C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 109

Progress toward new books…

I’ve gotten the Foreigner short story through the html check, and gotten as far as ePub conversion. Only mobi and pdf yet to go…Jane’s going to show me how to do that.

I’ve gotten through 98% of the html check for the Yvgenie body text. One little unmatched pointy-bracket and the whole text changes fonts. Finding the pointy-bracket at fault in a 120,000 word ms takes some hair-pulling, especially if it occurs at several points; plus the html has more than one way to give a command, but only one of those ways works well in a text conversion through various formats, so a future problem won’t show up in Preview, only by eyeballing the code.—As an example, pointy-bracket i will give you italics in html, but won’t work well in conversion: you have to have it as a ‘statement’ that’s a whole line long, ie, the long command that involves a font appearance change. Then you find silly things like a command invoking red ink and bold text, followed by two pointy-bracket slash spans that cut it off and make it not display. So that wouldn’t show in Preview either, but it could cause future troubles in conversion.

I’ll finish that this evening and start working with the image placement and front-matter html.

All of which is to say—we’re getting there. And I’m working on the current novel during the day. The other stuff is after supper.

FINALLY!—we are close to putting up new stuff on Closed Circle

Disaster and disease and trips and computer screwups and eagles over the pond notwithstanding—we have covers, we have text, and soon we will have copyright and other details that go with it. I’ve been frustrated that I haven’t understood the new system—which has meant that the work of my books AND Jane’s has fallen on Jane— Well, we had a show-and-tell, and I now understand just enough of it to do the basics. So…look for something on the 24th, and, our faithful folk on our three sites, your patience will be rewarded. I feel so much better now that I can DO something, and take a bit of the load off Jane. She’s feeling so good she’s having a bit of off-topic fun with her site—and I’m feeling re-energized and happy with this new ability to tinker with text, and all’s right with the world. FenCon sent me back sick as a dog, but we had sooooooooooo much fun there and met such nice people—we’re really looking forward to our next foray into the southwest…

Anyway, two happy writers are making some real progress on just about everything, and life is good.

4 hours on the phone with AT&T…

Gophones are great. 10 cents a call, 100.00 a year. We were paying big for phone connectivity, mostly for phones to let us locate each other in a supermarket.

OTOH, AT&T conducts psychological warfare against go-phone users: it has 4 layers of bots, some of them that loop, and some of which deliver you to live (but dead black screens with no sound which really do produce a voice now and again telling you to stay on the line, before they finally drop the call and you have to re-dial.)

Speaking Latin to some bots will get you to customer service, when repeatedly hitting 0 only prompts the bot to hang up. “Gallia est omnis divisa” is a phrase that confuses them.

But if you get a regular rep, they will tell you they are fixing things, but they don’t stay fixed. To get at that level usually involves a supervisor, who will still screw things up. My problem took two hours on the phone and involved my ‘automatic’ renewal account, in which they are supposed to charge your account 102.00 and set you right for another year. Yet—I get bot messages on my computer that says it’s going to expire and I have to manually refill it. So–I got a supervisor to assure me she had fixed that problem and the thing would automatically refill. Wrong: I got a phone text saying refill had ‘failed.’ Second go at the phone. Another hour, and finally another supervisor who got an earful, and manually put the charge through. It took.

Then today—JANE’S phone ran out, despite the automatic refill order. Another hour getting through the bots to a person, who said HER automatic payment had ‘failed.’ Well, guess what: we got online with our CC company, who assured us there’s nothing wrong with her account either—it’s AT&T not sending the proper request to the CC company, ie, routine practice for every corporation on the planet when it wants to get paid. HER help at AT&T is investigating and will ‘call her back.’ Meanwhile she has the transcript from the card company printed out and is ready to read AT*T the riot act.

Are we pissed? Yea, verily. Jane’s situation still isn’t settled, but I detect a common thread of ‘failed’ when it comes to AT&T sending proper request for autopayment to a credit card company. Can you say MASSIVE FAIL here?

And we remembered when I got sick, we hadn’t turned off our Ipad data plan. Also AT&T. Groan. Then in a call to our store I obtained the holy grail—a salesman where we got our Ipad told us the direct number the salesmen use for AT&T, which only goes through ONE bot, and if you select item two and speak Latin to it, you get a pass through to a live agent, taking only about 15 minutes to find out that the salesman who told us we always had to come in or phone in to reinstate the data plan probably wanted to log a customer contact —we found out you can buy or or turn off a plan automatically from the Settings screen in the Ipad. So that, at least, is handled.

Jane’s still waiting for the guy from AT&T to call her back.

I wonder how many millions of computer charges have now bounced back on AT&T because one of their bots has screwed up?

THE phone company in the USofA — and who has the most screwed-up phone system in the country? Oh, yeah……..

A boat to sail a lake on a Saturnian moon…

The proposed mission

Outside of the romance of the notion—it’s brilliant.

And…math beyond the speed of light.

the weirdness beyond lightspeed

Recovering from an eye problem…

First I’m on the end of my contact lenses, need to order some—went to Fencon on just about the last of my lenses, didn’t take a spare—now, understand, I can see far off just fine without glasses or contacts. I CAN drive without glasses or contacts. I cannot, however, accurately recognize people who walk up to me, or read a name badge. So losing the lenses would be a pita. But—I didn’t want to use my last lenses until I had time to order a replacement.

So—on the way out, a 2 night and 3 day drive, we hit the smoke most of the way. My eyes start burning. I flood them every chance I get. At the con, the right eye is dryer than the left, or not so comfy. I go on flooding it. It’s Texas: I’m allergic to everything in the American southwest.

Three days with my brother, and still the irritation in the right eye. I figure it’ll get better once we go north. We hit the road, and have a good drive—up to Billings, where we run into the smoke again. Jane’s sick and allergified, and too tired, and I’m wired for sound. I pretty well drove home the last day, through the smoke. We get to bed, we wake up, the eye is still giving me fits, but I delay one day trying to deal with the problem—these are, should you wonder, extended-wear, so a week is good, two weeks is really pushing it.

And that’s the day I come down sick, really sick, and coughing, and one very bad, epic bad, cough causes that eye to go really, really red. I know it’s got to come off, but it’s sore, I can’t see, I’m coughing and wheezing, and I can’t get the damn lens off. It’s on for the duration of the ghastly crud.

Bad me. When I can get the thing off, it requires showering it off, and by now the eye is really offended, sore, Lord! really sore, and I figure eyedrops and sleep will solve it.

Not. Ok. We leave the lenses off a couple of days.

It gets worse. This is the point at which I know I’ve got to go in and get it seen to, but the doc isn’t in on Sunday. Monday—I go over to Walmart (the best doctors in the area) and ask if they can take a look.

A 61 dollar prescription later, of which Medicare pays 1 munificent dollar, I have the med, and head for the car while Jane pays out. Nearly got hit by a speeder and I’m in too much pain to care, after all the testing and an hour trying to get that prescription filled (new customer there, for the pharmacy). The med, finally, brings a little relief.

By evening, the redness is gone. This morning, it’s doing really well. So it’ll be the 18th before I can wear my contacts again, but that’s all ok—the pain has finally stopped. And I’ve been living with that a while.

I know, I know, stu-pid. I should have pulled those contacts back when. I think I had that little bacterial infection from the irritation we were getting here from the smoke, even before we left on the trip: a contact can act like a Bandaid, and keep the eye protected; but after a certain point, it was a pretty dirty bandage, and it was stuck, which took a real painful effort to get off.

So, so glad for the doc. It’s a lot easier to work when tears aren’t streaming down your face.

The ancient world the way it was…

sacrificed army

For quite a while modern historians have been inclined to doubt the Roman viewpoint in history: if Romans reported it, it’s got to be propaganda has been the view quite conspicuously on the history channel, with certain folk with whom yrs truly has personally butted heads. The Romans had an ethic about truth, a pretty strong one. And they said this was the reason nobody wanted to be a prisoner of these tribes…

They weren’t kidding.

A reader echoed me this…thought you might find it interesting…

I think there’s been a discussion of this on the Alliance Union thread.

This rice thing is kind of interesting…

Apparently the plant has an affinity for arsenic (the atevi might think it a nice trait)—and sucks it up where available. Now, the US set acceptable arsenic levels in drinking water. But—you take to raising rice on certain ground, and apparently it will do as rice does. Since there is no US standard for arsenic levels in food (does that seem rather a curious omission?) the possibility that certain locales, especially orchards converted to rice culture (arsenic was in certain pesticides acceptable on fruit)—can create a problem. We lived, in Oklahoma, near a town that had the acceptable level of arsenic in its water, due to its natural occurence in the soil. But…if you live there AND eat a lot of rice—you get the regulated amount in your water, and stack atop it the non-regulated amount in your food choice—

So…while I am not alarmist re warnngs about this and that, the rather gaping hole in foodstuffs regulation does argue that somebody, sooner or later, should conduct some tests.

The good news is, the longer rice is grown in a locale, the more it sucks out of the dirt, the poorer the dirt will become, so where rice has been grown for a long time, it should be quite safe. It seems rather like what we do in marine tanks, when you get a lot of hair algae—due to the phosphate that comes in on rock and sand; so you grow another sort of algae in an attached tank, and as it grows, and you tear up bits of it and toss it out (or give it to another hobbyist) away goes the phosphate, and with it the curse of hair algae. OR you can simply run the water through iron filings, and it binds the phosphate. I wonder what binds arsenic—and if it would be a similarly simple fix….

Meanwhile, we are watching the origin label, and going for old fields. If, that is, they haven’t put the rice paddy over something as bad, eh?

I say enjoy the dinner and if nobody drops over, it was good.

Recovering rapidly—

Thank you, Donna, for the suggestion. I don’t know whether it’s the silver or the sugar that’s done it, but it went from a full-blown upper-respiratory awfulness to pretty bearable in 15 minutes, and I got some sleep last night in a stack of about 6 dense pillows—hard to get up this morning, I was so comfortable. Actual sleep, and the upper-respiratory crud on the run: I’m still having the chest-cough thing, but diminishing and I can get off the Dayquil/Nyquil stuff that were keeping me in too great a fog to work.

The one bad thing in all of it—I’d done an algae treatment on the pond before I collapsed, and we lost 2 of our fishes, not Ari, who’s still among the wounded, but two others of our mid-sized adults…I don’t know why just them; but it was due to something I didn’t see until I surfaced midway through the respiratory crud: we’d had a strong wind blow up from an unusual direction and blow the round winter cover from its mooring on the north side of the pond across the skimmer intake on the south side of the pond, blocking its ability to collect dead algae, and reducing the oxygen level in the pond—it was a complicated accident, one that Jane didn’t spot because she doesn’t handle the pond, usually: I do, and I’m not even sure I told her I’d put the algae killer in. I certainly didn’t anticipate the winter cover getting loose and blocking the intake: Jane went out and fixed it, and then another blow dislodged the fix again. After we lost the two fish we did a partial water change and then I got out the 100 lb test line and made a new mooring line, that has held fast. On an ordinary day this would have been a non-incident, but the algae killer piling up a skin of dead algae where the surface gas-exchange process happens at the same time I was unexpectedly too sick to stand on my feet and too stupid to remember to ask Jane to check it, and the old mooring string broke free, it was just, well, one of those many-moving-parts type accidents. Bummer.

We brought something else back from Texas—

…the infamous Convention Crud. I think the fires and the smoky drive set us up for it. It’s respiratory, and I’m chilled, dizzy and feel like heck, but improving. I laid out this morning and just rested. Now I’m feeling a little better…but Jane’s started coughing.

We were worried when we read that our good friend Mike Moe, who was also at Fencon, had come down with something a few days ago. We had a longer incubation, but this is not (cough*cough) pleasant. Been a while since I’ve caught anything at a con. MAY-be we should’ve gotten our flu shots before we went. I think we will certainly get them after we get over this stuff, in the theory that we may not have met the real flu yet. This responds to Dayquil/Nyquil and Mucinex—Theraflu, not so much: tried that first.

Chicken soup helped: the quick way to semi-homemade: fill saucepan with Swanson’s No MSG Chicken Broth, add Foster Farms Honey-roasted Chicken Strips (frozen); two heaping tablespoons of cooked rice (I tend to cook up a lot at once, then re-heat servings over the next several days, with various toppings;) or bean-thread (Vietnamese); or raw spinach leaves; or pre-cooked pasta; or raw green peas; add black pepper, add celery salt (except with the Bean-thread, use the Vietnamese sweet chili sauce instead, when serving); bring to boil. Serve. It will save you from the plague.

Jane did the chicken and rice number and I immediately felt better.