Wanderings

I received a good review in Amazing Stories Magazine for Frogs in Aspic and yesterday I finally sold the first copy of the book. The title explains everything. There is no hook to it, so people don’t buy it. The stories are more personal and go back to my early influences in SF and Fantasy. I don’t think that it is blockbuster material.

All in all, February was bad and March is working out to be just as bad. I stopped pushing the book in my plugins and the purchases just stopped. I just finished my taxes and recorded about $500 in sales for 2012. I don’t expect there to anything like that this year.

I have several books pretty much ready to publish, but it seems a total waste of time.

I subscribe to the feed I have created of Free Kindle Science Fiction Books, and I realize that there are litterally hundreds of thousands of SF books out there. Everyone who has ever written a bad SF book is published on Kindle. I can’t write a book that stands out. I downloaded a few books that looked that they might be good and believe me, they are very very bad. They make your eyes bleed.

I transferred my 5 biggest websites to Hostgator.com. They load consistently now without error. One site lost some configuration information, but otherwise there were no problems. It took a while to transfer all the databases to the new host, and then I had to change all database references. It looks like they are all doing well now.

So if you can read this post, it means that you are reading my blog on the new host.

My programming website, BlogseEye.com is now on another server and no longer generates 500 errors.

I finished my Harmonica Tabs site, harptab.com, to the new server and it is mostly up and running. There is a lot of custom code there so I have to go back and tweak things.

My Blues Harmonica Microphone site, JT30.com and my tube amplifier site, harpamps.com are currently transferring. I have the database all set up, but there are tons of pictures and movies on those sites, so it will take a few hours for everything to get there.

I will be watching these tonight to see if they all still work.

This site, cthreepo.com, is ancient and has a dozen or so sub-applications and blogs inside of blogs. All of these, of course, use different databases. I will be using one of my unused domains to test it and then just transfer the domain last after everything is working. Cthreepo.com will take a week or so, doing a piece each night.

I have been getting 500 errors on all my 1and1.com blogs to the point of not being able to use them. It is hurting me financially and I am getting tired of it.

In the next few days I will be transferring some of these blogs to another hosting company.

There may be some problems as I transfer the data, so don’ hesitate to email me. If you get the 500 error just reload the page and it should eventually come back.

I’ve had this truck for about 11 years. I sold it today because I don’t need and can’t afford two trucks.

She will be missed. She was a very comfortable truck, but lately she’s been sitting in the driveway and the mice have been building nests in her.

First, this is for Justine. Mom made me a birthday cake. I, alone of my friends my age, still have a Mom who is around to bake cakes. I am very lucky. It is a wonderful cake, Justine, Mom made it from scratch. I had a piece for lunch.

Walter, the reluctant rooster, is in the process of being integrated with the other chickens. They peck him to the point where I fear for his life. He jumps up onto the feed bucket and they leave him alone. Sometimes he jumps down and they ignore him for an hour, but then, something sets them off and he has to run for high ground. He is twice the height of most of the chickens, but he is terrified of them. He has to go outside, soon. He is too big for the cage and still growing. He crows at the crack of dawn, and I need my sleep.

When they are free to range he is more social with them. He hangs with the black Australorp chickens who seem to have excepted him. Elanor and Deedee, though, don’t like him at al,l and they chase him whenever he comes near.

The hawks are about, so I don’t let them out until late afternoon when there is less danger. Yesterday there was a hawk circling them at 4PM so we had to stay outside with the chickens. The hawks won’t come near when they see a human.

I am trying to sell the blue truck again on Craigslist.

I priced it way too high before.

Larry sent me this picture.

I wish I could afford one of these. I would prefer a power amplifier tube like a 6V6, but otherwise a preamp tube is great. Imagine one of these with coke bottle 5U4GB tube!

Steampunk modified USB flash drive 16GB. Real copper results in a great texture with beautiful oxidation.

via RED Pentode 16GB USB flash drive Steampunk by SlavaTech on Etsy.

Even though I am out of work, I am taking a snow day today. I love the way a nice heavy snow makes the yard look. I took a bunch of pictures.

Here is the album from Picasaweb embedded slide show.

For those of you who use Picasa to store your photos on the web, Google has screwed you. Google now redirects to Google+ so you can’t access the old Picasa site to do things like embed galleries into your web page. I found that you have to use a link with a “?noredirect=1″ option. Google is, I guess, trying to prevent us from accessing our images from blogs.

Anyway, to get to the old Picasaweb site enter: https://picasaweb.google.com/YOURGOOGLEID?noredirect=1

The YOURGOOGLEID is your google user name (mine is kpgraham). If you can’t get that to work, you can use the google id number. This is the google plus number that is part of the google plus link. Here is what I get: https://plus.google.com/photos/111528746672332918757
Take that long number and paste in into the link above replacing YOURGOOGLEID.

I want one of these. I think this is the next level of computing. These controllers will soon be embedded in phones and tablets. Much better than touch screens.

See how it works

via Leap Motion.

It has been over a month now, and I’m still out of work. I have had a few phone contacts and an interview where I thought that I was being hired, but they never called back.

I have been spending my time working on the house and tending the chickens and bees. No coding except for an emergency in one of the websites where one of my rss feed sources went dark.

Bees: Looks pretty bad for the two hives left. I fed them last week, but not much activity.

Chickens: Walter is a screwball rooster, but he still has not integrated into the flock. We are down to 13 hens because of the hawk. The cold weather has reduced things to about 6 eggs a day. The chicken that I thought was sick is now running around like there is nothing wrong with her. I don’t know if she is laying, though.

Eggs: We have 22 fertile eggs in an incubator. Some are Black Marin which lay a dark purple egg. The others are Americanus which lay blue-green eggs. I expect about half to hatch and about half of those will be roosters so we will have 4 or 5 more hens (if we are lucky) by the end of March. We are eagerly waiting for the 18th which is when the first batch is supposed to appear.

Letting the chickens out in the morning is really funny. Here are my chickens rushing to see Erica and he popcorn.

We have this fool young Rooster named Walter. He makes a fuss when he is in his cage, so we wind up letting him wander the house. I have to follow him around with paper towels as he is not housebroken, and not likely to ever be.

It snowed a little overnight. I measured a consistent 11.8 inches deep (the distance light travels in one nanosecond). I measured a drift at 19 inches.

Here is the view outside my front door:

I shoveled a little in the front and around back to the deck. The cats went out briefly and Furry had an encounter with Snuggles, the stray cat who lives like a troll in out cellar.

I shoveled out the chickens and found we had eight eggs, including a green “Easter Egg”. I fed them in the yard and checked their food and water inside the shed. It was 45 degrees F inside, warmed by chicken body heat, but tonight it will drop down below 10 degrees F.  I want to go over to target and buy another heater to replace the one that died last week. Yesterday I put the last of the pumpkins in the shed, but they have only pecked it a little. They will eventually destroy it; they like cabbages better. I have to buy one when I go to get groceries tonight. The chickens need the greens in the winter.

The bad new is that when the temperature was up around 45 yesterday, I checked the bees and the last three hives are dead. I have no bees going into the Spring. I have to order some more bees for the Spring.

I have lost 7 pounds because I don’t have my Dunkin Donuts in the morning anymore and I am much more active. I check my mail, but I have not worked much on the computer. I want to do a little programming, and work on a short story, but I am too tired at night.

I have had one interview, where they more or less committed to hiring me (haven’t heard back, yet), and I have a phone interview next week at a big company right here in Rockland County – very easy commute. What I really miss is the morning bus ride. I don’t get to read, now, and I miss the conversations with my friend Varrick.