Clouds of Venus promotional listing

Roxana at proofreadebooks.com was generous enough to promote my book on her site.  Here's the link:

https://proofreadebooks.com/2019/11/26/clouds-of-venus-free-space-trilogy-book-1/

She's a proofreader/editor, too, so if you're an author in need of that sort of stuff, you might want to check her service out.

Broker war ceasefire

Remember when I made this post about competition spurring online brokers to race to the bottom and offer their customers zero-dollar-commission trades?

Well, that war didn't last long.  I found out today that TD Ameritrade has been bought out by Schwab.


Charles Schwab to buy TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion all-stock deal


So, at some point in 2020, I guess I'll have a Schwab account.  And I was just starting to feel at home on the TD Ameritrade site since its acquisition of my Scottrade account.  *sigh*

R101

I learned something new recently.  I'd heard of the Hindenburg airship, of course, and I've even listened to the "oh, the humanity" recording from the onlooker.  But I'd never heard of the R101 disaster.

R101 was a British airship that crashed in France in 1930.  At the time, it was the largest flying machine ever built.  Forty-eight people were killed.

Iron Maiden wrote a song about it.

Slow speed resolved

The other day, the internet was running very slowly on my laptop.  I didn't know the reason.  Maybe it was my internet provider throttling the speed, maybe it was heavy traffic that the system couldn't handle, or maybe it was an issue with my laptop.

I'm now pretty sure it was the latter.

I downloaded some Windows updates, and I thought they were done downloading, but I guess they weren't.  I think they kept downloading, and that's what was sucking up bandwidth.  In any event, that all appears to be finished, so things are back to normal-ish.

What bugs me is that Windows 10 doesn't tell you much about what it's doing.  It likes to hide menus and processes.  It likes to spy on you and change your settings during updates.  When the OS does notify you about something, it's often a useless fact like "You just plugged in headphones" or whatever.  Well, duh.  I know what I just did.  Don't tell me what I'm doing.  Tell me what you're doing.  It's a lot easier to tolerate slow internet if I know the reason for it.

I like the OS for the most part, but it's a naughty rascal.  One must keep it on a short leash.

On the plus side, the updates went off without a hitch.  :)

I still love my Kindle

My Kindle is a first-generation Kindle Fire tablet.  It was a Christmas gift back in 2011.  It still works just as well as it always has.  I use the "Send to Kindle" app to send ebooks to it remotely.  I do this a lot, actually, because I enjoy old public domain books, both fiction and non-fiction.

There are no ads on my Kindle.  I got mine before the marketers succeeded in putting ads absolutely everywhere.

In another month, I'll have had this device for eight years.  Man... that seems like forever in technology terms.

I have no plans to upgrade or replace it as long as it keeps working.  I know some people have several Kindles and tablets and whatnot, but I'm not one of them.  One reading-thingy is enough for me.  And I still like the one I've got, its advanced age notwithstanding.

In my opinion, Amazon really hit a home run with the first-gen Kindle Fire.

Stone Age weapons work

I saw some photos recently from Hong Kong.  Some of the protesters have taken up bows and arrows.  One of the cops took an arrow in the leg.  :o

Just goes to show that when people are determined to defend themselves, they will find weapons with which to do it.  And no weapon is obsolete--even if it dates from the Stone Age--if it gets the job done.

There's something cognitively dissonant, though, about a guy holding a bow and a smartphone at the same time.

November blues

In early October, my traction on Apple disappeared for no apparent reason.  I had a nice steady drip of sales and downloads going for about eighteen months.  Now it's gone.  I have no idea why.  Some algorithm thing, I guess.  I hoped it was a temporary thing, but it's been over a month now, so I guess it's not.  I'd like to get that momentum back some day, obviously, and the sooner the better, but right now, I'm pretty discouraged about it.

It's tough trying to find decent manufactured products at reasonable prices these days.  If you want quality, you have to pay a fortune for it, otherwise you're stuck with disposable crap.  The "happy medium" is almost nonexistent.

I'm trying to find stuff to give the niece and nephew for Christmas, and it's tough.  It also doesn't help that today's kids are all glued to their screens.  What do you give a kid who only wants to stare at a screen?

I've developed a patch of rough, itchy skin on my lower back.  I have no idea why.  Add it to the list of health-related annoyances that have been popping up like weeds throughout my forties.

Well, that's enough whining for now, I guess.  Thanks for bearing with me.

Got cold fast

Unseasonably cold here this week.  In a previous post, I mentioned how some people think you can predict the severity of the upcoming winter by observing nature's little signals.  Trees producing more acorns than usual, for example, is a signal for a cold winter.  That's the theory, anyway.  I don't know if there's any truth to it or not.

The signals for this year, though, point to a cold winter, and if this week is any indication, those signals are correct.

On the plus side, cold weather kills off more bugs, and that's always a good thing.

In other news, I heard that a dog was killed by coyotes just a short way down the road.  This area is not part of the coyote's traditional range.  They're an invasive species, and they eat people's pets on a regular basis.  It sucks, but there's not much to be done about it that's not already being done.  Like kudzu and the snakehead fish, it's just another invasive species to add to the list of annoyances.

In remembrance

My great-grandfather registered for the World War I draft in 1918.  He was in his forties at the time and was not drafted.  His final child, my grandfather, would be conceived shortly after the war ended. 

I sometimes wonder what might have been had things gone a little differently.  If my great-grandfather had possessed a skill the military needed, then they might have taken him despite his age.  And he might have died in those horrible trenches.  And my grandfather and all his descendants never would have existed.  What if, what if...

All of our lives hang perilously from threads, barely avoiding being snipped away by the whims of chance long before we're scheduled to be born.  It's a sobering thought.

But today isn't for what-ifs.  It's not about us at all.

Today is for the honored dead.

Maybe I've fixed it

I've been having trouble with Firefox freezing on forums.  Today I received a notification from my computer that Firefox was blocked from accessing the graphics hardware.  I googled this to see what could be done.

The first remedy I found didn't help.  It suggested turning off a setting that was already off.

The second remedy involved installing a new (actually older) driver for the graphics card.  I really don't like screwing around with drivers, so I'm reserving this option as a last resort.

The third remedy was to uncheck the box for Firefox's hardware acceleration.  This is the remedy I went with.  I've now got it set on "Use recommended performance settings."  Hopefully this will do the trick.

The next few days should tell the tale.

Miscellaneous stuff

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since my last blog post, so I'm sorry for sort of disappearing like that.  I blame Halloween.  And Guy Fawkes Day.  And the weather.  It's not my fault!

The good news is that I got a few chores done in the interim, both authorly and otherwise.

I'm working on the second draft of book 4 of Wheel of Fire, and I can still finish this draft before Thanksgiving.  I'd like to do all my Christmas shopping within the next week or so.  That would get one major thing off my mind and enable me to charge through to the end of the year.  Now if only my family would actually tell me what they want...

The game show Jeopardy! is having its Tournament of Champions this week and next.  James Holzhauer will be back.  If you don't know who he is, then I encourage you to watch the show and see for yourself.  He's the most dominant player I've ever seen.  He holds a number of the show's records, and he's famous for making huge bets, usually going "all in" on the Daily Doubles.  He's a professional gambler, and it shows.

His Wikipedia page

I recently tried Canada Dry's flavored Ginger Ales--cranberry and blackberry--for the first time, and they're pretty awesome drinks.  Recommended.

This month is November 2019, the time when the movie Blade Runner was supposed to take place.  Interesting coincidence: Rutger Hauer died the same year that his character in the movie died.  R.I.P., Mr. Hauer.

Every now and then, particularly while I've got a forum site in the main tab, my browser will freeze for a moment and then unfreeze with some of the page elements broken.  Reloading the page works to set things aright, but it's still a nuisance.  It's been doing this since the latest Firefox update, so I can only assume it's due to something they broke.  Whatever it is, I hope it goes away with the next update.