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Volume 1: The early years 1948-1966 Volume 2: College, Army, first jobs 1966-1977
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Volume 3: PC Revolutionary: Computerland, Beehive, Novell 1977-1989 Volume 4: Beginning The Great Panic: Divorce, bankruptcy, mid-life crisis 1990-1993
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Volume 5: Being a Sea Cucumber 1994-1997 Volume 6: Searching for a new life, 1997-2002 (and discovering how deep the Panic Scars are)
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Volume 7: Recovering from Panic Thinking 2003-2008 |
Volume 8: Remaking a home in the USA 2008-2010 |
Volume 9: Searching for positive feedback 2011- |
The first part of the year 2011 a health issue loomed large: my eyes were giving out. The left eye in particular was growing a large and very healthy cataract dead center in the lens. This did not come on suddenly so I had been budgeting for its replacement for a year. What was a surprise was when the eye doctor said, "You know, you really ought to get both eyes fixed at the same time."
Urk! The idea of getting one eye messed with was plenty scary. ...One one day, and other the next day? Umm!...
But I did, and I got to experience a miracle of modern medical technology: Both eyes worked so well that I could give up on glasses! The procedure was scary but painless, and the recovery consisted of steadily improving vision for about three weeks and putting in eye drops for five weeks. I noticed that the world I saw was blue-shifted (my old lenses had been yellowing as well as clouding up) and there were some other minor oddities as the nervous part of my vision system adapted to the new optical reality. One surprise adaptation was that over a couple of months my lower eye lids started rising up again, they had dropped a lot when I started wearing glasses a lot, which made me look wide-eyed. After the operation they started rising again, which a couple months later did affect the shape of my eyes and my vision.
The other fascinating part was how quickly I took my new seeing skills for granted. I write about this as a miracle, and intellectually I know it is a miracle, but it never really felt... awesome. It felt pretty normal after just a night's sleep when I got over the iris dilating.
Ah... such is life. ...and having a miracle become that transparent defines a true miracle.
Another interesting element of life came up shortly thereafter: I quit playing the computer game City of Heroes (COH), and that was surprisingly traumatic for me. The process of doing so made me restless for many nights and lethargic for many days. I was surprised at the intensity of this distress.
As this phase was ending, I hit me that what I was feeling was much like a divorce. For six years COH had been a daily companion, and a faithful and entertaining one. But in early 2011 my dear little companion was getting boring, and then judgmental (I got into a fight with the support people over the name of a character), and finally fickle: after an update it stopped playing well on my computer. Here's the tale of that sad final month. It was time to cut bait, but it wasn't easy on me.
At the same time, I my years-long restlessness about theatrical movie offerings also spiked. I was seeing too much that I'd seen already. I knew the story just by reading the log line and all that would be different would be the special effects. I really, really wanted to be seeing new and different stories. So... movie watching was not going to be able to take up the time slack that coming off computer games was going to give me. This was sad. I really enjoyed a weekly jaunt to the movies, and my body really felt better when I made the trip. I was losing a therapy session as well as an entertainment session. It was doubly distressing.
And another change happening at this same time was that I reviewed my success at promoting my books and I was quite unhappy. I was spending time and money, and no one was buying!
Related to that, I was increasingly disappointed with acquaintances I'd made in my book promoting and movie making projects. The highlight of this frustration centered around a book promotion seminar I attended in January 2011. I paid good money to go to this seminar. I wanted a breakthrough.
What was covered at the seminar was very similar to what I'd been reading in books on book promoting. That part was good: It said that for the months previous I'd been going through the right motions. I also did a lot of networking at the seminar. That was good, too.
But in the months that followed the networking proved useless, and I sold no more books after the seminar than I had before it. <sigh> In fact, the networking was worse than useless: Very few of the other aspiring authors also attending, and the successful authors putting on the seminar, seemed interested in what I was interested in. And none seemed able to help my book promoting in any meaningful way.
After four months I got discouraged with them and defriended most of them from my Facebook account. As a group they were impressively dull, and not helping, and routinely falling victim to Facebook scams. They vividly reminded me of why I had given up on a local writers group two years earlier.
And that got me discouraged with this whole book promoting business. Sadly, it seemed to confirm my chronic worry that the Technofiction I was writing really was a breed of its own, and unlikely to become a popular one.
The insight I was getting as I was getting discouraged was that SF book publishing and general audience movie making where both dominated by two virtues: persistence and familiarity. And that was it: Those were the virtues that counted. The person who tried and tried, and who presented a familiar topic in a familiar way, and who was familiar to those with publishing/production power... won: He or she got an SF book published or a movie made.
What was discouraging about this was that the virtues I'm interested in -- insight, good science basis, worldly experience and good story -- play a vanishingly minor role. Likewise, novelty is deeply suspect -- taking a fresh look at a topic, or looking at a new topic, brings a "Huh?" response from those who can greenlight.
I recall from an article which I cannot now locate, some movie maker saying something like, "In my film class we had a lot of bright people. Many of those bright people are now bright accountants and other bright professionals. They gave up, I persisted. I'm the film maker." ...I think those other poeple made good choices. They pursued their other virtues, and they will live richer and more satisfying lives for doing so.
By April I had decided that I would finish the editing and publishing project for my current books, and finish my latest SF book, World of 2110, but it was time to be looking for other activities onto which to lavish my time and attention. Book promoting as a primary activity had had its day in the sun. Persistence was not going to become my primary virtue.
However, figuring out what would be next was not going to be easy...
The editorial that launched a thousand commentsOne of the odder incidents of early 2011 was starting a discussion thread on an MIT alumni group blog that continued on very actively for over two months... and then even more! I started it on 20 Feb and by 25 April there were 1025 comments and it was still producing more than a half-dozen comments a day. Update: on 24 May it reached 2,000 comments. Update: on 20 Jun it reached 3,000 comments. Update: on 16 Jul it reached 4,000 comments and picked up the nickname "blogathon" from Owen Franken one of the participants. Update: on 06 Aug it reached 5,000 comments. Update: on 30 Aug it reached 6,000 comments. Update: on 16 Sep it reached 7,000 comments. Update: on 09 Oct it reached 8,000 comments. Update: on 08 Nov it reached 9,000 comments. Update: on 28 Nov it reached 10,000 comments. Update: on 15 Dec it reached 11,000 comments. Update: on 05 Jan it reached 12,000 comments. Update: on 26 Jan it reached 13,000 comments. Update: on 28 Feb 12, a year later, 14,000 comments. Amazing. I have created a standard. LoL! Update: on 01 Apr on to 15,000 comments. Here is the editorial that launched a thousand comments: Collectivism is back. ...and BAD: Wisconsin State Budget Battle, and here is The 10K Blogathon. |
Technology update:The story of a sad little phone numberWhen I returned from Korea in 2008 I had to reconnect to the US in many ways. One of those ways was getting a cell phone. The process took a surprising amount of hoop-jumping -- which I blame on America's phone regulatory environment. The Curse of Being Important is strong here. One factor that strongly influenced my choice was that upon returning I discovered that the cell phone account which I had closed properly years earlier had been turned over to a collection agency. Umm... cheap shots had been taken. OK... no more contracts for me! I tried month-to-month for a while, but I used my cell phone so little that that plan seemed expensive. I went back to pre-pay, and found that if I paid $100 my first year, I could refill that pool each year with whatever I wanted to... typically about $20. Cell phone service for $20/year... it matched my cell phone usage well. The cost was right, but what was bad was three previous owners of this phone number had been deadbeats. I got a stream of voice, robo calls and even faxes from collection agencies trying to contact those previous owners. I learned about collection agency tactics. <sigh> The most annoying being: They would sell around their lists. I would get one agency to stop bothering me, then they would sell their list to another agency and the bothering would start up again. It took about two years to get each and every list holder to not only stop calling me, but to not pass on my number when they sold it on. ... Or so I thought. In the summer of 2011 I got hit with a new technology twist: the Phish Phone Call. I got a robo call claiming to be from my bank saying that my credit card limit had been dropped. The first time I got the call it was spooky... and I followed the first instruction to get it straightened out. Fortunately, just the first. When more was asked for I caught the strong whiff of scam and hung up. Bad... Even worse, I got the same robo call two weeks later, and again a couple weeks after that! Umm... it was a new scheme, but the perpetrators were no smarter than other scam artists. Still, the more I thought about this the more discouraged I became. I was getting these calls only on my cell phone number. This meant that some collection agency had sold their list to these phishers. And, since these phishers weren't about to listen when I asked to be removed from their list... <sigh> Further, the fact that I was getting these monotonous calls regularly over a six week period meant that in spite of their monotony the perpetrators weren't getting caught. This meant my bank, the phone company and law enforcement were spending mill..., no thou..., no tens of dollars trying to catch these people. <sigh again> And, it meant that making these calls was as dirt cheap to do as sending e-mail scam was. And... there was no reason why these people would not sell their list on and on as the collection agencies had. So, my crystal ball told me this was not a problem that was going to fix quickly. It was time to change my number, and I did. The moral of this story is that cell phone feature technology has some catching up to do. Now that there are phone phish scammers who will become as profligate as e-mail scammers, there needs to be a quick way to identify and report robo caller fraud. And there should be quicker and easier ways for end users, such as me, to block unwanted calls. Update: In August my patience ran out and I changed phone numbers. Doing so paid off. The new phone number stays blessedly quiet most of the time. Once in a while I get a call for the old owner, but, surprisingly, the people calling are night-and-day different from those who called the other number. They are polite, courteous, and stay connected long enough to find out what has happened. None are robo-call collection agencies and I'm on no phone-phishing lists. Changing numbers has paid off handsomely. |
-- The End --
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Volume 1: The early years 1948-1966 Volume 2: College, Army, first jobs 1966-1977
|
Volume 3: PC Revolutionary: Computerland, Beehive, Novell 1977-1989 Volume 4: Beginning The Great Panic: Divorce, bankruptcy, mid-life crisis 1990-1993
|
Volume 5: Being a Sea Cucumber 1994-1997 Volume 6: Searching for a new life, 1997-2002 (and discovering how deep the Panic Scars are)
|
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Volume 7: Recovering from Panic Thinking 2003-2008 |
Volume 8: Remaking a home in the USA 2008-2010 |
Volume 9: Searching for positive feedback 2011- |