Regina Glei's Blog, page 43

Chicago Nikki – 2

After the sun burned away some remaining clouds and fog from last night’s thunderstorms, the day turned out to be glorious and I waited in front of the hotel for my tour bus to arrive. The tour company picked me up and only one other lady was on the bus, who turned out to be, guess what, German. They are everywhere! lol. The bus brought us to the starting point of the tour where we changed buses and the real tour bus was much fuller.

The driver was a fascinating guy, somewhere close to 60 I guess and he had a very unique and unnerving way to talk. He was stressing the words in a very odd manner and separating them where they should not be separated. Some… thing like no………torious. And so forth.

He talked without pause while driving, reciting everything from memory but sometimes his talk did not exactly match the point we were driving by. Also, when he was coming up to the next attraction too fast, he would switch in mid sentence to the new attraction without having finished the former story. There was one point where he completely lost it and told us the same thing in exactly the same words twice in a row. Amazing. A great proof for that you do not have to be “conscious” for speaking.

I felt pretty sorry for the guy, since his working conditions suck. He started at 9:30 in the morning and did Chicago’s north side. Then he came back to the pick up point where I joined and started the south side tour from 11:30, coming back to the starting point at 14:00 and doing the north route again until 16:00, that’s when I got off the bus and he was driving on yet again to the south side. Meaning tour guests can join the tour 3 times a day, and the guy drives both north and south side twice a day. He had no lunch, he did not even drink something despite the constant flow of words, he is talking without pause for some 8 hours a day while driving. Jeeeeeeez… tough job. He does not even seem to have to go to the bathroom……. maybe he was a robot in disguise?

As for the tour itself, the best moment was the magnificent view of the Chicago skyline from in front of the Adler planetarium. I found the south side tour more interesting than the north side because it takes you past Barak Obama’s Chicago residence, which is in the (very nice) Hyde Park suburb. The area around the house is fenced off with “no trespassing”, “only for residents” signs and the driver said that when POTUS is in town the area swarms with police as well as Secret Service.

The north side tour’s highlight is the area round the Chicago Cub’s Baseball stadium. People have put seating onto the top of their houses so that you can watch the games from there, a very funny and unusual sight (hope it’ll be recognisable on the photos I took).

After the tour I walked up to the John Hancock building for a view and a great view it is. The building’s observatory is in the 94th floor, some 312 (I think) meters above ground. Thanks to the excellent weather the view was awesome. I tweeted two pictures and will upload stuff to Flickr when I am back home in Japan. I especially liked the shadow of the building I stood in on Lake Michigan. I’ll ask a Chicago local at the convention whether there is any weather in which one can see the far shore of the lake.

The plan for tomorrow is shopping spree. Non-Asian sized clothes and shoes, yeah!

Chicago Nikki – 1

Apart from worldcon related blog entries, I will keep a little travel diary as well, since there is always something happening during travels. My flight to Chicago went smoothly though I didn’t manage to sleep for a single moment due to a fully packed plane.

It’s always funny to fly with an American airline, since only the long-serving veteran flight attendants get to serve on long haul intercontinental flights and the average age of our flight attendants was 50. They had a rough charm that you have to like them for and I was joking with one of them about my red hair and about whether they really have “almost everything” on board or not – I caught them not having Mountain Dew

The Japanese guy next to me made me worry. How is he going to survive his trip to the US? He could not even tell the flight attendants what beverages he wanted in English and ended up repeating after me, so when I got apple juice, he said “apple”, when I ordered beef, he ordered beef. In the morning/night whatever it was before we arrived I explained the menu to him, to no avail, he still ordered what I did, lol.

Arrived in Chicago I searched and found my Go-airport shuttle bus service and there were interesting guests aboard. An American lady from Arizona who was visiting relatives in Chicago. Then a Persian couple with their adult son. They fled when the Islamists took over and the country became Iran and are now living in Gambia in Africa. Once a year they come to the US where there is a conference/convention of “old Persians” who celebrate their culture and literature in exile so to speak. The couple and their son looked like elite to me, all three of them spoke excellent English and were of Bahai faith – which I had never heard of before. Very interesting bus ride. Of course they asked me where I am from and what I am doing in Chicago and I ended up giving all of them “Dome Child” and “Siegfried” postcards, including the driver! A good start for my mission to Chicago.

After checking into the hotel I discovered to my satisfaction that there is a big supermarket right around the corner and I bought a salad and other necessities. Yes, I am in the US – the portion sizes are just amazing. I think I’ll have to throw half the salad away because it will be way too much to eat!

It was already slightly raining when I arrived but after returning from the supermarket it turned pretty bad. Quite some water is pouring down here at the moment. Wet to the bones in one minute style… I very much hope the weather will improve overnight, since tomorrow it’s city tour time.

Off to Worldcon

Once a year SF writers and geeks and SF writer geeks get social and gather for the World Science Fiction Convention or short “worldcon”. I participated in my first worldcon in 2007 when it happened for the first time in Asia – in Yokohama, Japan. Since then the worldcon has been in Denver, Montreal, Melbourne and Reno, and this year the 70th worldcon will happen in Chicago. I couldn’t make it to Melbourne and Reno so this will be my first worldcon in 3 years and I’m very much looking forward to it.

5 days together with some 5000 like-minded nerds! Yeah!

WiFi and time permitting, I plan to tweet and blog from the convention.

I’m flying to the US tomorrow and flying from the US to Japan is always fun, since I will time travel and arrive before I leave. If everything is on schedule I will leave Tokyo on Sunday the 26th at 16:30 and arrive in Chicago on Sunday the 26th at 14:00. Cool. On my way back to Tokyo I will of course loose that day again

I’m allowing myself three days of sightseeing and non-Asian sized clothes shopping in Chicago before the worldcon starts on the 30th of August.

De ha, itte kimasu!

“Siegfried” novel now available as a Kindle eBook

My new urban fantasy novel “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” is now available in Kindle format as well from Amazon in the US, the UK, Germany and other European countries (France, Italy, Spain) and also in India! (Still waiting for KDP to add Japan to their program too finally).

The Prettier Mona Lisa

Tokyo has a great many museums and I admit that I am not making as much use of them as I should but I could not miss a substantial part of the Mauritshuis collection being on display in Tokyo including its most famed and priced picture: Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”.

I was wondering why the Mauritshuis allowed the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to show parts of its collection but the clarification came right at the entrance to the venue where a panel said that the Mauritshuis closed to the public in April this year for 2 years (wow) to undergo restoration and reconstruction. So, the Mauritshuis sent its collection on tour and to celebrate its own reopening, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum won the deal it seems.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s o-bon holidays season in Japan and many companies (as well as the one I work for) had closed the entire or parts of last week. I went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum on Tuesday the 14th and Ueno Park, which brims with museums and also the Ueno Zoo, was incredibly crowded despite juicy mid August temperatures of 33 Celsius or so (in the shade of course).

Entering the park there was a giant queue to one of the museums and I thought, hell, if that is the Metropolitan Art Museum I’ll go home again immediately, but luckily the queue was for the Ueno Royal Museum and their Tut Ank Amun exhibition.

Arrived at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum next to Ueno Zoo, I found a sign which happily announced that the waiting time to get into the Mauritshuis exhibition was only 10 minutes. That sounded much more promising indeed, after all the exhibition had already started on the 30th of June.

In contrast to the Tut Ank Amun exhibition, the queue was also inside the acclimatized building and the short wait was easy to handle.

The exhibition spread over three floors starting in the basement and working its way up. Even though the waiting time had been only ten minutes, the crowd was huge and even bigger in front of every picture.

In the basement the exhibition started with the history of the Mauritshuis, then landscapes and seascapes and history paintings. The first floor was devoted to Portraits and Tronies the second floor to Still Lives and Genre Paintings.

The crowd moved agonizingly slowly from picture to picture and was transported from floor to floor via a escalators. The famous Girl with a Pearl Earring had her own room and inside it the crowd split into a queue and a gathering. The queue was for people who wanted to see the Girl from “relatively” close up without further heads in the way but while walking and not stopping in front of the picture. The gathering was behind that first row of passers by and people were allowed to stand there and stare at the Girl as long as they wanted, but always with someone passing between them and the picture.

Even the first row passers by didn’t get closer than a meter. The picture hung behind a balustrade and a sheet of bullet-proof glass which was cleverly integrated into the wall, meaning the picture hung behind it in a flat alcove. The lightning was perfect and the bullet proof glass did not glean and felt as if hardly there. The procession until one got to the picture took about 15 to 20 minutes. After the procession, I sneaked into the gathering in front of it and was as so often happy for my height and did manage quite a good look at the picture.

It is beautifully done, yes. The light composition is perfect and she is very pretty and one does indeed wonder if she was a real model and person or not.

Three other paintings left a deep impression with me too, all of them Rembrandts. Two of them were Rembrandt’s self portraits as a young and old man. I don’t quite understand why the people from the exhibition did not put them directly next to each other but had one painting by Rembrandt “the Laughing Man” in between. It would have been, at least in my opinion, much better to have those two self-portraits right next to each other. The eyes stayed the same, but otherwise quite shocking to see this young, optimistic and cocky face next to the old, tired and puffy one.

The third picture that impressed me much was Rembrandt’s Simeon’s Song of Praise which is a masterpiece of lighting again.

Despite the throng of people this was an exhibition well worth seeing and it compensates for my disappointment last year, when I was in Amsterdam seeing the VanGogh Museum and the National Museum where there was a postcard of the Girl with a Pearl Earring in the museum’s shop saying “I’m in the Mauritshuis in The Hague”, and I had no time to go there, well, now I didn’t need to

Trivial and Non-trivial Machines

Last week, I wrote about the “four rooms of change”. My new job has exposed me to another theory that I like very much, which is the story of the trivial and non-trivial machines. One of doubtlessly many definitions of the principle can be found here.

The original idea was developed by the Austrian/American physicist/philosopher Heinz von Foerster

Like in my “four rooms of change” article I would like to talk about this topic from the lay-woman, “shop-floor”, perspective = from someone who deals with stuff like that on a corporate, consulting level.

So what are trivial and non-trivial machines in human terms?

A trivial machine is simple, you put A (e.g. money) into a machine and get B (e.g. a PET bottle with water) out of the machine. The outcome of putting A in and getting B is predictable. Only if the person who has loaded the machine with goods makes a mistake you receive e.g. orange juice instead of water from the machine (and will be thoroughly upset about it, because you expected water, not juice and are disappointed that the predicted outcome was not what you had expected).

Human beings though tend to be non-trivial machines. You put A in, but you have no clue whether B, C, D, X, Y or Z will come out. For example: You sit in the subway beside someone who stinks. You decide to tell this person that he/she stinks. You do not know how this person will react. He/she has many choices: the person could ignore you, get up and leave for another seat, start a quarrel with you, hit you, apologize to you, blush with shame and so forth. You simply do not know what the outcome of an input into a non-trivial machine will be.

This is what makes human interaction so difficult and scary at times. Since people usually do not wish to trigger a negative response from a non-trivial machine, we “weigh our words” or every often decide to do simply nothing and endure the stinking neighbor in the subway. The fear of the non-trivial machine’s reaction often outweighs the amount of “suffering”. We are afraid of more suffering caused by the non-trivial machine’s unpredictable output.

So also in the corporate world we very often remain in non-motion or non-change, because we fear the reaction of the non-trivial machines around us that could make our work environment worse. That is of course also true outside the office. The existence of non-trivial machines everywhere we look is a great source for resistance against change. There are many other versions or reasons for resistance against change of course, but the non-trivial machine issue is surely one of them.

Again, nice food for thought and a very obvious reason for why so often, we endure an in principle unsatisfying status quo.

Siegfried novel out as a paperback

My urban fantasy novel “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” is now out as a paperback, with Kindle version soon to follow.

It’s also available as a paperback from Amazon UK and Amazon DE.

The amazing cover art was done, as for the Dome Child, by Naoyuki Katoh.



You can find more about the novel on my homepage.

Four Rooms of Change

In principle I don’t write about my work (in the desperate attempt to keep bread-earning and books separate), but I stumbled over the “four rooms of change” theory thanks to my new internal consultant job and feel in a missionary mood – this stuff is really interesting.

The four rooms of change were conceived in the 70ties by a Swedish psychologist named Claes F. Janssen and his original can be found here.

The idea was then “plagiarized”, as Janssen says, into the “change house model”, which is explained (for example) here.

Anyway, I am not a psychologist and not deeply into the matter and my comments about it below are those of a lay-woman. Nevertheless, I think I represent the “corporate” level of theories like that and would like to say a few words about it from the non-psychologist, non-scientific, practical, “shop-floor” level point of view. I’m someone “out there” in the corporate business world, dealing with organizational development and the pains of change every day.

So, here is what these four rooms of change are about from my lay-woman perspective.

Before change occurs you are happy (hopefully) in the room of Contentment where you know what you are dealing with, where you are familiar with the events that occur. Then change happens in whatever form. For example big organizations (at least the company I work for) LOVE to change their organizational structures in the never ending effort to make things better (“better” from whose perspective is a totally different topic, more on that below).

Change is initiated, people drop out of their comfort zone and plunge into the room of Denial. People are overwhelmed by the change and their initial reaction is “not with me!” If things go bad they stay in the dungeon of denial – in the corporate world that usually means people quit the company or at least change departments.

Next comes the stage of confusion, you somehow get over the denial, but are still confused and in danger of landing in the “pit of paralysis”. The main slogan here is “I’m not the right person”. In corporate terms also this means that people are in danger of quitting their jobs or at least changing departments.

The big question then is how to raise people out of Denial and Confusion to Renewal where the new ideas (the change) take root. In the Renewal phase you are supposed to receive “aha” revelations. Though you still might not believe that all this is the right way to go, you gain a positive mindset and a “we can do it” attitude and implement the change. Once that is done, you return to the room of Contentment – until the next round of change occurs…

In my job I find plenty of departments and teams which are stuck in the Denial or the Confusion phase. Managers are desperate for their subordinates to please understand why this or that change is happening. What people recommend needs to be done to get out of the Denial room is for the boss to talk to every single subordinate and clarify his/her questions. In the Confusion phase people recommend training of the group that is in the process of change with the goal to elevate them to the phase of Renewal.

The trouble I see with these four rooms of change in a corporate environment though is the nature of the changes that are usually being implemented top-down. The model does not work when the change that throws you out of your comfort zone is “bad”. If the change only serves the interests of a few (bosses higher up), the process will not lead back to Contentment or better to say only to Contentment for a few.

To me the four rooms of change seem very true, I see them every day, however, the nature and contents of the change is an all decisive factor that will determine whether the change process has any chance of ever reaching the Renewal stage or not. It would be nice if all change was positive, but unfortunately we do not live in an altruistic world where everybody has only the best intentions… Many, too many, of the changes I see in the corporate world are driven by whatsoever ambitions of a few alpha-animals who want to bend the rules to their personal advantage. Who plays along might reach the stage of Renewal together with the ruthless initiator of the change, who does not play along quits, or just keeps his/her mouth shut, or howls with the alpha-animals.

One way or the other, I am grateful that my new job exposes me to such ideas (great food for thought); I did not encounter them when I was still planning and number crunching.

Indie Pub Nikki – 13

The birthday of my new novel is coming closer, let’s see whether it’ll be up and running during the Olympics or not . Here’s the latest update on the progress.

I guess due to (bad) experience CreateSpace suddenly insists on sending you two physical proofs of your novel. Once at pretty much the beginning = once you have approved your cover and have uploaded your “interior”, the second time, after both, interior changes and cover changes have been approved.

I was a bit confused about this at first, since last time around, for Dome Child, I received only one physical proof and that was after all the back and forth with the interior was finished.

Now they send you the interior as a pdf, (as last time around) and I checked the file and made my change requests and wanted to upload those but couldn’t. That’s when I first noticed they want you to check the physical proof before they allow you to upload the change requests. I argued a bit back and forth with them that I don’t need a physical proof at this stage when there are such obvious mistakes already as a wrong page break, etc.

Customer team said though that it’s “better” to look at the first physical proof, since many people notice mistakes only when they hold the paper in hand. I don’t think I am one of those “many people”. I am so used to doing everything at the screen that it seems like a waste of time, paper and money to ship a physical proof that will most certainly have various mistakes in it half around the globe.

Nevertheless, customer is not king and I had to wait for my first physical proof. Once I received it, I had to write them an email that I got the thing before they finally “activated my site” for uploading of change requests.

As expected, I found nothing additionally wrong with the paper interior in comparison to the interior pdf file. It was good to have a physical proof though for the cover, which didn’t look like it should. The cover art was in need of shrinking and brightening.

After uploading my change requests for the interior as well as the cover art, the latter was taken care of within 4 business days or so and looks now acceptable in pdf form. The interior however, which took some 5 business days to get back to me in pdf form, is screwed up. All my changes were implemented correctly (an upgrade from last time, where some of the requests I had made were wrongly implemented) but a new problem has come up – a weird formatting issue where suddenly, in the latter half of the book, the text looks squeezed and there is too much empty space between the page numbers at the bottom and the text. What is that? Where did that come from? That was not the case in the good for nothing physical proof. I, of course, immediately requested revision and it took another 4 business days for CreateSpace now to correct their own mistakes… A bit annoying. It throws me back in schedule and I hope the Kindle version will be ready in time for the SF worldcon in Chicago where I plan on going at the end of August to promote my new novel (and the Dome Child of course as well).

Well, let’s hope for the best.

I still think there is no real alternative to CreateSpace though, since it gives you the easiest access to the world’s biggest retail platform = Amazon, but they still need to improve their indie publishing process in my opinion.

Louie – Resurrection!

Exactly one year ago, in July 2011, I wrote for the first time about Louie – a wild wine ranking itself up a rain pipe next to my three-meters-above-ground kitchen window. Then, in February this year, I sadly announced the death of Louie, since the building’s owner had come upon the idea to clear the ground around it to attract new tenants for the empty place next to mine. I was quite shocked to hear the guy who did the cleaning work refer to poor Louie as an “excessive weed”.

Well, thing is, the exterminator seems to not have caught every bit and root of Louie, since he’s back! And with a vengeance I noticed his resurrection around May and was oddly moved that the triffid had risen from the dead. Zombie-Louie is growing strong and as of today has already recovered to man-height, eagerly stretching its arms this way and that, mostly though entangling the rain pipe again.



Since he is taking hold of new neighbor’s fence as well, and since I want to prevent that neighbor from getting upset with the triffid, I apologetically cut him a bit to size today and tried to persuade him to stick to that rain pipe instead of spreading all over the place. I hope he’ll heed my good intentions to keep him alive. I don’t dare to take a sapling though, because the dude would take over my apartment within a matter of weeks.

Thanks to new neighbors, I suppose the building owner won’t come along too often and order more attempts at extermination. In case that happens again though, I hope to notice it in advance so that I can save a sapling of the beast, with the intention to replant him yet again after the killing has been done. For the moment though, Louie is tightening its grip on my rain pipe and hail to his resurrection