Media Predictions for 2008

The thing that surprises most people when I talk about the future is the death of static media. I mean no more DVDs, no more CDs. I can remember when VHS beat out Betamax. I can remember when CDs made vinyl and tape obsolete almost overnight. I can remember when DVDs replaced VHS during one Christmas season. It is easy to predict that a new format will replace CDs and DVDs any minute now.

Apple iPods have made CDs obsolete already, but there are pirating concerns and copy protection issues that holding back the technology. I think that the record companies want to hold back the death of CDs for as long as possible. I think that they should give up.

Here's what I think should replace the CD. I call it the Music Chip. The Music Chip will be a sealed system. You can't record on it. It can only play the songs that were burned into it when it was made. It will have a small rechargeable battery and a socket for earphones. It will contain 20 songs and will cost about $10 retail and about 30 cents to make. (The recording artist will get about 3 cents a song, as they do now with CDs.) An optional charger will cost about $20. It will come in a blister pack with a small booklet. It will only play audio. It will contain a digital version of the songs, but the digital source will be embedded in the chip and it will not be rippable. The only way to steal music will be to play the songs through the audio port into the microphone port of a PC. The quality will be about the same as the old 45 rpm singles that died 15 years ago. High quality versions of the songs will be available for download with DRM (digital rights management) copy protection.

Prediction: This year there were single song musical greeting cards available quite cheaply. You will see music chips available for all the latest hit recording artists at K-Mart for stocking stuffers next Fall.

DVDs are dead. The whole idea of selling hard copy movies for viewing in the house has been marginal. The studios make money on DVD sales, only if the DVD cost is well below the price of a theater ticket and comparable with the cost of a rental. I don't want to see most movies more than once. The movie rental industry knows this. HBO and Cinemax have been "renting" movies through cable for years. TV stations have been giving movies and TV shows away free for years because the advertising model works well for TV. The TV networks are finally wising up and realizing that advertising works just as well on the internet as it did in broadcast. The networks are posting their TV shows online and making as much money per viewer as they made on broadcast. The trend is that fewer people are watching TV and broadcast advertising revenues are falling.

Prediction: Before the end of the year, flash-in-the-pan movies will go directly from theatrical release to YouTube. The movies and TV shows on the internet will have imbedded advertising that will be added dynamically. The ads will be tailored to the viewer as well as the movie content. The technology will alter the streaming video and overlay advertising, directly on the video over uncluttered portions of the picture, so that no amount of editing by hackers can remove it. Movies and TV shows will be available on the TV using appliances like the Apple IVideo box for free. The content will contain commercials. It will seem like ordinary TV, but the delivery process will be different. It seems obvious that the Cable Companies will want to do this, but providing free TV is not something that the cable companies can possibly understand, and they will find themselves trying to make a small profit off of being cheap internet service providers.

Other predictions.

Satellite radio will go live on the internet and give up the satellites. I think the only people that listen to satellite radio are the people that get the free introduction subscription and the renewal rate is very low. The iPhone can get the internet most anywhere for less than $100 per month. I suspect that most people will be able to stream the internet radio to their car speakers through the iPhone. There will have to be some cool software written with huge buffers to account for the natural low signal patches, but the software should be knocking around by next Christmas.

The first truly interactive TV shows will appear nearly 60 years after Ray Bradbury described them in Fahrenheit 451. If you will remember in Bradbury's novel, the TV sets were large flat screens that covered an entire wall (or two) and the shows had a character that was left out for the viewer to play. The software has to be smart enough to detect the interaction, but forgiving enough to compensate for a viewer who flubs his lines or runs out to the bathroom for a few minutes. These would be more than computer games and more like long running soap operas where you can interact with the characters. Computer games will go large scale with WII type interfaces and multi-person shooters will figure a way to shoot back, perhaps even with deadly results (I can only hope).

Remote presence devices will appear. Think of a Roomba crossed with a Mars Rover only with a face. Internet devices with a screen, camera, speaker and microphone will appear. Consider these scenarios. I want to visit Machu Pichu, but I can't afford it. I rent a mobile device that I can control with my mouse from the privacy of my own home and have the device "walk" around the ruins. I can take pictures. I can explore anywhere I want. I can talk to the other tourists at the site without ever leaving my desk. Suppose I want to go to Las Vegas. I can rent a little wandering robot at a casino. It has an arm that can put quarters in the slots. It has a pocket where I can put the winnings and have them shipped back to me. Suppose I want to go shopping in Paris. My little robot can go from shop to shop and I can talk to the shop owners or haggle with the vendors on the Left Bank. If I were a travel destination, I would be looking to buy several of these right now. If I were planning a wedding, I would rent a dozen of these for relatives that live too far away to travel to the reception. If I were bed ridden, I would buy one of these and ship it all over the world, wherever there is an available wi-fi or fast wireless internet connection. I could go anywhere in the world without leaving my wheelchair. Strangely enough, I can't find anyone selling these. I'll have to build one in the cellar.

Resolutions

I started writing my New Year's resolutions. After I listed ten, I went back and found previous year's blog entries on the subject and I realized that I blogged 7 of the 10 resolutions in previous years.

So much for 2008. I will not humiliate myself by listing them again.

At least I've never resolved to lose weight. I know that is a lost cause. The best I can do is not gain any new weight.

I hope everyone has a happy new year.

Year End Statistics

This blog and CTHREEPO.com in general are getting fewer and fewer hits. Most hits are on the cliche page and the black hole extensions. The blog itself gets 1/5 the hits it was getting this time last year. The RSS feeds still gets 250 hits a day, but I have decided that this is mainly aggregators and robots. Feedburner shows a steady 10 or so real rss customers.

Justine says that this is because I don't have enough cat pictures and too many tech articles and/or rants. I should concentrate on the cats and folksy news and I will be more popular. Nobody likes the technical stuff and nobody cares for my off the wall opinions. Well that's not so easy for me. I write what I feel is important at the moment. Many of the the things that I think about can't be discussed with the people at work or with the poker boys. Erica is sympathetic, but I doubt if she cares that my page views per unique visit changed in October.

The traffic in general on my sites is going up steadily. There have been shifts. Google changed its algorithms in September and my HarpAmps site dropped by half, but the other harmonica sites took up the slack and even HarpAmps is slowly coming back.

The total traffic for all sites was about 4 million page views last year. I am currently receiving about 500,000 page views a month or about 16,000 page views a day, but this will die down in January. The blog is only a few hundred of these viewers, but I care more about the blog than the other sites.

The surprises are that Paperthetown started getting hits out of the blue and HarpTab has been getting a huge number of mysterious hits from some spammy toolbar. These mysterious hits don't result in income, though.

FreeNameAStar did very well and paid for all of my Christmas Shopping, bought me an 1963 vintage amplifier, and will pay for my Astronomy course this spring. I was averaging 25 pay stars a day up until Christmas, but this has died down to nothing again. I made more than 10 times what I made last year on stars. I credit this to the site redesign. I didn't think that a change in web site design could make such a big difference in profits.

The Baseball Magic numbers were disappointing. I made about the same this year as last year in total. All I need is to have the sites appear in some magazine or mentioned on TV and they will take off.

Adsense has not increased this year over last year and has actually dropped by 20% in the last 4 months. I was going to use adsense to retire on, but I guess I have to keep working.

The Amazon money is mostly through beta context clicks. The Chitika pays very little but I have had it at the bottom of every page since August. Commission Junction is largely the income from clicks on eBay searches. Coast2Coast is a harmonica company, but I have to take the payment in harmonicas. Since I don't play much anymore, I haven't used this credit.

If there is a recession in 2008, I expect that all of this will go down. I think that the growth rate in internet traffic is starting to level off and the exponential changes I've seen in the past ten years will be more linear.

I am still waiting for the next big thing. There will be a web killer app soon. This will be a new paradigm that will change the way people use the web. I was looking at Justine's iPhone and thinking that this will part of it. The death of broadcast TV and CDs will be coming soon to be placed with Video on Demand (think youtube) and digital media (think mp3s). All of my sites are primarily text based. I've tried audio and video, but it takes way more time.

It's time to think about new year's resolutions. I'll have to look at the last few years resolutions to see what I wanted to do and failed to do. I think I may have blogged some of them.

Get your resolutions ready.

Oldest WWI Vet Dies at 109

When I was a boy it was not uncommon to see World War I "dough boys" in parades. They looked very old then, however my Grandfather was older, being too old for WWI but not old enough for the Spanish American war. I can also remember seeing headlines where the One of the Last Remaining Civil War Veteran Dies.

My father was a WWII vet and his kind are a dying breed. Even Korean vets are elderly and the few of my friends that lived through the Viet Nam War are rapidly approaching retirement.

Perhaps it is the coming new year, or perhaps I miss my Dad, but I am feeling quite down about this passing of the generations and the knowledge that I am part of this march into the future.

This week, as the old year ends and we wonder what will come in the next one, I am a little sad.


Oldest WWI Vet Dies at 109

Honor Harrington

I have an MP3 format version of a few of David Weber's Honor Harrington books. Weber is very up front in stating that the character Honor Harrington is somewhat based on Horatio Hornblower. Just as James Kirk is based on Hornblower, the female character Honor Harrington is in the end quite a bit different from the deeply conflicted character invented by C. S. Forester.

I listened to the first book in the series - On Basilisk Station, which has some intense space battles that are very reminiscent of the naval battles in "Beat to Arms" and other Hornblower books. I wish that the Honor Harrington character had more depth, in fact my main criticism of the the Harrington books is that the characters seem to be a little flat.

I am about half way through the second book, The Honor of the Queen, and I have trouble telling one person from another. My internal narrator has trouble differentiating. These books are long and seem to suffer with the problem of long periods of "Tell" not "Show" because there is so much back story to the political situation. Weber also flips viewpoints from character to character occasionally in a way that I find jarring. (e.g. When Harrington leaves the room, the narrative often continues from the viewpoint of someone left in the room. Either this is wrong or Weber is not doing it well and I find I have to mentally catch up to follow the thread.)

I like the books and I like Harrington, but there are many times that I would prefer to be actually reading from a book rather than listening so I could skim chapters until there was some action. The action, when it comes, is good. Harrington is not as complex as Hornblower or charismatic as Kirk, but she is a good solid character. I like a good space shoot-em-up.

One thing that is notable about the books is the political issues. Weber uses terms such as liberal and conservative that in our own world carry considerable baggage, but in the Honor Harrington world have more literal meanings. The book's liberals are against war and the conservatives don't want to spend money, but the differences between our own political definitions of these terms is very apparent.

In the book Honor of the Queen, two extreme religious sects give Honor a problem because they believe that women should be kept at home to have babies and the men won't deal directly with Honor. She winds up fighting on one side against the other, but it is odd that she has to defend such a sexist view. Honor considers herself a conservative and yet her positions and most of the political positions of her nation would be considered liberal. It is an odd mix. (I have no doubt that Honor will impress the woman haters by her courage and strength and strike a blow for woman's rights on this odd planet.)

One thing that troubles me is that the time period is two millennia in the future but the technology is barely beyond our own and progress has been reduced to a crawl. I find it difficult to write about technology more than a few score of years in the future because I feel that the pace of change will only increase, making the future very hard to predict. The retarded technology of Honor Harrington is a convenient trick to make the fiction easier to write.

AnthologyBuilder

Here's an interesting concept. I almost wish that I had thought of it. Send these people your stories and they make them available for anthologies. A person who likes short stories can pick and choose from a bunch of stories and create a customized anthology. I would guess that the anthologies are published through LuLu, which means that there is a manual step for each anthology sold so you have to rely on a human to format the stories, select the cover and set up the book with LuLu.com.

I am tempted to send them 20 or so of my published stories. You make in the neighborhood of a dime for each anthology sold.

The reality of the situation is that not many people read short story anthologies. I think they will be lucky to sell 100 anthologies a year. I hope that I am wrong and they sell many thousands. There are a great many excellent short story anthologies available and if these don't sell all that well, how can they expect the roll-your-own anthologies to sell any better?

Another drawback is that LuLu.com is already too expensive. These people will slap their own profit in addition to the $1.50 for the author's share.

Author's are paid after their account reaches $20, which is about 150 to 200 anthology sales. My opinion is that you'll have to wait about 5 years before you are paid.


AnthologyBuilder: create your own science fiction or fantasy anthology

By the Throats

"The Holiday Season has us by the throats, again."
A. Bunker

Ollie Watching Christmas Birds

Ollie was watching the birds at the feeder from the bay window. The presents, the tree, and the ornaments made for a good picture. Click it to see a big version.

Hermie Comes to Visit

I'm off today. I had to work on the truck and do some chores.

A local cat who Erica has named Hermie comes to visit. She swears that she doesn't feed him, but I think she does. Our cats don't like him. They sneak up, peer at him and growl whenever we open the back door.

Christmas Tampon Angel Ornaments

I have been getting thousands of hits on my PaperTheTown.com site. I created this site from a variety of old databases that I found. I reformatted the data and made a neat way to store the information. I never actually read much of the content and I am always surprised at what the search engines dig up.

The one page that has been getting the most hits is this:

Tampon angel ornaments!!!!!!

Use Playtex because they fan out into a cone shape.

Dip into water until tampon expands.

Remove and tie at the top to create the angel's head. Let hang (by handy dandy string) for several days until dry.

Paint face with peach or skin tone, and draw small black dots for eyes. Add blush or pink paint to cheeks.

Paint "dress" with glimmer paint. Criss-cross thin gold ribbon across chest (around neck).

Add yellow doll hair to top of head as well as a gold pipe cleaner for a halo.

For the grand finale...glue small gold angel wings to back.

Ta da!!!

You would never know she belonged anywhere else than your tree!!!!

People have to look long and hard to figure out where that little darlin really is from!!!

It's like my page is the only one in the world that explains how to make these bizarre things. I don't think I'd want them on my tree. I do like all the exclamation points. The person who wrote this was very excited.

I expect to see lots of these this Christmas. Send me pictures!

Chimney Stickings

Chimney Stickings Quote of the day:

"We asked him what he was doing down there and he said, 'What do you think?'"

Neil Gaiman Short Christmas Story

This is a short short short story by Neil Gaiman.

Nicholas Was...

For Justine

Fafhrd is not happy about the hat but at least he is resigned to it while I take a picture or two.

Christmas Music

I listened to some Good and Bad music today.

Dianna Krall's new album is the best of the bunch,

Jorma Kaukonen's Christmas CD has some good moments mixed with not so good moments.

Josh Brogan is very good, but a little heavy on tradition.

The Springsteen Christmas CDs sucked big time.

A Soulful Christmas is too much soul. All the songs start to sound alike. It would have been better if mixed in with the others.

I downloaded an album of "cool" Christmas songs including The Ramones, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. It should be interesting.

I will pull out Elvis and Sinatra next. These are two great Christmas Albums - on vinyl.

I have a blues bootleg xmas tape if I can find it. Nothing like T-Bone Walker singing Christmas carols.

It's starting to feel like Christmas

I got the tree in the house. It smells nice - That's the sign of a fresh tree. I like my trees to be less symmetrical and more natural. Because there was so much snow on the ground, I took the first tree that was close to the right size. Countless others had passed it by because it leaned and one side was a little bare. This is a lumpy guy, but he'll look good with lights and ornaments.


I bought a cat Santa hat, but Ollie absolutely hates it. I have to find a cat who is less frenetic.

Diana Krall - Christmas Songs

I am listening to Diana Krall's two Christmas Song albums. If you want something just right for sitting in front of the fire, sipping hot chocolate, and wrapping presents, run out to the local CD store a get these two. They are just perfect.

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 7

My Blues/Science Fiction story, Unplugged, is in this anthology. Perfect gift for someone who reads.

Ask J. Erwine, the editor, to autograph it before it ships out.

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 7

Christmas Tree Day

We cut a tree up in Battenkill (up near Red Hook, NY). It's about 70 miles, but I don't want a tree cut down a month ago in my house.



We only have 4 seconds of video, but that's the tree.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

This is SO true. It's also true for writing, playing harmonica, and dealing with cats. I am still trying to figure out how to deal with cats.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Frogs in Aspic

This is an Experiment. I Apologize if it takes forever to load.

Thwarting Adblock

I have a quick and dirty way to detect if the FireFox AdBlock plug-in is blocking ads on your site. I am still not convinced it is a good thing to annoy AdBlock users. First, AdBlock users aren't going to click on ads anyway. Second, AdBlock users are more than likely to leave your site if they are issued a nasty message. You aren't going to change behavior with this.

I may start putting alternate messages up if my Google ads are blocked, so that the space remains.

Thwarting Adblock

Gentlemen, Be Seated

The space shuttle may have been hit by a micrometeorite that damaged part of their power supply. During the 1940s and 1950s, meteorite impacts and showers were a big part of space stories, especially on TV shows.

My favorite meteorite story is, of course, Heinlein's Gentlemen, Be Seated about some space jockeys who plug a meteorite hole by sitting on it until help comes.

Spacewalkers to inspect station for meteoroid strike: "The station is not in any danger and is still producing enough power to support the arrival of a Russian cargo ship this month, said station deputy program manager Kirk Shireman."

The image is an illustration for "The Green Hills of Earth" where you can read the story. (from http://www.projectrho.com)

DNAML Book Format

In a recent entry over at Speculations, an author posted his eBook sales. By far, he made far more money with the DNAML format than any other.

I researched this. DNAML makes an authoring system that makes a very pretty book reading browser plug-in. I am not a big fan of browser plug-ins and I have many problems with the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader. I prefer to have online stories and books presented as pure HTML.

There are several reasons for the success of DNAML. One is that it supports DRM (Digital Rights Management). Normally, I would say the DRM is the enemy. I don't like copy protection on anything. DRM reduces the value of anything that it touches, but it seems that many sites that sell books online are using DNAML with DRM. This protects the files from being copied after someone buys them. It is annoying for the buyer, but protects the author and the seller. DRM has been shown to reduce sales of music. Of course, DNAML can be configured to not use DRM.

Another reason that DNAML is successful is that there are a number of sites selling books that use it. They may have chosen DNAML because of the DRM, but don't use it. The plug-in makes book reading very easy and the authoring software seems easy to use (I am downloading the free "try-it" version). The bad thing is that you have to buy the authoring software.

Anyone considering selling PDFs online might consider the DNAML format. It is smaller and faster than the incredibly bloated Adobe PDF plug-in. It works just fine in FireFox.

You should go to ebook.com (ShareWareeBooks.com) and try reading a book. The first time you try it will ask to install the browser plug-in, but that takes just seconds. You can see how nice the interface is. You can use the ebook site to sell your books, as well as hundreds of others that I found with a quick quick google search for "Science Fiction DNL".

I will try to create an eBook and post it here so you can try it out.

Update: I tried the trial software. It limits you to 2 pages. Two pages are not enough to evaluate it. I wanted to produce a short story and publish it. I tried to do a text flow of a story and it locked the application. I had to use ctrl-alt-del to bring up the task manager and close the software.

It seemed like such a good idea before I discovered the stupid trial limit and the nasty bugs. Stay away from this. It was a waste of time. I've already uninstalled it. I expect that I will be getting spam from them, now.

Article Sites

I snatched a rather large list of article website. If you write articles you can submit to these free sites. You can include a link or two back to your own site and the back link works well to boost your Google ranking. Other people will scarf up your article and place it on their sites, and with luck, they won't take out the link. Since back links are gold, this is is a valuable thing.

The whole process seems suspicious, but it is a well known way to bump up your traffic. First you've got to write an article. This is not a problem as I am always writing one dumb thing or another. I can start by expanding the TV aspect ratio blog article. I am going to submit a few to a couple of sites to see if it works. I tried putting a few articles on Squidoo, but no joy. I'll keep an watch to see if I get an click-throughs.

Unblocked

Westchester County has unblocked Blogger.com. I can post, but not much news.

• It is snowing like a sonofagun out there. I am a little worried about the ride home.
• Erica tells me that a local cat, which she has named Hermie, is now living in the cellar. Ah, yes, just what I need - another damn cat.
  
• My RCC classes were canceled this evening, making the Final Exam a problem. I will have to go to school next week on the scheduled snow day. The class told me that I am the only teacher that they ever had who has not taken a sick day. It never occurred to me that I get a sick day. I've never missed a class in the 30 years that I have been teaching at night.
  
• I checked the Maine real estate listings and I found a coastal home 5 minutes from the ocean for about $200K - cheap.
• Quantcast, a great free website stats site, has a feature where you can combine all of your websites to get aggregate stats. On my 10 biggest websites I have total 320,000 page views per month, with about 70,000 unique visitors. That's over 10,000 pages a day. Who are these people?
  

The Chimney Stickings Quote for the day is:

"A looped rope was lowered down into the chimney and attached to his foot"

Blogger Access Denied

The server group blocked blogger at work. I guess they didn't want me to post to my blogs. This affects CthreePO.com, JT30.com HarpAmps.com and BlogsEyeView.com (if I ever get back to it). My anonymous blog is on a WordPress site so that still works.

I have a bunch of stuff to write about so I am collecting my thoughts using Docs.Google.Com (an excellent writers resource).

First, this is the perfect Christmas gift for your friends who are religious but can't quite keep those commandments: http://www.reserveaspotinheaven.com/. I wanted to create a site ReserveASeatInHell.com, but the good domains were already taken. I can think of quite a few people that deserve a nice seat reserved in hell.

Second, My PaperTheTown.com site is suddenly getting thousands of hits. It has benefited from the recent Google Page Rank recalc and is now better off than some of my other sites. It has been making a dollar or two a day. It used to make only a few cents a day if at all.

I received a reject on one of my stories where the editor took the time to severely criticize the sentence structure. I may never write again.

Here is a great image of the moon that you can use as wallpaper on your machine.
Download it to your windows\media directory and then right click your desktop to select properties. Flip the desktop tab and browse to the image you just downloaded. pick Stretch so it fits on your screen and apply it.

The Zine where I sold one of my first stories ATSOISE, is a dead market. I am trying to get the archives from them so I can keep it rolling. I like the look and feel. It has a kind of Goth subculture feel to it and specializes in Gothic Horror so I have not contributed much there. I could get an editor to read the slush and I would manage the site. I want to do this because I would feel bad if the site just died.

I am very angry at an article by an idiot at the LA Times about Heinlein. Robert A. Heinlein is my hero and I resent it when people who have not read more than a book or two of his have bad things to say about him.

Robert Heinlein's future may be past

The article says that Dick and William S. Burroughs have more influence on SpecFic than Heinlein. Dick was nuts and his writing is mostly spotty with wonderful heights of insight and genius and long lows of hack writing. Anyone who has read Dick would know this. Burroughs can't be read without the urge to vomit. I challenge anyone to finish Naked Lunch without the need for frequent trips to the bathroom.

People who have read only Starship Troopers are afraid of Heinlein. I would say that he glorifies the individual and often the individual is a man, so that many women and some men feel threatened by his writings. If you read all of his work you realize just how liberal he was. He promoted women's rights at a time when women were expected to stay at home. He had Black, Jewish, Gay and Hispanic heroes at a time when all characters were Aryans. He wanted to redistribute wealth in an almost communistic revolutionary way. He spoke out against organized religions.

Scott Timberg, who wrote the article seems to think that Heinlein's movies count. Heinlein, while he was alive, refused to let any of his stories be turned into movies. The one experience he had in the early 1950s was enough.

The author writes that Heinlein was an "assertive right-winger, a libertarian nudist with a military-hardware fetish". This proves that he has never read Heinlein and is writing his article based on the movie version of "Starship Troopers", which was nothing at all like the book. I will admit that he was a nudist. His Lunar cry of freedom Tanstaafl has a Libertarian feel, but he was no right winger and the most military based book that he wrote was Starship Troopers, which was a catalog of the horrors of war.

BAH! I have to go gargle to get the taste of this out of my mouth.

There is a link between Google docs and blogger. I'm going to try to publish this. Wish me luck.

Ray the Christmas Elf

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Ray Doherty at the Scarlet Deli had his Bah Humbug hat on when I went to buy lunch. Scarlet is the best deli that I've ever been to. I've been eating their lunches for the last couple of years and I have yet to get tired of it.

Ray is quite a character.

Image is from crappy Razor cell phone camera.

Westchester County Surplus on eBay

The county auctions off surplus stuff. It is for pickup only and they won't ship. I have watched this for a while. I am watching for when they auction off the server formerly know as SQL010. This server has given me enough headaches over the years, but finally it is being decommissioned. If the price is under $20 I am going to buy it and smash it with a sledge hammer.

They recently auctioned off my old cubicle and they typically have laser printers for under $30. Lately they have been selling off Jewish wrapping paper and other items that were abandoned on county property. The PC's that they auction off go cheap.

Since they don't ship, the items have to be picked up in Elmsford, NY. I was thinking about running a service that would broker the items and ship - for a nice fee, but it is too much work. I might buy some stuff cheap and re-auction it and ship the stuff, but what would I do if I got stuck with 5,000 happy passover paper plates?

Santa Claus in Orion

Right in time for the festive season, ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has discovered a huge cloud of high-temperature gas resting in a spectacular nearby star-forming region, shaped somewhat like the silhouette of Santa Claus.

In other images on the site it does look a little like Santa, but you have to have a little imagination to see it. It also helps when they draw in the eyes, although they should have also drawn in his pipe.

(via Dynamics of Cats at Scienceblogs.com)

Chimney Stickings

Today's Chimney Sticking quote:

Listen to your mother-in-law. Don't climb down chimneys. And I probably need to lose weight.

Damn Astrology

I had to refund three star names yesterday because irate customers refuse to believe that Astrology has no physical connection to the current position of the stars in the sky. The astrological sign Aries, for instance is the region of the sky starting at the vernal equinox and extending 30°. This region no longer contains the constellation Aries. The earth's wobble results in the precession of the equinoxes. Our calendar makes up for this with leap years and leap minutes to keep the vernal equinox in the month of March.

The constellation in the sky over the vernal equinox is now Pisces and it will eventually move into Aquarius around 2600 AD. This is what is meant by the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The age of Aries was from 1658 BC and ended in ca. AD 498, when the age of Pisces began.

So people expect when they register a star in the astrological house of Aries that they will get a star located within the boundaries of the constellation Aries. What they get is a star near Pisces. Astrologers are still using the books and charts written 2,000 years ago and don't know that the stars have moved.

I am seriously thinking about removing the Zodiac option from the extras. There is a certain satisfaction, though, of taking money from people who believe in astrology. Silly people will spend their money on silly things, so I might as well give them an outlet for their silliness.

I have put disclaimers on the the website. Luckily, silly people can't read very well and I don't expect it to affect sales. I only hope that it makes silly people feel silly enough that they won't ask for refunds after paying for a Zodiac sign.

TV Aspect Ratio

My mother bought one of those newfangled LCD TVs. It has a 16:9 aspect ratio and even though it is technically a really big screen, the picture is smaller.

The issue is aspect ration. Wheel of Fortune (the only show Mom really cares about) comes into the house designed for an old fashioned TV set. These sets had a 4:3 ratio. When my Mom watches Wheel on the wide screen, there is a band of unused space on the sides and the height of the picture is actually smaller than an old style TV with the same diagonal measurement.

Because of the way TV screens are measured, you get a smaller picture on the new style TVs.

TV companies still measure the diagonal size of the TV. This creates a situation where it is difficult to compare an old style TV with the newer ones. If you are going to watch mostly the old style broadcast stations, the new screen will do you no good. Even if you watch all high def digital TV, the height of the new picture is still smaller than an old style TV.

Here is a visual about what I am talking about

First the old fashioned TV that we all grew up with:

Now here is what it would look like on a 16:9 LCD flat screen TV with the same diagonal measurement:


The bottom picture is wide screen, but not has high. Pat and Vanna are obviously smaller. The TV manufactures are fooling us. The TV screen is smaller, even if it is wider. The part of the picture that we care about is smaller!

I want to be able to see the picture from across the room and if I pay extra money, I want Vanna to be bigger - yeh!

Here is the result of some simple calculations

To replace an old style 20 inch screen you need to buy a 24 inch flat panel TV.
To replace an old style 24 inch screen you need to buy a 29 inch flat panel TV.
To replace an old style 26 inch screen you need to buy a 31 inch flat panel TV.
To replace an old style 32 inch screen you need to buy a 39 inch flat panel TV.
To replace an old style 37 inch screen you need to buy a 45 inch flat panel TV.
To replace an old style 40 inch screen you need to buy a 49 inch flat panel TV.

Microsoft Office Live

I have blogged about Office Live before. It is similar to Google Pages, but it gives you a domain name for free. The site is good for what I would consider a brochure site. You can't really do much with it except create static pages. It would be an excellent site for an artist or writer to display their work. The interface is not so difficult, but there are limitations. DO NOT PAY THE EXTRA MONEY! Microsoft wants $19.95 to upgrade to their full feature site. Don't fall for it. If you want hosting, then go to HostGator.com or 1and1.com for a nice inexpensive hosting package.

Use the Office Live site for what it is good for. Make a brochure or a showcase site. Get the free domain name. Upload your art or paste your stories into the easy to create web pages. They have a blog now and seem to have cloned FaceBook and MySpace. You can create a site where this is all mashed together.

The reason that I mention Office Live is that they are rolling out the beta to a document sharing system. It will be similar to Google Documents. I have all of my personal spreadsheet files on Google Pages now and many of my checklist and lists files. I even have a few stories there. I do not recommend the web based word processor, though because it is not responsive enough and I've gotten used to Office XP and its little bells and whistles.

I uploaded a bunch of story files to the Microsoft SkyDrive folders. I was thinking about keeping my master copies there and downloading them when I need to work on them. Their new document system implies that you can treat your online files like local ones and can edit them without downloading them. Is this an office browser plug-in or is it an extension to Word? It will be interesting to see.

Microsoft Office Live

Mars Party

I just got my RCC email going. I found out that I have a ton of messages. Most of these messages are spammy, but one of the messages caught my eye.

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students:

I would like to remind of Mars Opposition Party 2007 On Saturday December 8th from 9:00 PM to 12:00 Midnight at Rockland Community College. This free public event will be held at South side of the fieldhouse parking lot.

This Fall, Mars will be at a closer distance to Earth than at any other time in a two year period.

With Mars high in the crisp autumn sky, don't miss the opportunity to view this mysterious planet up close through some of the best telescopes available.

Plenty of snacks and hot refreshments will be served. Please dress warmly and bring your family for fun filled evening.

Best regards,
Saeed Safaie

I am tempted to go hang out with these nerds. I think, if the weather is clear, that it might be fun. The long term forecast shows partly cloudy for Saturday so I might go for it.

Chimney Stickings

Today's Chimney Sticking Quote:

"Lt. Mike Flores of the Albuquerque Fire Department said that no one should ever give this maneuver a try"

Chimney Stickings

Chimney Stickings

Today's Chimney Sticking quote is:
"They pulled him from the other side and I managed to pull him out by his tail"

PayPal Storefront Widget

PayPal Labs has a Beta of its Storefront Widget. This is a flash app that allows you to create a storefront using PayPal. It is nice for someone who is selling a virtual item or a flat rate item. The widget does not have any allowance for calculating shipping costs. For selling hard objects, like microphone parts or books, you need to calculate a shipping fee that is country based so that you can have different rates for different countries.

If you are selling MP3s or PDF books, then the product is very useful. I created a store with 15 items in about 45 minutes.

Pros:
Fully integrated into PayPal.
Nicely done storefront design.
It works!
Quick to create a small storefront with fix priced items.
Sized to fit nicely in the sidebar of a blog.

Cons:
Uses a fixed aspect ratio image - It resizes your images to fit in the space allowed, but stretches and distorts them.
Not much choice in the basic formats.
No options allowed such as size or color.
No shipping options such as shipping weight, quantity discount, packaging costs etc.
No sales tax calculations (which makes this illegal in most states).
No allowance for extras like insurance.
No allowance for express shipping.
No allowance for overseas shipping rates.

(I researched this and if you use PayPal cart checkout it will calculate shipping and tax for you. You have to do this as a preference for your account so it does not facilitate separate stores. I would have to open a new PayPal account for my JT30 store so as not to use shipping on my star store.)

Now it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that a talented flash programmer can whip up in an afternoon, not something that a team at PayPal labs would produce. I could make a similar item using javascript in a few hours, and indeed I am thinking that I might try it some evening when the TV sucks - actually almost any evening.

Yes, that's the ticket. I should be able to do this in JavaScript with a PHP back end to retain the settings. Rather than try it with my JT-30 store, though, I will try to create a widget to "Buy the Book" that authors could use. I'll check out the SamsDotPublishing.com book sales sites and try to incorporate all of their features into a 160x400 badge that will fit on a blog, so that bloggers can sell their books on their site.

Web Site Offer

I received an offer to buy my star site from a company in France who is in the same business.

How do you value a website? It is probably correct to figure that the current income from the site is not going to change. (This is probably not true because the site is growing quite a bit. This year I am doing roughly six times the business of last year.) I did a pessimistic calculation and found that the annuity 10 year value of the website is $140,000. An optimistic estimate is about three times that. I would value the site somewhere in the middle - $300,000 is a nice round figure.

Someone wanted to buy HarpTab.com recently and I quoted them $18,000 using a similar valuation and I never heard from them again.

This last request reeks of nigerian scam. If they ask my bank account number so they can transfer the funds, we'll know what they are up to.

Chimney Stickings

Chimney Stickings is still working. Don't forget to check it out every day until Christmas.

"The homeowner, Wilna van Reenen, was horrified to see hands sticking out of the chimney"

Server Error Haiku

I received an Error 500 server error this morning in the form of a Haiku. This is cute:

Server has error

It can not open this file

It must be repaired

This is the morning for haikus. Brust had this one on his blog:

There was a young man of Honshu
Who tried limericks in haiku.
But

Winter Birds

This is the last set from today's pictures. These didn't come out as well. The birds were Juncos, Chickadees, Titmice and Sparrows and are not as showy as the Bluebirds and Cardinals who sometimes show up for lunch. I took these in the middle of snow storm so they are a little dark.

Fall Cats

Just last weekend the temperature was in the 50s and low 60s. I took these pictures of our cats playing in the beautiful fall leaves.

Winter Cats

Winter Cat Gallery

Winter Crows

I took some pictures of our crow family. I thought that they might come out spooky, but the snow filled sky and the black crows hides some of the detail.

First Snow

Today it snowed. I have lots of good pictures, but I will start with the wild Christmas Tree in the back yard. I should cut it down and use it, but I really like it growing wild back in the woods.



Here it is showing its baby brother better.


Click images for large version.

Chimney Stickings

Last year there were a flurry of stories in the news about people getting stuck in chimneys. I was going to write a story about a man stuck in a chimney so I started collecting the links. I never wrote the story, but I have the links.

Here is a one a day blog about people and things being caught in Chimneys. The software will reveal a new stuck in the chimney story every day until Christmas - in honor of Santa Claus.


Chimney Stickings