Lazing...

Izzat a word?

I managed to slip out of the MCC around 7:45 pm last night, having dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. Alex K. is off today, replaced by Mike T. in the early shift.

I got up at around 8 and sat down to edit the piece Lev assigned me for this morning.

The subject has to do with installing panels on the FGB to create storage lockers. I found it a particularly difficult piece to do, since I was forced to visualize the manipulation of hardware I'd never seen inside of an area I'd never seen.

Descriptions of physical manipulations, I've found, are typically difficult to follow because the people writing the descriptions rarely take the trouble to review the text from the point of view of someone who's never seen the setup.

I first ran into this phenomenon back in college when I "studied" close-up magic. Most descriptions of, say, card tricks, were useless; you had to see what was happening to understand it. (I've been told roughly the same thing by medical students: descriptions of surgical procedures are often confusing, unless you already have some familiarity with what is going on.)

Fortunately, there was only a limited scope of things going on in the text of the document I translated. Most of it had to do with unscrewing fasteners, installing the paneling, and replacing the screws. Still, it took a while to edit.

* * *For some reason, the DSL connection in Colorado quietly expires after a while even though the router is set to keep the connection alive. I woke Drew up this morning to go "connect" our home network so I could check mail and do some housekeeping.

I have to make sure I call him at the store during the day to have him send me the UPS data for our monthly report. If I have the time, I'll work on a Perl script that will transform that sow's ear of a data file into a silk purse of a mail-ready report.

Time is a-wastin'. I should probably pull on some clothes and walk over to the McDonald's on Telephone Road for a quick breakfast (there is nothing to eat in the house). And I should do that before the breakfast menu is retired for the day.

Cheers...

Interesting piece by Eric Flint...

I've mentioned Eric Flint in my journal on previous occasions, but it turns out he is the "Librarian" of something that Jim Baen (the force behind Baen Books) set up called a "Free Library."

Flint writes a periodic piece he labels "palaver," and in the lastest of these (#6), he presents actual numbers supporting his assertion that "it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public."

Flint starts by asking a simple question:

"Does anyone have any real evidence that having material available for free online-whether legitimately or through piracy-has actually caused any financial harm to any author?"

He then provides a number of examples where it is hard to show such harm occurring. In his own case, for example, he cites increased sales of a book he co-wrote with David Drake (An Oblique Approach) after it was made available for free download from the Baen site. Says Flint, after presenting the numbers from his royalty statement:

It's what happens next that is significant. Because, all other things considered, those "sales this period" figures should have kept steadily dropping. Slowly, perhaps, but what most certainly shouldn't have happened is a sudden rise in sales-and a rise which increases in the next period.

He acknowledges that his is not cut-and-dried, unequivocal proof of his position, but does assert that his is the only hard data that anyone has proffered in the debate, a far cry from those arguing the "encryption/enforcement" side of the question, who - says Flint - have never come up with hard figures. Again, Flint:

Harlan Ellison, for instance, screams that he has "Lost sales!" because of piracy-but, to the best of my knowledge, has never once even tried to demonstrate that this is true. Not once has he done more than endlessly assert the "axiom" that since a title of his was pirated he "must therefore" have lost sales of that title.

A well-written essay, in my opinion. (Moreover, 1632 is available in the Library.)

Cheers...