylkill Expressway in Philly near the Art Museum (which doesn’t look too well either) right next to it. Gothenburg, Sweden, is missing. Closer to home, Dublin Zoo has somehow relocated itself into the south city center, right on top of a hotel where we routinely stay: I’m half concerned that the next time we check in I should bring a whip and a chair in case of lions.  (Also, an area near Dundrum in County Dublin [now mostly famous for a high-end shopping center] has been labeled “Airfield” and the Irish Minister in Charge of Yelling at Apple has had to contact them to get it removed urgently before some iOS6-using pilot [of whom there are many] mistakes it for the military airport at Baldonnell and tries to land there. …Is it gone yet, BTW? I’m afraid to look.)

Apple. How did you let this application leave the house in such a state? What on Earth possessed you?!

Yes, I know about the bad blood between you and Google, about the Apple / Android divide, about your desire to put some distance between you. I understand that perfectly. But here, in this one spot, you should have just sucked it up and said All right, fine, we can cope with this until we have something not just better, but breathtakingly so.

…Too late now.

So many actions in life have unexpected results. Here’s my list of the local ones resulting from this whole business:

(a) I now bitterly regret ever having punched the Upgrade button. I will never regard an Apple OS upgrade the same way again. I should have been more suspicious to start with. Lesson learned.

(b)    The minute there’s a Google Maps app in the App Store? I’ll be all over that like a cheap suit and I will never touch the native Maps icon again. I won’t even look at it. (Probably I won’t be allowed to delete it, which is a shame, because for a long time, every time I see it, I’m going to growl.)

(c)    We will be buying a Samsung tablet at the earliest opportunity. Admittedly, we were already inclined this way for several reasons: (1) for ebook production, because nothing works to test an ebook version like the actual device it’s intended to run on: (b) Peter likes the Android OS better than he does Apple’s (“And now you see why,” says the annoyed voice from the next room):  and (3) the constant and sleazy-looking litigation over whether or not the Samsung looks too much like an iPad has put a bad taste in both our mouths. But this has pushed me right over the edge. Apple, your implementation of Google Maps may not work any more, but I know someone whose implementation will. If my experience is anything to go by, you are driving your customers straight into the arms of your competition. And the ripples from this are going to spread: the longer it goes on and the louder the ruckus gets, the more potential Apple customers are going to say “Nuh uh, don’t want one of those.”

(sigh) Okay, done ranting. But I wish I knew how they were going to fix this, because a function of the iPad that was important and useful to me (and apparently to a whole lot of other people) has been reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. It would be lovely if Apple would amend iOS6 to allow a user to opt in to Google Maps (or out of the Apple mapping application). But bearing in mind the rather controlling nature of Apple, this seems… at best unlikely.

Meanwhile… can anyone recommend a reliable way to roll back to iOS5? (Though I already have a horrible feeling about what the answer’s going to be.)

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

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Entrance of the Queen of the Night
Hobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMusicObscure interests

A Day at the Opera (part 1): "Il Barbieri von Nuremburg" and other madness

by Diane Duane

(Image above: the entry of the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute: via David Ronis)

I was bitten very early by the opera bug.

I think this happened in fifth grade or thereabouts. Our grade school music class got shoved into a bus and ferried into New York, where we spent a day with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and some people from the Metropolitan Opera, being shown the sights and talking to musicians and singers about what they did and how they did it. (Some of us got to actually conduct the Phil for twelve bars or so. Who cared that the orchestra was minus its second chairs? It was… quite something. …That’s another story.)

At the Met, anyway, we all got to sit down front in the expensive seats, and the chandeliers were retracted and lowered for us (which was seriously cool), and then the curtains parted and we found ourselves staring at a coloratura soprano with an afternoon to spare, standing near the top of a stepladder with a spotlight on her, wearing an amazing long glittery black dress and what appeared to be a crown of stars.

Then the conductor gave the downbeat, and the soprano opened her mouth and sang. And suddenly she was not just some singer on a stepladder but the local embodiment of Astrafiammante the Queen of the Night in all her pissed-off  glory, absolutely shaking the rafters with what I know know to be one of the more difficult pieces of music in the operatic repertoire, but then simply sounded to me like a very angry angel looking for someone to deck out.  I wasn’t entirely clear about the details of what she was singing then; I was way too blown away. I had never heard anything like this before. I… was… GONE.

So began what’s since become a lifelong fascination with this complex, sometimes crazy and almost always beautiful art form. I listen to opera when I’m happy or when I’m sad, and particularly when I need to force a mood shift for work’s sake. As a result, opera is rarely far from my writing: there are precious few of my books that I haven’t found a way to sneak opera into somehow (though mostly I try to be circumspect about it. You may only hear a little of the music in the background [as during Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses] or see it on stage in full view [as in Dark Mirror, with added Klingons].  But it’s usually lurking somewhere in the wings.)

The reason this comes up now is that the other day I was looking under the bed for something, and bumped into a big box of cassette tapes that Peter and I have been promising to strike to digital format for what seems like forever. There was the old tape deck, too, sitting there with that patiently aggrieved look that superannuated hardware visits upon you, having given you long and faithful service and still having been abandoned. I said “Oh, what the hell?”, pulled out the deck and the box of tapes, went through the usual frustrating search for cables with which to get the cassette deck talking to the big desktop machine’s sound card, found the cables in less than half an hour (which is in itself a small miracle around this place: other hardware geeks will know how cables both simultaneously pile up and still manage to hide themselves from you when urgently needed), did the hooking up, and started going through the box.

Oh, memories. There is nothing quite so evocative of Nostalgia For Your Lost Youth as going through old hand-made cassette mix tapes.

One tape, though, when I picked it up, jogged my memory unusually hard:  because I realized already had a dub of what was on it — albeit not a great one, done some years back. And thereby hangs a tale.

Those of you who live in Los Angeles, or have National Public Radio stations near you, may (or indeed should) know of the funny, erudite and utterly melliflous music commentator named Jim Svejda (it’s pronounced SHVAY-duh), who operates out of the venerable and much-loved classical music station KUSC. Jim has has been there seemingly since dinosaurs walked the earth, running their Evening Program and just getting better and better all the time. (This goes for his voice too, which is possibly one of the reasons  I like Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice so much:  in some modes it reminds me strongly of Svejda’s.) I have been this man’s fan since I first heard him: he is, for this reason, probably the only member of KUSC’s staff to appear in a Star Trek novel.

For years and years Jim hosted a syndicated show called The Opera Box in which every week he shared his passion and wisdom about all things operatic (not to mention his extraordinary audio collection). Now, since KUSC is a public-supported station, which once or twice a year slows things down to run pledge drives, Jim at such times would put together unusual “special features” which would be aired a little at a time until people had called in to pledge enough money to get that particular recording rolling again.

One of these was a hysterical farrago called “Il Barbieri von Nuremberg”, a totally crazed piece of business in which Svejda cobbled together a truly Frankenstein-monsterish fake opera out of bits and pieces of operatic works both famous and obscure, constructed a beyond-wacky plot for the thing, and then supplied it with his own commentary in that lovely dark voice of his. Somehow or other I failed to get that on tape, which still drives me crazy sometimes.

But I did manage to tape the sequel that Jim did the following year (1981, I think), “Il Barbieri von Nuremburg Strikes Back.” This purports to contain excerpts of the lost bel canto opera Lucia di Liverpool, as performed by the Omsk People’s Lyric Theatre, Tractor Sales and Service.

It’s madness.

And now at last I have an MP3 of it — or what I was able to get of it, back in the day when in the middle of a live recording you had to sit there hovering over the machine waiting for the tape to run out, then break out in a sweat as you cued the flip side and started recording again.  In particular — besides the numerous crazy symphonic and other musical interludes that Svejda has tucked into this thing —  I direct your attention to the 25:00 minute mark (or this separate 3-minute MP3), and Jim’s truly nutso version of the famous tenor aria Di quella pira, into which he inserts the voices of at least twenty-five different tenors*, flawlessly pitch- and tempo- matched (this was way before the software that now makes such things easy: Svejda would have most likely done this with a transcription table), and which is frankly the damndest display of virtuoso scissorwork I’ve ever heard.

…So here it all is, in MP3 format. The main file is just short of an hour long (about 60 megabytes): you may or may not be able to get it to stream for you — I’d guess that will depend on your software.

One caveat: please note that the sound quality on this dub is NOT great at the very beginning, though it improves considerably after the first ten minutes. (The tape was already pushing at least twenty-five years old when I initially struck it to CD, after all, and some stretch-distortion at the ends, and a little print-through, would have been unavoidable.)  The rest of the hour isn’t bad, despite the occasional hiss of FM signal drift; and now that I have better equipment, and way better audio tools, over the next couple of days I’m going to see if I can get an improved dub off the original tape.

Anyway: enjoy!

*Possibly more. I lost count.

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