From Ye Old Blogge: Friday, September 01, 2006 Passing Milestones

merely moan

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Passing Milestones

(and not in your water, either!)

Some major milestones have slid quietly closer and closer and then fallen away astern for me, some almost unnoticed. Some other milestones are looming pretty intensely, and some you just want to forget.

Last Saturday, (26th August) the first milestone that slid beneath the billows of time was the publication of my diet book online. I was rather ill that week, but this was the one thing I managed to achieve that I was most proud of. As a result of that effort, people around the world with "slow inflammation" based illnesses (and this includes several cancers including the one I designed the diet for, prostate cancer) will be able to give these horrible illnesses a run for their money. For me, it reversed my prostate problems in seven months and saved me from the risks involved in the surgery. On all counts, I'm glad I got the thing to publication.

The next milestone that derived from that is that I went from being an unpaid writer to being a published author. Published author! Okay this is very akin to being vanity press but it's still publication. I almost missed this in the excitement, and it was only the other day that it finally penetrated my consciousness. Wow...

What wasn't immediately obvious from that is the other hat I began wearing - I am now also a publisher. The difference between vanity press printing and publishing is that printing involves only taking a marked-up text and setting it in print. Publishing involves choosing the manuscript, editing it, marking it up, getting it printed, and publicising (that's where the "pub" in publishing comes in after all) and selling the finished product. If I only turned the text into an e-book I'd have been a glorified electronic printer, but I've also done the first publicising of the product by putting it online, and have the advertising and publicity plan coming together and launching this weekend. So I'm a printer/publisher now as well.

Apropos of which, I've decided that I'll assist other health/diet/lifestyle/recipe/DIY/home_improv authors by getting them into e-publication and letting them sell their wares on the zencookbook site - may as well act like a real publisher I guess. Also, more titles will equate to more useful information in one place, and that will mean that we all benefit. So if you know someone with a good idea for a book, or with a manuscript, which they want to put online using e-book format, get them to email me teddlesruss(AT)hotmail(DOT)com and I'll help them get it happening.

This Thursday (31 August) another milestone hove into sight and zipped by. As well as becoming a published author, I'm now a *paid* published author. Yep, the first copy of The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook sold online Thursday morning and made my day... That's within less than six days of publication, and without any advertising. Gotta love the Internet!

And since it's now September, I can also say that another milestone cruised in almost under the radar, being that this blog surpassed 1,000 hits in a month, at 1056 for the month of August. That's this suite of blog pages, nothing to do with the diet book, which hit its own high water mark of 35 hits a day yesterday as well, and I haven't even begun to advertise it yet.

Upcoming milestones:
I'd rather forget, but in another six weeks it will be the anniversary of my biopsy that showed the high level of deformed cells.

Six months from now also sees me hitting the half century mark, and should also see results from the CSIRO tests of the diet.

All in all it's been a pretty good week for milestones.

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.

From Ye Old Blogge: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 What my parents said about the festive season...

Memory Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

What my parents said about the festive season...

Thirty years ago, I first heard my parents say "Christmas is so commercialised these days!" and, being only a little tacker in those days, I just couldn't see how such a magical time could be thought of as commercialised.

Now I'm older and wiser, and I know where all those presents under the tree come from, and hell if I don't believe my parents finally... I saw an ad for a women's magazine on the TV the other evening, and it included ' your five free gold stars' and an article about ' how to use your free gold stars to add a personal touch to your Christmas ' inside it. And I started thinking about all that, and opened a whole can of worms in the process...

For example - gold stars. Cost next to nothing, just gold covered card cut on a press, and honestly, even as a kid I would have been offended to be offered such crap, even for free that's just plain snake-oil salesmanship... Sort of like a handful of blue glass beads only cheaper...

And having insulted their entire readership (who, come to think of it, probably deserve the insult, because they're obviously still buying that patronising, cheap drivel rag) they then use that gift as a way to fill up a couple of extra pages. I mean, what can you do to 'personalise' your Christmas with five gold stars which are as depersonalised as you can get? Stick them to something, same as the other 800,000 readers of the magazine who after all got the same gift and the same article? Argh, give us a break!

That's the commercialism part covered. Now for the obligatory 'back in de good old days' whinge:
My mother was probably a halfway houseproud woman, but she didn't go to extraordinary lengths to 'personalise Christmas' either, we used off the shelf streamers garlands and tinsel and decorations. Even back then, the only people who had the time or resources to 'personalise' their Christmas were bored affluent wives of high-income earners, and they added the personal touch because it was missing in their lives. Nowadays, even less people have the time and resources to go to any great lengths to add personal touches.

Most people will use their off the shelf bits just as they've been doing for thirty years, and have the same 'commercial' trees as everyone else, the same 'commercial' decorations, and (probably) sigh and complain bitterly about how commercial Christmas has become...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.

From Ye Old Blogge: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 Smart phones dumb bunnies

marley omen

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Smart phones dumb bunnies

Here's a cute story. Smart phones fox frustrated users - go ahead, go read it, it's a hoot - that has me thinking again.

The story claims that smart phones are too hard for their owners to work out. Awwww, poor dumb bunnies... One of the quotes I love most:

Intuwave points out that configuring the e-mail function on the SonyEricsson P800 involves 12 separate parameters. A mistake in just one of these can scupper any chance of using the device to send and receive mail.

Setting up an ordinary email program involves around the same or even more parameters. How do these jerks get their email anyway? Oh, I see - AOL...

'There is a huge gap here,' he said, 'and it's high time we saw a mobile care revolution.'

Gee I wonder where precisely that gap is?

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Title should be: From Ye Old Blogge

I started a new blog.

Yeah, I know - mad bastard. As if I don't have enough to do already...

So now I have Tis Not Today as well. It's a memoir-style blog with stuff from my past which you might find as amusing (or not, sometimes...) as I did when living through it. I had some interesting times, some great times, and a few not-so-great times. But I'll share them over the next year or two of writing.

As you may know, I write a lot of blog posts every week. We're talking sometimes a few days of researching and writing, and it takes me a fair bit of time. As well as that I do a lot of other things - work on ways to recycle waste materials, mostly plastic but I'm also getting into thin metals, textiles, food waste, and looking at a few more as I go. I also do my share of the household work, keep a vegetable garden for us, do craft and handyman projects, electronic projects, 3D printing projects, and loads more.

You can help me to keep server and online fees paid, help me source some of the materials I use to research and make projects, and generally let me know you appreciate my time and efforts. Please use the graphic above to donate, subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter, or contact me to chat.

Because, I do keep a lot of blogs running. Here's the list:

BFZCB TEdALOG LiteII TEdAMENU Tuckertime TEdADYNE Systems O Hai Corona Grumpy Old Guy PTEC3D News Tis Not Today

You can also help me by sharing links to articles you liked, every share is a bit more reach and helps get the posts seen by even more people. 

Only a short post this time, just wanting to let you know about the memoirs blog. See you there!

Ye Olde Blogge Poste, Tuesday, November 18, 2003

No Mery Lame

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled. There seem to have been two posts this particular Tuesday:

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Now this I REALLY hate!

Scientific American, take a walk of shame for this piece of crap reportage - fancy going through an entire article whose entire raison d'etre is to let us know that scientists now know the temperature of formation of DNA - AND THEN DON'T FUCKING REPORT WHAT THOSE TEMPERATURES ACTUALLY ARE!

Do yourselves a favour SciAm, and fire *name withheld* who 'reported' (if that term can be applied to such a lightweight piece of crap) this item...

Spinnerets

Hmmm. Just saw this on Science Daily - Discovery Could Lead To New Ways To Create Nano-fibers And Wires - and now I'm thinking:

Do spiders spin their silk like this? Multiple strands of ultrathin strands solidified together? Go read the article then come back.

Okay? They form a droplet inside a viscous liquid and then solidify it using light, then snap it off. A bit like:

=- --------------------------------------------------------------- --<)

^Nozzle, breaks off here, then a loooong thin thread, then a break and the droplet ^. Scuse the bad artwork...

Now suppose that spiders generate a lot of such threads inside their mysterious spinnerets. Suppose that instead of using light to solidify their threads, the 'viscous liquid' turns out to have the exact right properties to solidify the thin threads, provided they are extruded at the right speed. 

Getting a picture? If you did this continuously, you'd end up with microfilaments with 'bumps' every so often along their length, which would be the droplets. If the spinnerets jets work together, you could produce a fibre which is 'locked' together by those bumps, which consists of many microfibres, and if the viscous fluid is also adhesive, it sticks the strands together with surface tension.

I'll collect my prize when they discover that this is precisely how spiders do it. I'm confident.

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.