Today I learned about a new comic book site hosted by Mark Waid. The site is called thrillbent.com and I’m quite interested in taking a deeper look. I asked Scott about Mr. Waid and if I’d like his work and he said “Duh, yes. You’ll love him.”
After the digital comics first panel and a recent look at the @comixology app I feel it is only fair and appropriate to blog about how they have improved because they definitely have.
Attending a panel from a company called iVerse about Digital Comics. Lots of talk about price points, acknowledging the 800 pound silverback in the room, Apple, and talking about digital libraries. Social networking is still the red-headed stepchild, phrases like “… Twitter, whatever.” which I find *hilarious*.
What I find really interesting is when these digital comics will become so mainstream that they feel comfortable moving forward with a Netflix model where you pay a monthly fee and can access as much as you like.
Now we’ve entered the dimly lit world of licensing versus ownership, flooding, fire, or company collapse. How can you secure your digital goods if you lose access one way or another? Thinking about this topic with some of the things I’ve experienced in my professional life you would just need a source-escrow agreement so when the company fails, the content you purchased is made available to you in an open format. This doesn’t exist now, but it could.
At C2E2. Got my GLNG #16 signed by Arron Kuder. Had lunch at a really great new food vendor at the con, called Ambrosia. It was quite good if not a little expensive. At least I won’t be starving by dinner time.
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I recently broke down and bought myself new shoes to replace the old Sketchers that I thought I could gamely patch with hot-glue. That patch did do the trick, but then other parts of the shoe started to fail, splitting apart so much that I could see my socks peeking out when I walked. Thankfully I have not had to ford a lot of slush this past winter or deal with any ponding water now that spring is here, but now that spring is here, it was only going to be a matter of time before I would be truly sorry, with soggy feet.
While out shopping for shoes for Scott we ended up stopping at a Famous Footwear shop in the local mall. As Scott is so fond of saying, I apparently have a thing about shoe shopping. He says it’s a thing, I notice a little bit but perhaps it’s more than just a little to an outside observer. That day Scott didn’t find any shoes to replace his sorry kicks but I did. I always have issues with buying shoes because I have big wide feet and so a lot of popular shoe manufacturers are just out of the question. UnderArmour, Nike, Adidas, the sportier brands just can’t cut it. They cater to little precious narrow little baby-man feet, not these clod-hoppers at the end of my ankles. I was just buzzing around, not really seriously looking for anything in particular but came across a nice pair of leather shoes and I spotted the soles, which bore the distinctive characteristics of Dr. Marten. So, what about English shoes that are made in Vietnam? Well, the english bits are pure marketing hokum, but we don’t pay any attention that they were shipped here on a slow boat from Asia. Anyhow, these new shoes fit surprisingly well and were very easy on my feet. As usual new shoes radically correct the pronation in my feet and so my balance is shot for a few days while I re-acclimate to a proper foot geometry. These particular ones bear the model name of “Sussex” and the more I wear them, the more I like them. Apparently, and I don’t know if this is a real kind of shoe or just some goofy name that the Dr. Marten’s company has invented for these shoes, but they apparently are “chukkas” and they are not as low as sneakers, not as high as high-tops, have very few eyelets for the laces, but have a very comfortable footpad which makes walking quite enjoyable on my feet. They are made of a really nice leather and I was reading around on how to best care for them so they don’t crack and wear-out faster than they should and every pointer suggested cleaning and sealing the leather with baby oil. Frankly that idea worked out tremendously well. It darkened the leather just a little bit, but it also waterproofed the leather which is kind of nice to see when you accidentally tromp through a puddle and your shoes resist every single drop. Anyhow, ever since I bought them and wore them I’ve been very happy with them. My shoes no longer squeak, leak, or look like they’ve been run over by a lawnmower.
So if you’re looking for shoes, I can heartily recommend these. I’ve just about had enough with Sketchers as they don’t really last as long as I think they should and how they fall apart is kind of pitiful. I’ve kept them because while they aren’t really good shoes any longer, they’ll do quite nicely when I have to mow the lawn or do gardening. It will be very interesting to see just how long these Doc Martens last. I’m rough on shoes, my pronation is rather, and it’ll be a real challenge to see if I warp and wear these shoes down or if they are as durable as the marketing staff at Doc Martens says they are. We shall see. Due to a pricetag goofup at the shoe store I got these for about $60, when the list is $90. Even still, I think these shoes would have been a steal at market prices even, but I am glad for the accidental deep discount.
I tried a fair bit of cleverness just now. I found a bit of fan fiction online and copied the text to my Drafts app on my iPad. I’m at Chocolatea on Wifi and no access to any devices other than my iPhone, my iPad, and my Nook HD.
I wanted to get the text from my Drafts app over to my Nook HD. The best way? ePub. Or at least that was the challenge I had set for myself. Now I knew I could probably do it with the apps I had, Wifi, and Dropbox gluing it all together.
I opened the text in my Drafts app in Pages, which allowed me to export it in DOC format to my Dropbox app. So that was easy enough. Now I had my fiction in DOC format on Dropbox. None of the online file converters understands Dropbox, nor how to unpack the Public link URL that you can make with Dropbox. Instead of getting your document, you get HTML gunk from Dropbox. So I have another app on my iPad called Files Connect. I used that app to copy the DOC file from my Dropbox to my Windchilde account, so I could host it online *simply* (hah). Once I had a URL link that worked for the DOC file I went to Online-Conversion.com which provides a public service to convert DOC files into ePub format. I handed it my URL, let it go and it offered to email-attach the results to my email. Off it went. I opened Mail on my iPad, opened the email from the service, found the attachment and tried to open it on my iPad. My iPad gave up and offered to send it to a host of other apps that might handle ePub format, one of those was Dropbox, so I saved the data off to my Dropbox. Then I connected to Wifi on my Nook HD, started the Dropbox app and found my ePub file. I renamed it, then I exported it to my Nook HD.
What a mess. I got what I wanted to do but it took me about 2 hours of head-butting against online services and a lot of rigamarole just to do this one thing. I was half-hoping that Pages on my iPad would be Dropbox aware, and ePub aware, and it isn’t. No free apps exist that I could see that create ePub files from pasted in text or from other file formats.
At least it used up some time waiting for Scott to get out of work. At least there is that. As for interoperability, that’s hilariously not going to happen. At least not between iOS and Nook.
If you were to judge your favorite book by its cover, would you still read it?
My favorite book is “What Dreams May Come” by Richard Matheson. The cover art for the book is muted and features a man standing before a doorway in the sky. The words, the art, it’s hard for me to answer this prompt because I’ve read this book and I know I love it. I think that it would engage me even if I had never read it before. It would be better to judge a book I haven’t read and then read it and see if the judgement of the cover matched the experience.
I will say that a book that I saw by the cover, which was George Nader’s Chrome did intrigue me and I judged the book by the cover, at least positively and after I read it I was rewarded with a great experience. So in that case, judging a book by it’s cover, even if it wasn’t my favorite worked out for the best.
There are book covers that, lets face it, are awful. If I had to judge the Wheel of TIme series by it’s cover art I would just yawn myself to sleep. I wouldn’t be interested in any of it because I’d think it was a time travel story told by steampunk amish. Thankfully I was exposed to the books before I got a look at the covers and found myself loving the series despite it’s rather lame cover art.
I hate that books sell by their shiny cover art and not as much by their merits. Perhaps that’s something that eBooks can address as those, like the ones gathered from Project Gutenberg lack cover art, letting the text stand on it’s own for good or ill.
Back in 2010 there was a new hamburger shop opening up to much fanfare. The place was called SmashBurger and I wrote a review of the establishment. I didn’t like their food and now I have reason to not like them for anything else. According to this article the owners of our local SmashBurger are homophobic bigots.
So, wretched food and hate?! Golly, missing that will be a joy! If you like this place, I seriously ask you to think about where you buy things, and who you support with your money. Culvers is just a few miles down the road, you can get better food, cheaper, without the hate.
At least JetPack for WordPress 2.2.1 upgraded without any fanfare. Everything still works too! For the blogs that I manage that had it, it’s updated. Wheee!
P.S. If anyone would like their own blog on our domain just let me know. I can set it up for you lickety-split and even manage it for you if you like. For free. Yes-suh. 🙂
My abandonment of Google Reader is complete now. I have found an app that is independent of Google Reader, it’s called feedHopper and it’s available on the iOS App Store. It means that I’ll only be able to handle my RSS feeds on my iPad, but that’s okay, since that was where I wanted them to be anyways. The app is quite handy, you can set up Google Reader as a sync service, hoover in your feeds and then disconnect. Kicking Google Reader to the curb as it were. It comes feature complete with lots of sharing options including my beloved Pocket service.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Google Reader. I’m happy with what I’ve got. I recommend this app to anyone who used to use Google Reader. Now it’s time to dump all the apps that only work with Google Reader. In a way, Google dropping reader put a bunch of iOS devs out of business. Poof. Like that. That’s what happens when you hitch your horse to Google. You’ll need a 55 gallon drum of lubrication for what is coming. HA HA Dangly Bits.
I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.
My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.
Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.