Amazon Context Links

Amazon lets you put a little code snippet on your web page that sets up context links. Keywords that Amazon recognizes are formatted as links and if someone clicks on it and buys stuff, you get a few percent back in their affiliate program. This sounds simple and painless.

I just did a link-type report for July 1-30 and this is the result of having Amazon links on my main web sites:

Imps.	Click Thr. Rate	Clicks	Items Ordered	Referral Fees
232055	1.16%	2691	33	$18.58

As you see this is 232,055 impressions.

The unanswered question here is the Earnings per page impression. That number is just about 8 cents per thousand links. Comparing this to the competition, I get over $2 per thousand clicks from my context sensitive text ads (a mix of YPN, MSN, Google and a few others). I get 5700 clicks on these ads, which is about twice as many as the Amazon clicks, but they pay 0ver 30 times better.

So the question is this: is the $18 worth it? By placing these context links did I loose a click to the more lucrative text ads on my site? Is Amazon diverting clicks that could have gone to the text ads?

The Amazon context links are getting better. I think that the system is learning about my web pages and highlighting better keywords as the preferences of my readers are analyzed. They are about twice as good this month as they were last month. I will try another month and see if they produce over $30 next month. If this is a trend it might be worth it.

I wonder why Yahoo, Google or Microsoft don't create the same kind of link strategy? I would like to put pay-per-click keyword context links on my pages, I think that it would pay well. I wonder why they don't have a product that will scan my pages for keywords the way Amazon does?

Here's a link that hit Del.icio.us a few days ago.
Make Money Online: 100+ Tools and Resources

This has an interesting section on sites that will pay you to review products and websites. You get about $6 per review, but you can do a couple a day, every day and have to have a blog that you reserve for this. It has to have a good Google Page Rank, but you can usually get a good rank if you have interesting content and a you link to it from your other pages and a few dozen other people link to it. I am thinking that you could make $400 a month reviewing stuff. Your regular readers will forgive you if each good blog post is separated by a couple of evil capitalistic blog posts.

I have signed up with a few of these sites. They have to approve you and so far no have contacted me back. You have to have an established blog with at least two entries a week for over a year. I hope that they will want reviews of musical gear. I don't have my hopes up that they will want reviews of SF novels, but they may want movie reviews. I can knock off a 500 word review of a movie that I've never seen in about 5 minutes. That comes to $180 an hour!

I will review the review process as soon as I can get an assignment from one of these sites.

Poker Jim's Comedy List

Jim sent me his list. I will wait to see if anyone else comes up with a list and then I'll take a consensus.

His Girl Friday
Raising Arizona
Miracle at Morgan's Creek
My Man Godfrey
Strangelove
Nothing Sacred
Diner
Manhattan
Annie Hall
Philadelphia Story
The Awful Truth
Sullivan's Travels
Some Like It Hot
Spinal Tap
Bringing Up Baby
The Princess Bride
City Lights
Duck Soup
The Ref
The Road to Morocco

John's top 20 Comedy list

This is Johnny B's response to my previous post:

Top 20 Comedies in no particular order -- (I'm assuming by "funniest" you
mean the best comedies as works of art as there are plenty of mediocre films
that have a lot of funny lines in them, while at the same time there are
also great comedies before which you may hardly ever break a smile):

His Girl Friday (the liveliest, best-directed, sharpest and greatest comedy
ever)

Sunset Boulevard (best black comedy)

Eating Raoul (my "camp" entry)

Dr. Strangelove (prophetic masterpiece)

South Park movie (generally not my brand of humor either, but still
enormously funny)

Victor/Victoria (like all great art creates an alternative universe)

Dinner at Eight (incredible cast)

Christmas in July (minor Preston Sturgis masterpiece usually overlooked)

My Man Godfrey (Carol Lombard version)

To Be or Not to Be (amazing chemistry between Barrymore and Lombard)

Broadway Danny Rose (an overlooked gem and Woody Allen's most masterful
straight comedy)

Born Yesterday

The Bank Dick

Horse Feathers

Zelig (Forrest Gump ripped off the idea but not the brilliance)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Duck Soup

Being There

The Producers

The Apartment (Billy Wilder is amazing in that he produced two great dark
comedies -- this one and Avanti -- that have hearts

Top 20 Funniest Movies of All Time

John asked me if I liked the Simpsons and he said that someone that he trusted told him that the Simpsons movie was the funniest film of all time. I doubt it. It may be funny, but it is not my kind of humor. I don't like physical or dumb-ass humor. I like clever and smart humor. I could think of a hundred comedies that I would rather watch than the Simpsons Movie.

I decided to make a list of my own favorite comedies. I used Google to find a variety of lists on the net and I picked over those. I did not find "The Bride Came C.O.D" on any list, neither did I find Peter Boyle's truly awful and disturbing movie (but still funny) "Joe" on any list. These movies mean something special to me, so I had to include them. This is a personal list. Each movie touches me in some way. The Simpsons Movie will never touch me. Cat Ballou is on the list because it is my mother's favorite comedy. I enjoy it mainly because my mother fell off her seat in the theater the first time that she saw it, she laughed so hard.

Here is the list:

1) Bringing Up Baby (1938)
2) His Girl Friday (1940)
3) The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)
4) Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)
5) Harvey (1950)
6) Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
7) The Graduate (1967)
8) Joe (1970)
9) Adam's Rib (1949)
10) My Man Godfrey (1936)
11) Cat Ballou (1965)
12) The Producers (1968)
13) Harold and Maude (1972)
14) Born Yesterday (1950)
15) The Trouble With Harry (1955)
16) It's a Gift (1934)
17) She Done Him Wrong (1933)
18) Sleeper (1973)
19) Dinner at Eight (1933)
20) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

I had a dozen more good movies on the list and on any given day, the order of these movies would change and other movies could appear in the top 20. The order is only approximate. I will think of others that should be on the list.

I know Bringing Up Baby will always be the greatest comedy of all time. You'll notice that I am not a Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy fan. There is only one W.C. Fields and only one Mae West on the list, because although their movies are funny, they are not really good movies. In addition to being funny, a comedy has to have a good, more or less realistic plot and stand alone as a good movie. A movie that is just an excuse for gags is not a good comedy.

There are no comedies after 1973 on the list. Somewhere in the early 1970s, Hollywood lost its sense of humor. I blame cocaine. I wanted to include "Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song", but it really doesn't belong on any list, except the one in my head.

The funniest line in any movie on the list is Bette Davis kissing Jimmy Cagney and then shouting "Mustard!" in the Bride Came C.O.D. This is even funnier than "George, Here George" in Bringing up Baby.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair

I finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair by Robert Pirsig on the way to work this morning. I had a long email discussion with Johnny B. about this book and the the sophists. He was reading what he could find of Heraclitus and we were discussing the Socratic philosophers and the break between Plato and Aristotle. I look at this historically because I took several courses in Medieval philosophy and science in my short ill-fated stay at Hunter College in the early 70s.

I viewed the first three quarters of the book as a rehash of the stuff that I enjoyed back then. I saw Aristotelian thought as the scientific realist approach and the enemy was the neoplatonism that had been developed during the middle ages. The trial of Galileo is the culmination of this, and although Galileo lost and recanted his science, the trial is the point where Aristotelian thought predominates and science is able to start building the modern world.

Unfortunately, religion has never given up its Platonist origins and seeks for the absolute in great abstract structures. Persig seems to go off in another direction in a silly kind of new age wifty discussion of quality. It seems all sort of pointless and and abstraction of abstractions. The end of the book is sad and disappointing. I was enjoying all the discussion until the last chapter. Persig makes it worse by giving us a follow up about his tragic life. The book wound up on such a down note that I am sorry I spent the time on it.

If no one wants to listen to it, I will put it out in eBay this weekend.

Potter tape

According to the tracking information from Amazon, my Potter tape arrived in the West Nyack Post Office today. It should be in the mailbox when I get home. I am currently listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I think is a very good read. I have four tapes to go, but I don't know if I will put off listening until after Potter.

The postponement of gratification is the very foundation of western civilization. Who said this? (besides Poker Jim.)

Potter Porn Clicks:
Last month I closed down my Britney Naked spoof pages. I immediately saw a drop of almost 50% in my web ad revenue. I could not figure out how this happened. Formerly, my most lucrative site was harpamps.com, where the spoof site started, but the traffic there dropped by 75% where at the same time JT30.com doubled. I could not figure out how the spoof pages changed all of this. I figured it was just the search engines reindexing my site and page rankings had changed.

I finally figured out that in the redesign of HarpAmps, I took out the links to my generated landing pages. These are keyword pages - for instance dumble.php, which is made up of only links to Dumble amp references on my site. (Dumble made guitar amps, which are very collectible.) I wrote a program a while back to analyze my keywords and generate these landing pages designed to attract the search engines. It must have been important, because after a few weeks of them being deleted, my traffic dropped in half!

It wasn't Britney that caused me to loose money, but my own mistake at deleting these links. About two weeks ago, I put them back. The spiders have indexed my site, and today, my stats are coming back to the way they were. I am back over $30 a day and heading towards the $100 figure - which is where I retire.

Strangely enough, though, my biggest keyword for all of my sites is still "Potter Porn". I used this in on one of my spoof pages and I am still getting thousands of people looking for Potter porn. I don't understand this. Who wants to see Potter porn? I just don't get it.

Hope for the younger generation

I play harp. Not all harp players are old guys. Check out this lesson from harp player Jason Ricci. Other than the fact that he needs a haircut, I totally get this guy, even though I am old enough to be his grandfather.

Potter Anxiety

I ordered the Potter book through Amazon, who promised to get it to me at or near the release date. The projected delivery date, however is August 1. The promised date applied only to the book and not to the the book on tape. I stopped at B&N to see if they had it, but they wanted $55 for it. Walmart, on their website, said that they had it for $44, so I stopped at a Walmart (only the second time in my life that I've set foot in one of these places), but they did not have it in stock. It reminds me of a Yiddish joke - "I'd charge only $35 for it if I didn't have it in stock".

I will have to wait until August first to start listening to it. In the mean time, I will have to try to ignore Ward's critic emails. His last email was just "Owl Dead". I don't want to know, and this is making me afraid that I don't actually want to listen to it. Ward is downloading the chapters from the internet and using his iPod clone to listen to it. I don't really like this. Rowling has done something very unique in the Potter books, and Jim Dale is the best narrator one could imagine. They deserve my cash.

Another lost submission

My submissions stats show editors loosing exactly 50% of my stories since I started subbing the latest pieces in May. This last one was from a gmail Address to a gmail Address. I can look at the messages and see that it was sent - I used the same email for the query and got the response. I sent it out again, but this jinxes this market: all it will mean is that I get a super fast reject when the reader recognizes it. I have one last story out at 71 days - I suspect that this one is a lost soul also.
I haven't used snail mail to sub in about two years. Maybe I'll send some of this last batch of stories to F&SF, Weird Tales, etc. It will be a strange thing if the Post Office is more reliable than the internet.

Unidentified Man killed outside Colo. governor’s office

Unidentified Man killed outside Colorado governor’s office
He reportedly claimed to be ‘emperor’ taking over state government

J hasn't updated his blog lately. I'm a little worried.

Man killed outside Colo. governor’s office

Generation Chickenhawk - Young Republicans

I like this video - Max Blumenthal took a camera into a convention of young Republicans. The mendacity sort of makes you sick to your stomach.

I can remember not understanding the Young Republicans back in 1968 when I saw these crew-cutted guys trying to act like activists. Now, unfortunately, I understand them better. They are sad cases. They are white Uncle Tom's, suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where they kiss the hand that would destroy them. They have, through some perverse reaction to stress, learned to love their enslavers.



Generation Chickenhawk: The Unauthorized College Republican Convention Tour from huffpost and Vimeo.

Heinlein Short Story Contest

The Heinlein Society is hosting a Centennial Short Story Contest for the best original story expressing the spirit, ideas, and philosophy of Robert A. Heinlein.

I am a child of Heinlein in many ways. I have written many (bad) stories where I try to copy his style, mood and philosophy. I need to get together a few good ideas and enter one of them.

It looks like we have a few months to ponder this. The winners will be announced in July of 2008, so I figure the closing date around the end of the year.

Centennial Short Story Contest:
"All stories must employ an original universe of characters and locations (sorry, no Lazarus Long stories), and should be fewer than 15,000 words in length. Entries shall be judged by a most august panel of professional writers, editors, and Heinlein scholars."

Habitable Planets for Man

I got this from Bob Sawyer's Blog (very much worth reading once in a while).

The Rand Corporation is a think tank. They produce high quality analysis on different problems and corporations and governments spend quite a bit of money for these reports. They have made some of their older documents available as downloads.

This PDF file for Habitable Planets for Man is an very good introduction into what it would take for man to survive on another planet or artificial environment. Sawyer claims that this is his main text book for world building. I have gone through about 30 pages so far and I believe him. There is a wealth of very technical information presented with good explanations. If you ever write a story where men will drop down onto a planet then you need this book.

The book is a scan of the original document and there are many minor problems with it, including, what looks like a lost page. It is about 40 or more years out of date on some things. It was written in 1948 and it was updated, but not recently. It is still a very good read. Scan through it now so when you write that space adventure and come up with a question, you will know exactly where to go to find the answer.

Habitable Planets for Man

Lost Story Update

My bad luck is holding. Coyote Wild, after buying my story and holding it for ten months, has told me that it doesn't fit and they won't be publishing it. They released it back to me. I had warned them that I thought that it was a tough fit in any magazine - not sf or fantasy - neither hare nor hound, but they bought it anyway. It is more of an early Weird Tales Bradbury style story without Ray's brilliant use of language.

I'll send it out again, of course, but I am deeply disappointed. The story itself was suggested by an article in BoingBoing and I was going to tell BoingBoing about it because a link there is worth 10,000 hits - so much for marketing strategies.

Lost Story - again!

I have trouble with my story submissions.

I submitted a story to a magazine last September and the story was accepted in October. It was slated for the December issue and then rescheduled for April, but there was no story. The July issue just came out - no story. It leaves me in editorial limbo.

I'd like to see the story published. I have a good story, although a hard sell, and I can't shop it around because it was already bought by this magazine.

I wrote to the editor, but so far no response. This is just my continued bad luck with short stories. It is the third time an editor lost a story of mine after a sale, although it is the first time that they didn't even seem to know it. Maybe the publishing gods are trying to tell me something. I have a couple of ideas for novels and I don't want to wait until I am 63 to start writing them. Maybe I'll have better luck with books.

Jim Shannon - Missing in Action

Jim's last blog entry, July 9, was about his computer acting up on him. It showed the classic symptoms of terminal hard disk failure. He mentioned that he might be able to get online at an internet cafe.

If there is anything I've learned in more than 35 years of programming; you must always act confident around computers. They are like Doberman Pinschers - they can smell fear and the always go for the throat.

Jim was over 100K words into his novel. I hope he had a backup!

I am attempting to send out positive waves right now to get his PC in line.

I expect Jim will go for a new PC. He was talking about an Apple laptop, which is very expensive. I use an Apple in my Web Page Design course and I did not have much difficulty with the shift of paradigm, at least as far as casual use goes. He can configure the old disk as a slave, install it as an E: drive, and try to recover as much information as he can off of it.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Spoilers

I've been trying to avoid the Harry Potter discussions on the internet, but speculation is rampant. I couldn't help it. I've read the rumors and I've read the supposed spoilers.

The best and most believable that I've seen is that Professor Snape redeems himself. This is something that I would personally like to see.

I don't think that Harry will die. That would make the whole series kind of pointless. If he does, he will return as a ghost to be Headmaster.

I have heard that Dumbledore is not really dead. He staged his death along with Snape to work in secret against Voldermort. This would make a nice twist.

I have heard that both Hermione and Hagrid die. This doesn't seem likely at all. Hagrid is all set up for a noble death and Hermione is annoying, but I think it unlikely that both will die.

I think that Voldermort will be killed by Harry, but in an unexpected way. I think that Sirius Black will reappear. It is possible that Voldermort will fall through the gateway thing that Sirius Black fell through and that Sirius will pop out, wand in hand, saving Harry from the remaining death eaters.

I think that Harry's Aunt will play a larger part than anyone expects.

I think that we will finally have a happy resolution to all of Harry's problems.

I have heard that Hermione and Harry fall in love and get it on. I don't think so. She is still too annoying, and I think that she and Ron are made for each other.

Malfoy will also redeem himself and I think that he is one of the two characters that are supposed to die. I am sure Peter Pettigrew is the other.

At the end of Deathly Hallows there will be an opening for yet another story arc. I don't know about this, but it makes too much sense to be false.

Reject?

Tell me if this rejection letter makes any sense to you:

I liked the story, but we already have a similar piece for this year.
Feel free to shop it around elsewhere, and if we don't contact you by the
third quarter of 2008 please resubmit it.

If you have anything else you think we might like, we'd like to take a look
at it.

Does this mean they want the story, but maybe in a year?

No Climate connection in Global Warming

One argument that I hear frequently by those trying to debunk global warming is that there is a natural solar warming cycle. In previous posts I have tried to show using graphs from the EU that climate changes are long term, measured in many thousands of years and that the spike in temperatures is a local phenomenon, which has no relationship with long term climate cycles. The spike is large enough to be significant. It is not a data blip, but it is too sudden and too extreme to be part of any normal climate change.

The article in the Guardian includes a summary of the debate. I think that the key quote is:

A spokesman for the Royal Society, the UK's leading scientific academy, said: "This is an important contribution to the scientific debate on climate change. At present there is a small minority which is seeking to deliberately confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day. We have reached a point where a failure to take action to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions would be irresponsible and dangerous."

If you come across an article or a web page and it says that global warming is due to a natural solar cycle, just click the X in the upper right hand corner of your browser, because this is just bunk.

HOWEVER...

Unfortunately, evidence of solar warming is statistical and we all know about damned lies and statistics. Solar warming is not a proven fact and can't be until it is too late. The evidence leans heavily that there is something going on, and there is some kind of link to increased carbon dioxide levels. There is much speculation as to how bad this might be. I certainly think that we should be concerned. Global warming is not discountable. I would rather be wrong about global warming than discover I am right after it has been deprecated for purely political reasons. I have a feeling that politicians who have been bought and paid for by those with vested interests in the energy sector will be telling us that global warming is bunk long after New York is under 40 feet of water and the great American Midwest is nothing but a desert.

There are numerous other reasons for cutting combustion emissions. These go beyond global warming and into the problems of acid rain, urban asthma, ozone layer erosion, and pollution related cancers, to name a few. Our dependence on imported oil is ruining our economy and that is another reason to support green technology. Even if global warming proves to be less of a problem than it potential could be, the are still many very good reasons for reducing our CO2 output.


New analysis counters claims that solar activity is linked to global warming

Style

We often think of style as being the mode and manner that make our work unique, but in publishing, style means something altogether different.

A style guide or style sheet is a list of rules for formatting manuscripts. Style is how to use commas or italics or slang in a manuscript. I have read in one editor's blog that fewer than half of the people submitting stories actually read the style guides in their How to Submit pages. Less than half of the authors who want to get published bother to format their manuscripts properly or use an RTF file as an attachment. Ignoring the submission rules is usually good for an automatic rejection.

I was sent a link to the style guide for the magazine The Economist recently. The guide is nice and short and full of interesting stories about style. The economists is a very readable magazine, despite its dry subject matter.

Here is a style tip for Science Fiction Writers:

Always italicize the names of ships. For example The Enterprise, The Galileo, The Star Fox.

Read the magazine's submission policy well. Sometimes they let you format the italics directly in the RTF file, but the RTF file has to be converted to html and unless you use the god-awful save-as-html in Word this is not easy. (MS Word adds horrible crap to the html when you save it as html). Most editors (especially for novels) require that you use underlining to indicate italics. If you have to submit in plain text use the asterisk *to indicate this section is in italics.* I like the asterisk (*) or [i] because I can search and replace in a text editor and never screw up the format.

Some editors may read this. How many people use acceptable manuscript formatting? What are your policies on formatting italics? J? Mark?

http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide

Zappa Quote

Johnny B sent me this:

"Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex."
-Frank Zappa

Antiques Roadshow

Last month Poker Jim and I went down to Baltimore with tickets to Antiques Roadshow. I am sorry that I've taken so long to get back about it. The images have been sitting in the camera and I've been mostly sitting on my ass. Getting up at 5:30AM to run around the lake hits me around 7PM and I am useless as far as getting any computer work done.

I wanted to drive, but Jim is a train guy and so we took Amtrak down to Baltimore.

That's Poker Jim above and there he is again in our seats. Amtrak is a good way to go, if a little expensive on the east coast. If you count the cost of gas and wear and tear on the truck, though, it is almost reasonable. It is comfortable and quiet, except for the woman in the next seat who talked everyone near to death.

When we got to the show we had to spend nearly three hours on line. We got there around 2:30 and didn't get to see anyone until after 5PM.. Photography is not permitted on the set and the pictures of the line with all the odd people didn't come out.

These are the tickets that I was given by the triage people. The furniture one was autographed by Wendall Garret, the expert who looked at Larry's box.

I collect old SF magazines, old Microphones and Amps. I wasn't going to bring my mics and amps as they are too obscure and I know the value of my magazines to the penny. I asked my brother for some antiques and he came up with this watch. It is engraved, Eddie Bauer, and says Christmas 1885. I stood in line to find that the watch is worth $150 and that the Eddie Bauer store didn't start until 1920 so this is a different Eddie Bauer.

Growing up, we lived about 3 miles from the West Nyack Dump (Clarkstown Sanitary Landfill) and on weekends Larry and I would go down to the junk section (not trash or garbage - only a dump aficionado would know the difference.) Larry, especially, found many treasures. I was older and I had discovered sex, drugs and rock and roll at that time, so I didn't go as often. One of the things that he brought home was this walnut box. I brought this down hoping to get the interest of one of the Keno twins. There was only one there and he was on dinner break so I worked with Wendell Garret, the guy in the wheelchair.

The box is a Federal shaving box. It would sit on the top of a gentleman's dresser and hold his shaving stuff. There were inserts that held a mirror. Wendell examined the drawer, which is all hand made dovetails with no nails, just some pegs.
It is walnut covered pine made from 1820 to 1850 in the New York area, value $300 to $500. That's a nice find for a dump!



I also brought a quilt made of cigarette silks from around 1900, but no one felt like looking at it and some guy said it might be worth $100, but he doubted it. Jim brought an old Indian blanket that he thought was worth thousands, but is not worth much of anything so he was bummed out.

If you go to Antiques Roadshow, get there early! It doesn't matter what time your ticket says. Get there early. Do not bring jewelry, silver or collectibles as these lines extend around the block and take hours of more waiting. Bring textiles, rugs, furniture, folk crafts, Native American crafts or fine art. These lines were short. I was amazed to see firearms was a long line. (The police check the guns to make sure they are not loaded before you can get in.)

Many people wore their Roadshow outfits, sort of like the old Let's Make A Deal. Don't bother, it won't help you get on TV. Only bring two things per person. They are very careful that you can't have more than two appraisals. I saw people with large carts full of crap. I saw lots of ordinary stuff that you might see at flea markets. It was almost as though people couldn't find any real antiques to bring.

The appraisers work from 8AM to 8PM so they are pooped out by lunch and are not in a real good mood. Some fans are very aggressive and I think that the appraisers are not very happy, so don't waste their time. Make sure you are polite, don't push things and thank them. I found a good way to perk them up was to ask if they got on TV today and then they come alive and tell you about their great find.

I am going to try again to get tickets, now that I know the ropes.

I remembered the scene in Neuromancer where Molly and Chase went to Baltimore and ate crab cakes. (I think it was Neuromancer.) Since I was in Baltimore, I had to get crab cakes and asked a few people where the best place would be. Three times I was told to go to Moe's Seafood, so that's where Jim and I went. I got two lump crab cakes that were nearly as big as my head and I had trouble finishing them. If you ever go to Baltimore, stop by Moe's -the best crab cake that I've ever had.

Next stop Camden Yards.

I am not a Baseball guy, although I played in little league and we won the local championship. The last time that I cared about a team was back when the Pittsburgh Pirates were in the race - a very long time ago. I've been to outings with friends to Shea Stadium, but I was not really into it.

Camden Yards, seems to be the perfect Baseball Stadium. It is small and intimate. The fans were great and seemed to be passionate without being too crazy. I didn't see the Shea stadium brand of drunks and idiots. The crowd was not as noisy as the NY fans, either. I had a great time, even if I don't know (or care) who won (we had to leave early). There was a team involved named the Devil Rays. What kind of satanic name is Devil Rays for a baseball team????

This is Jim, his brother-in-law Jed, and his nephew Leo. They were great and I really appreciate that they went out of the way to put up with a non-sports guy like me.

I go home around 3AM the next day. The train took forever getting back to NY. I had to explain to Jim that it was all uphill, so it ran slower. Just look at any map. Johnny B. picked us up at Penn Station and drove us home, which was very nice of him. We had to listen to a band called the Elevators all the way back up to Nyack, which I could have done without.

The next day I went over to see Larry and he gave me his Roadshow look of amazement when I told him the value of his antiques.


Here's a picture of Zak asleep under the forsythia. He was not at all impressed.

Audio Experiment

I did a search today for an MP3 hosting company. I found several. This is a the first one I am trying. DivShare.com.

They have a flash widget that lets you put a nice player on your website. This is what it looks like.

Domains and stuff

My harmonica links site crashed. It is being hit hard by spammers and I try to stay one step ahead by changing the page to add a new link. The spam robots still hit the older forms at a rate of 20 to 30 spam links a day. When a robot finds the new page, I disable it and create another one, leaving the old one as spam bait.

I think that I was hit by a SQL Injection attack. Since there are no user ids or maintenance pages per se, the only thing they could do was drop the database.

It wound up costing me $15 to restore the db. I have written a php backup program that backs up the site every two days. I made it generic and I will be adding it to all sites that use a database.

I have dropped the SF story of the day site and ScienceFictional.com now points here. My author's site KeithGraham.com now points here, too. I don't have any of my fiction on my sites anymore - I couldn't see any profit in it. I know, I am supposed to be writing to be read, but the fiction site was getting only a few hundred hits a month. I'd rather be read on sites that pay me.

I am going to start reading my stories into MP3 files again. I am getting a few hundred downloads a week on my audio stories and recently I have received some very nice comments asking me for more. I still think that audio stories are the way to go. The success of the iPod and now the iPhone just go to show you that the next generation will not read, but they will listen.

Does anyone know of a site like youtube.com that lets you share mp3 files in the same way?

Duotrope

Duotrope is a very useful tool for writers trying to sell their stuff. I decided that since response time is the highest concern to me that I would use Duotrope's statistics to send out my latest batch of stories to the markets with the fastest turnaround time. I sent out 5 stories to ezines that were supposed to report back in a week or less. Some were supposed to average less than five days. I got a few rejections right away, but they went right out again to different quick markets. All five stories have been out from three to six weeks. I have not heard anything in quite a while.

A long wait means that you have been considered for the final cut, but I tend to believe that everyone is on vacation, and they will start reading slush again in August. If my luck holds, two or three out of the five are rejections that have been lost in transit. I will start querying at 90 days. I hate the wait!!!!!

Duotrope's Digest

Update: 8 hours later I got a big R on a humorous alien story.

Fireworks

Coming home from poker, I stopped at the crest of the hill over the reservoir and I watched the fireworks. This is the video that I took.

I removed the video until I can fix the embed problems. I was crashing the blog under firefox.

Wizard At Large

I just finished listening to the abridged tape of Terry Brooks' third Magic Kingdom of Landover novel, Wizard At Large. It was very silly. I enjoy Terry Brooks, but he does have a tendency towards being too cute in this series. I've read the first two novels and I thought that Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold! was the best. The tape is not worth saving to listen to again. Anyone want it before I send it out for auction? I'll pay media mail postage if you promise to send it back when you are done.

The Wondrous Worlds of Terry Brooks - Wizard At Large


I understand that Terry has sold the movie rights to Magic Kingdom... and that a Director has been chosen and several versions of the script were produced. This does not mean that there will ever be a movie. This could be a good kids movie. The plot might be easier to bring to the stage than the Narnia books. Neil Gaiman's movie, Stardust, if it is a success, may spur Hollywood into making more fantasy films from popular books.

I am now listening to Philip Jose Farmer's book To Your Scattered Bodies Go. This is the first River World book. I've read the book twice and now I am enjoying listening to the tape while I cross the hated TZ bridge.

Testing new toy

I want to make fairly high quality videos, but I don't want to spend much. I recently received a $50 coupon for an online store and I bought an RCA Small Wonder for practically nothing. This is an intermediate level recording solution that does not use tapes. It uses AA batteries so there is no hastle making sure that it is charged. I put one of my 1 meg SD cards into it so it can record three hours of video as long as the batteries hold out.

Below is the test video that I took of my cubicle at work. I used Microsoft Movie Maker to convert it to a WMV file because there seemed to be an issue with the codec on the original AVI file. I know, I hate WMV files, too.

I removed the video. The embedded video was crashing the blog. I am researching other alternatives.

What the Cat Dragged In

Gracie the Wonder Cat drags stuffed animals home. Sometimes they are bigger than she is. I don't know where she finds them, but she seems to think that they are worth acquiring. She has a collection of half a dozen stuffed plush furries that she places on the deck for our approval.

She never seems interested in them after she gives them to us.

The one at left is her latest prize. I don't know what it is, but it looks alien to me.