I ordered my bees today. I put the $70 order in at Betterbee.com, which is up in Greenwich, NY. This is very late to order bees. Usually they tell you to order by February 1st. I hope that Betterbee is not sold out. I have not yet received my order confirmation.
Greenwich (pronounced green-witch) is up above Albany over on the Vermont border. Back in the 1990s I road up many times to see my Aunt Jean, who lived in Greenwich after Uncle Eddie died. Her house was two blocks from Betterbee and I remember seeing the signs. It’s about 10 minutes to the Vermont border and several times I bought a Christmas tree at a Vermont tree farm owned by one of Aunt Jean’s friends.
I have to ride up and pick up the bees on May 9th. That will take 3 hours each way and cost me about $50 in gas and tolls.
If you have bees, you need a hive.
I ordered the hive at the cheapest place I could find online. I got an unpainted 10 frame beginner’s set with all the little things that they charge you extra for when you start out. I paid $140 for the less expensive kit where you have to assemble and paint it yourself. The assembled eBay kits cost up to $250 and Betterbee charges over $200. I should get the kit in about 10 days. I can decide then if I need to spend more money.
I hope that someone finds this by searching for Rockland County or Nyack and beekeeping. I would like to be able have a bee buddy to call in case of emergencies. This will be my first time. I went through the very good bee tutorials at http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/. This blog has lots of good lessons in starting in raising bees. It doesn’t seem that hard. The bees raise themselves. There is very little that you have to do to keep them happy.
I will get Larry to come over and video me for each of the milestones so you can see me making the hive and then getting stung. Hopefully he’ll be able to video me harvesting honey eventually.
If you are reading this and Betterbee is still selling bees you may consider starting a hive of your own. All you need is a yard. Bees are very gentle and don’t sting. They are not like wasps or yellow jackets. They don’t attack and you can generally touch them and have them land on you without danger. Your neighbors probably will never know that you have bees unless you tell them.
I will be going up on the 9th, leaving Nyack around 6:30am. It is a three hour ride each way. If you live around here and order bees, I’ll pick them up for you if you donate something towards gas and tolls. You’ll be able to pick them up in West Nyack on Saturday afternoon on May 9th.
***UPDATE****
Betterbee has confirmed my order. Bees are coming!
I don’t usually watch much of presidential speeches. There has been little reason to do this for the last 8 years. Obama, though, is a tremendous speaker and his speech the other night was very interesting and entertaining. I am rooting for him, although I am not sure that any spending or bailout plan will get us out of this hole that we’re in.
Less so was was Bobby Jindal’s speech. After Obama, he came off just awful. He has been compared very often to “Kenneth the Page” on 30 rock. If you do a search on Kenneth 30 rock Jindal, on Google you get 92,000 hits.
Philip José Farmer died today at the age of 91. I remember Mr. Farmer as the Science Fiction writer who finally brought sex to SF, even before Heinlein. His story The Lovers is the first and best story of a love affair between an alien and a human. His Riverworld Series will always be on my list of best science fiction.
Ray Cummings is one of the important early writers of SF. He wrote for Astounding and Amazing in the first incarnations. Brigands of the Moon, however, is not readable.
Rudy Rucker was interviewed at selfpublishingreview.com. Rudy is one of my favorite writers. I discovered him when I started exploring cyberpunk, but Rudy is a different animal and his books are more like math-punk. His novel Wetware was the first thing that I read by him, and I still think it is his best.
Rudy has a blog where he is quite open about his job as an author. He describes himself as “mid-list”, which seems to mean that he sells books at a moderate rate, but is mostly ignored by the book industry.
In this article he discusses his adventures in POD publishing. He recently created and published a book of his paintings at LuLu.com. He has thousands of readers a day at his blog and you might consider this as having a built in audience for his work. To date he has sold 10 books.
His experience with eBooks is similar. He re-released some of his earlier books as eBook downloads, but sales over the past couple of years have totaled in the hundreds. This seems to be no way to make a living at writing this way.
He does not give figures for his fiction books as POD sales. I would guess that they are not really much better. I would also be interested to find out how his new books are selling through traditional publishing houses, just for a base of comparison.
He says that traditional publishing has little to offer him except for an advance. They do not promote his books other than to put a listing Locus, (which I doubt many people read). They send out some review copies. Other than that, the traditional book publishers take a big chunk of change for doing nothing more than listing the book in catalogs and shipping out the orders.
In the last few years some of the larger book distributors have gone out of business. You can only buy books at book stores or online today. In the past every department store had a good book department and every corner store had rack of paperbacks near the magazines. The book business is bad, and that means that authors will have to find new ways to reach the dwindling few people who still read for pleasure.
I managed to get onto their oh-so-slow system. They use a package with clunky java applets and ugly frames – very 1990s. I tried to change my password, which can be easily derived if you know my name, but the system would not let me.
Week 0 is for introductions. The system, rather than use a content system like GeekLog or Joomla, uses a third party course system. The chief communications method is via newsgroups (1980s).
Luckily, the software will not be how I judge the course. If, at the end of the six weeks, I manage to learn something new, I will count it as a net gain.
I learned my astronomy from the likes of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. You can’t get better teachers, so it will be interesting to see how this goes.
In this NY Times article, it is revealed that Tessa, P.K. Dick’s last wife, has finished the novel The Owl in Daylight that Dick was working on when he moved to the next level due to a massive stroke induced by alien mind control rays mixed with amphetamines.
Interesting that she could not find a publisher for it. I might buy a copy, but now I think I’ll wait for the reviews.
Wouldn’t a lost book by P.K. Dick spark a bidding war? Maybe Tessa can’t write for a damn and the book really really sucks.
Maybe Amazon CreateSpace just pays better in the long run. On CreateSpace you get $6 – $10 for each book. A traditionally published book gets 5% to 15%. So, if Tess got 10% on a $20 book it would be only $2 at a traditional publisher. It makes sense to do the CreateSpace thing in this case because the book will market itself, so maybe the book doesn’t suck.
Here’s the question: Does the marketing done by a traditional publisher justify the difference? Why aren’t there marketing agents who will take a percentage of sales in return for managing the distribution POD books?
By the way, I am still waiting for my first sale at createspace.com. No one out there bought my CD. I was thinking about formatting my kids stories into a book with a title like: 12 Science Fiction Stories for Kids – age 8 to 14. I thought it might sell better than the CD. It would almost have to. I think this might be a good anthology title and might sell better than the adult SF out there.
Here is a Bruce Sterling interview (in English and Italian) about The Long Tail.
“In the future a million writers with one reader each will be more important than a publication with 10 writers and a million readers.“
I think that is obvious. Today the value of one share of stock in the New York Times costs less than the Sunday Times. As Bruce points out, magazines and newspapers are thin anemic things. They have little content and less advertising. No one uses the local classified pages. No one reads the local papers or subscribes to the national magazines. It is cheaper and easier to go on the web and read a dozen interesting blogs than to read a generic publication that has nothing of interest in it.
I am getting over a nasty little cold. I have not been doing much of anything, including reading, just sneezing.
I ordered a new pair of glasses online at quite a savings. I got the eye exam at a department store and I am waiting for the glasses. I will blog about the results when the glasses arrive in the next few days.
I registered for the SAO short course in Astronomy. The international balance of trade make it somewhat affordable again. I have received the welcome letter with instructions on how to get started. I will blog about this regularly.
I have found a farm within driving distance that sells beekeeping supplies and they will have a shipment of bees ready for me on May 9th, if I want it. Getting started costs around $350, but there is twofer deal, so I want to talk to Larry about it. I’ve have to drive up just north of Albany to pick up the bees and hive. It would take about 3 hours up and 3 hours down. There is another site that will overnight the bees and hive to you for a total of $400 if I decide not to drive. I want to do this, but I don’t want to kill the bees.
There is a satellite launch on March 5th at the Kennedy space center. You can view the launch from a beach in Cape Canaveral. Air fares to Florida have dropped so much that it is silly to not go. I will ask Larry or the poker boys if anyone is willing to go down and share expenses for a motel room and the rental car. We could go down the night before, watch the launch and then get our ears at Disney World, or just hang at the beach all day. If I can pull this together I will post the hotel where we are staying and anyone out there who wants to meet us there can join the party on the beach. I’ll be bringing my harmonicas.
I have been taking a course in web design. I know, I know, I have been designing web pages for years and even taught 4 semesters of a course in it. I decided that I did not have a well enough grounding in the actual esthetics of the design process even if I have the mechanics down pat. Everyone agrees that I make ugly web pages. I would like to see how another instructor deals with the topic. I have been in some interesting disagreements here at work about creating simple effective pages without all the fancy clutter. http://webdesign.about.com/
I got a rewrite request on my story The Dinosaur Dance Floor, but I have not been able to get myself excited enough to do the work. Antihistamine pills take all the creative oomph out of your life.
FreeNameAStar.com had a bang up Valentines day, even better than Christmas. It has slowed down since then, but I am still running better than 50% over the same period last year.
I have a camera full of pictures from January and February. I have not found time to empty it out and now there has to be a dozen blog entries worth of stuff in it so I am shirking this. I will try to get to this on the weekend.
In order to save money, all contractors working for the county of Westchester have to take an extra week off without pay. This may go up as the year goes on. It means more free time for me, but less money in the bank. It also means that I may be staying home on a few Fridays over the summer in order to catch some of those Friday afternoon garage sales.
The link is to an interesting blog that finds public domain movies.
There are hundreds of movies that did not have their copyright renewed and went into public domain before the current Mickey Mouse copyright act went into effect.
Most of these are “B” movies or were filmed at studios that went out of business or were bought up by the big guys and then forgotten. Some of the movies look very good.
I have started downloading some of these.
Here are a couple of examples:
My Love For Yours (1939)
Bill Burnett, a resident of Bali, visits New York City, meets and falls in love with Gail Allen, the successful manager of a Fifth Avenue shop, who is determined to remain free and independent. AKA: “Honeymoon in Bali”
The Limping Man (1953)
Riveting suspenser stars Lloyd Bridges as a former American G.I. who crosses the sea to find his wartime girlfriend, whom he hasn’t seen in six years. Arriving in London, the reunion is complicated when Bridges learns that his paramour is caught up in a web of deception, murder and blackmail. Can he clear her name before they both become the target of a sniper?
I like this guy. I read his book (about his motorcycle trip around the world). I think he is very smart, but I don’t always like his opinions (or else I don’t understand them).
This is great rant about the banking system from 2/11/2009.
The key here is that Jim is shorting American Stocks, which means that he is sure that things will get much worse before they get better, and Jimmy is often right about these things.
Baen’s is having a short story contest. Up to 8,000 words that shows near future SF. Prize is publication in Baen’s Universe at current (pro) rates. Free entry. Electronic only (rtf attachment). Submit by April 1, 2009.
WHAT WE DO WANT TO SEE: Moon bases, Mars colonies, orbital habitats, space elevators, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, realistic spacecraft, heroics, sacrifice, adventure.
WHAT WE DON’T WANT TO SEE: Stories that show technology or space travel as evil or bad, Star Wars type galactic empires, paranormal elements, UFO abductions.
That’s my kind of story. I have several that, if I ever finish the damn things, will fit right into this.
Breaking into a pro market by climbing out of the slush pile is damn near impossible. The contest will insure that at least one of us struggling writers will make a pro sale.
I found an archive of old games in a disk that I had from the says that I ran a BBS. Eliza was a popular demonstration of limited artificial intelligence. The version that found is very limited, but is still an interesting idea.
I converted the program from GWBASIC to JavasScript. I think I got it to work OK, but I can’t really tell.
Eliza is a Freudian therapist who answers questions with questions. It should, if you play along, lead you to reveal your deepest thoughts and ideas and guide you to greater self understanding. I, of course, am not a Freudian, but lean towards Jung. Jung was into story telling.
You can add this you your own page. Just grab the code and paste it into your blog or web page html.
There is an interesting article at Space.com about a star surrounded by a red rectangle of dust.
This is interesting because my Star Finder program using Google Sky API shows the star quite nicely framed with the dust cloud. People have been using my site to see the star.
I get lots of spam, mostly for my older email addresses. I get at least 200 a day. Sometimes it makes it into my regular mail, and twice today I have received a spam message that is not really a spam message.
The email says it is a joke. It involves an old lady and her dog and cat. The trick is that the joke is unfinished. The email promises to tell you the punch line if you email the unfinished joke to 10 people. The payload is a spam link at the end off the message.
There is no way that you will ever find out the punch line. By the time I received the message it had gone through a dozen emails. Figuring that out of the ten forwards, only 4 will continue to forward it, it means that more than a million people read the email, and the spam link that went along for the ride.
Chain letters usually promise bad luck for breaking the chain, or else promise huge wealth. As such they are flawed. People recognize them for what they are. This letter only promises a good laugh.
Genius! Everyone will want to know the punch line. No one ever will, but they will pass the message along so that they can have at least a chance of finding out how it turns out.
I think I will research the perfect internet joke – a little dirty without being obscene, involving a puppy, a baby and beautiful woman. I’ll have a link to FreeNameAStar.com in the message and a million people will see it.
This guy, who had lots of hits, never made any money. In his best months with more than a million hits he made about a grand. I have made more than that on my harmonica blogs in some months.
The thing is that blogs that do not focus on a specific segment of the market do not make any money. I make money on the harmonica sites because advertisers want to advertise on harmonica sites. Harmonicas, the most popular instrument in the world, are big business. The blogger in the Newsweek article wrote about Steve Jobs. There is no focused market for Steve Jobs. No advertiser thinks that they can sell their product to people interested in reading about Steve Jobs. Without the tight link of content to advertising, there will be no ad revenue.
The one exception that I have discovered to this tight focus rule is Speculative Fiction. Other genres seem to work. Romance especially seems to make money. There is little or no money in SF and Fantasy fiction. The only way to get readership and ad revenue in spec-fic is to tie it in to comics, games and movies. I am a purist and I will not sink so low.
That being said. I am looking for an artist willing to work with me to produce some graphic stories. I’d like to convert a few of my ideas to graphic novels. I have even started to storyboard some ideas. Artists, it seems, are not that interested in working with writers. We seem bookish, boring and very uncool, I guess. It would be a difficult step for a teenage artist to take direction from an old guy like me.
I recently received a couple of invites to be a friend to someone whose name I did not recognize. I get these from time to time and they are usually spam bots. The name seemed familiar, so I clicked through and there was my cousin’s face smiling at me on facebook. She had used the surname Mansfield, which is an old family name on my mother’s side. The Mansfields were an interesting branch to the family and we have a diary written by one of my ancestors. It is from the 1830s and is mostly a list of disasters like train crashes, steam boats exploding and large city fires. My cousin used her own first name, but used the Mansfield surname to hide her real world identity.
My real name is scattered all over the internet, sometimes in places I would rather not think about. I wrote shareware in the 1980s and many of my programs were quite famous. I received a shareware writer of the year award back in the 90s. My program txt2com allowed someone to take a text file, wrap a reader around it and then compress it. The file was self contained and not easily altered. It was used for bomb making recipes, really dreadful porn and many other things that I did not know about. The bad thing was that my name was embedded in the file as the copyright owner of the software. I was not the owner of the contents. Searches on my name find some dreadfully bad stuff attributed to me.
In the world of the internet, I have been writing articles about harmonicas, science fiction, and web development since 1993. Yahoo shows 53,000 pages with Keith P. Graham on them.
I was thinking that it might be better to assume a Net-Name like Keith P. Mansfield to protect myself. It is like closing the barn door after the horse escaped, but in the future it might make a difference.
Yesterday this website received over 1600 unique visits. The lion share were for the page of Overused Science Fiction Cliches. Looking through my logs, I find that most of these are coming in through Stumbleupon.com. This is a web application where users recommend other users. Evidently, the cliche list is popular there.
One bad thing is that the stumbleuponers don’t visit any of my other interesting web pages. They just look and stumble on the to the next page. It would be nice if they hung around. I changed the cliche page and out some of my more interesting links near the top so maybe they could try those pages, too.
I need graphics of classic SF cliches to snaz up the site. It is practically all text right now.
My name, Keith Graham, sounds fairly unique, but Grahams are as common as Smiths in Scotland and Ireland. The name Keith is a popular name, especially for a good Scotch-Irish surname like Graham. The combination is fairly common. Look under a rock and there are good odds that a guy named Keith Graham is hiding there. The police once came to my house with an arrest warrant looking for a local Keith Graham. Luckily, I was able to convince them that I was not who they were looking for.
This site just popped up in one of my Google Alerts. Someone has registered KeithGraham.org (I own KeithGraham.com). He’s a motivational speaker, whereas I am a demotivational guy who doesn’t like talking to people. He lives in area code 210, which is in Texas.
All of us Graham’s are cousins. I even met a black Keith Graham once who told me that his Great Great Grandfather was half white and took his name from his slaveholder/biological father.
I read one of my Christmas presents this week. It was good. Galaxy magazine was an interesting alternative to Astounding. Some of the stories are weak, but all of them much too far out of the mainstream to have made it by Campbell.
My dark little cyberpunkish story RepFix has been accepted at Electric Spec. About 300 people submitted for about 6 slots so I am very relieved that the story made it all the way. The acceptance letter was very nice.
I have Tyree Campbell to thank, because I read his story in Electric Spec in the last edition and liked it a lot. He wrote a dark cyberpunkish piece about people with medical nanobots in their system, which make it almost impossible to die, even if you want to. I thought, hey, if they liked Tyree’s story they might like mine.
I have a dozen half written stories sitting around and no time to finish them. Maybe now I can force myself to make time.
I report my stats at Duotrope, but they think that I have an "unrealistic overall acceptance/rejection ratio". I can’t help it if I’ve been on a lucky streak lately, selling stories on the first or second time out. I should record the stats on my story Speed Trap, and then they’ll think my stats are more than realistic – downright depressing, in fact.
This is an example of what you should not do if you want another job. I (stupidly) once put some code in a program I wrote that said “Keith has not been paid”. It kicked off two months after I finished a project. I was suspicious that I would not be paid, and I wasn’t. It was a stupid thing to do because it guaranteed that I would not be paid ever, and it burned some bridges that may have eventually proved lucrative. It hurt me, did not hurt the target, and was a real adolescent idea. It is up there with the top ten stupidest things that I have ever done.
Later on I told a fellow programmer about it. Rather than take it as a cautionary tale, he put destructive code in all of his programs. If he was ever fired, his code would wipe the database a month later. A supervisor discovered the code, the programmer was marched to the door, and I had to review tens of thousands of lines of his code searching for this idiots trojans.
The programmer at Fannie Mae did not write a complicated worm or anything. He changed a supervisor script that had access to several thousand servers. The script checked the date and when the time was right it would have killed a whole lot of data on all of the servers. It was just a few lines of extra code.
The kick is, that the guy screwed up this stupidly simple three or four lines of code and the reason he was discovered is that the script crashed the first time anyone tried to run it. Access logs pointed to who had made the change. The guy was a bad programmer and deserved to be fired. Now he faces 10 years in jail.
The moral of the story is, as a programmer, you are in a position of trust. Management has no idea what it is you do and how much they depend on your honesty. Ethically, you have to act in the best interests of your employers. If you betray that trust, there are always people who are better coders than you, who can 1) track you down, and 2) fix any damage in a short time. The best revenge is to get another job that pays even better than the one you were fired from.
I read Alan Dean Foster’s Voyage to the City of the Dead.
Ray Cummings is one of the important early writers of SF. He wrote for Astounding and Amazing in the first incarnations. Brigands of the Moon, however, is not readable.
There is an interesting article at Space.com about a star surrounded by a red rectangle of dust.
I just finished this DAW 1978 annual. I really liked Joan Vinge’s 
I read one of my Christmas presents this week. It was good. Galaxy magazine was an interesting alternative to Astounding. Some of the stories are weak, but all of them much too far out of the mainstream to have made it by Campbell.
