What Is Currently Making Me Angry With the Heat of a Thousand Firey Suns

I need to update information on a website I control with information about a company in India -- and I was just on their contact page a few minutes ago, which loaded and gave me all the data I needed. However, that page now will not load, and no amount of googling or futzing around has made IE just show the god-damned cached page you had five minutes ago!

Back in the early days of the 'net, it wasn't uncommon to set your browser to "work offline," and poke through the pages you'd loaded before. But that seems impossible now, and of course that's exactly what I need right now.

I really, really hate it when technology removes capabilities.

Update, two minutes later: Before anyone asks, I has a couple of IE windows open at all time at work because our portal site is set up to only authenticate with IE, so most of the systems & resources I have to use only work that way.

Submission Policy

I haven't needed a written policy before, but I've been getting more and more requests recently, so I now want something to point people to.

Guest Posts

Antick Musings has never had any guest posts, co-written posts, or sponsored posts.

I do not intend to ever have any posts in those categories, or any other kind of posts other than the ones that come out of my own fingers.

Do not query in these areas; I'll just ignore you.

Book Reviews

Antick Musings is, at least in part, a book-review blog. And I do take submissions, and at least a few of those eventually turn into reviews here. But I don't review even as much as 10% of the books I see, and I read and/or review a lot of books that aren't sent as submissions.

Self-Published Books

I work in Big Publishing, and have hopes to get back into the fiction end of that business. For that and other reasons -- sixteen years of dealing with submissions at the Science Fiction Book Club strongly among them -- I'm temperamentally disinclined to like self-published books. You can definitely query me about your book, but I'm really not that likely to ask for it. I like the system we have, and want to strengthen that to the point where I can work for a SFF publisher again.

I apologize in advance for standing in the way of your glorious revolution.

Formats

I can read e-books -- I've got a device with lots of things on it -- but I generally don't. Personally, piles of actual physical books are what spur me to read them, and e-books are easily forgotten since they don't take up space. So I am happy to take submissions in digital formats, but that means that I'm very likely to forget about them.

I prefer physical books, even when they cause me storage problems.

Again, I apologize in advance for standing in the way of your glorious revolution.

Genres

I don't read as much SFF as I used to, and I try to avoid fairly generic work in those areas these days. (I know that no author considers her book "fairly generic," but if you're writing about a small band of heroes battling the Evil Emperor, the spunky redheaded demon-hunter with a complicated love life, or the tough-as-nails Space Marine planet-hopping to defeat The Bugs, you're who I'm talking about.)

I also read mysteries/thrillers/spy stories -- again, I prefer smart and sneaky and intricate to James Patterson-level single-page chapters -- as well as a fair bit of narrative nonfiction and humor/columns, with the same caveats. (I don't see nearly as much in these areas as I'd like to.)

I am a marketer by day, but I'm generally not looking to review books on marketing, or most categories of business books.

Responses

I am very bad at replying to e-mail, especially if I have to say no to someone. I apologize in advance for dodging your e-mail. If you don't hear from me, it means I'm not interested but can't muster the energy to tell you that.

Exceptions

If your name is Matt Hughes or Harry Connolly, these rules don't apply to you. There are other exceptions, I'm sure -- if you think you might be one (hint: have we ever met?), ask me.

If I ignore you, see above.

Heaving a Large Sigh

So Google is going to shut down Reader, now?

(They aren't satisfied with all of their other failed products, and they need to get rid of one that works well and that I use every day?)

Is Bloglines still out there? I guess I need to start researching what else is out there. And I'm sure porting over all of my folders is going to be a huge pain, curse those Mountain View bastards.

Anyone out there using anything particularly good to read RSS feeds? I really don't want to go back to a list of bookmarks and nothing keeping track of read/unread.

My New Look

Since all of the cool kids are jumping off a bridge this week, I was compelled to do the same. You can generate your own fake pulp cover here -- it's one of the really good generators, with lots of controls to fiddle around with things.

Distributed Egosurfing

Hey, you know what I haven't done in a long time? Checked in on the world of Andrew Wheelers, to see what my (devastatingly handsome, astonishingly accomplished, and penetratingly intelligent) compatriots are doing, around the world, to make the world more like us.

Diving gingerly into the world of Google results -- and trying to strip out personalized results as much as possible (since I know who I am) -- reveals the following amazing individuals:

• Andrew Wheeler, the photographer based in Paris and owner of the fabled andrewwheeler.com domain, leads the charge, with a homepage that hasn't changed in years (not that the keeper of this blog has any reason to complain on that score!) and a great photoshelter site full of awesome pictures that only an Andrew Wheeler could take.
• The other photographic Andrew Wheeler -- the American with a focus on racing photography -- is still there as well, with pictures equally awesome and usually more viscerally exciting.
• The actor Andrew Wheeler has recently worked in a bunch of TV movies, including the forthcoming Skye & Chang.
• This very blog and my LinkedIn page come up next, making me, as far as I can tell, the fourth most famous Andrew Wheeler in the entire world.
• The Andrew Wheeler who writes for ComicsAlliance -- the one most likely to be confused for me, and vice versa -- is a strong fifth. This comics-reviewing Andrew Wheeler is more likely to write long learned posts about X-Men than I am, and also has written books on food. He's also English, which I haven't been for a good two hundred years, at least. His Twitter handle also ranks highly in the world of Wheelers.
• The lawyer Andrew Wheeler -- focusing on criminal law, particularly (as far as I can see) DUI cases, in the great state of Washington -- has a suspiciously tooth grin for an Andrew Wheeler, but he is a lawyer, after all. He's also the first-named partner in his law firm, once again proving how awesome all Andrew Wheelers are.
• The only Andrew Wheeler in Wikipedia leads off the second page of Google's results; he's a professional basketballer in New Zealand, and only seems to be in Wikipedia because he hit a guy in the face with a beer bottle two years ago. (Since all Andrew Wheelers are entirely fine and upstanding citizens, I have to conclude that the other guy must have deserved it.)
• In Washington, Andrew R. Wheeler is the one you want on your side to lobby about energy and environmental policy. (If he's the one who kept getting quoted in the news during the Bush years, I believe he's against pretty much all of those policies.)
• Dr. Andrew Wheeler, the Irish marine geologist, is currently Vice Head of University College Cork, proving Andrew Wheelers are just as strong in academia as they are in the private sector.
• There's a cinematographer Andrew Wheeler in LA -- his credits look to be mostly music videos and commercials so far, but it's only a matter of time before his name is splashed across the beginning of a big summer movie.
• The architect Andrew Wheeler focuses exclusively on healthcare organizations, and I'm sure he's a wonderful person despite leading his bio with his proclivity for golf.
• And there is, of course, an accountant Andrew Wheeler, as there must be -- he turns up in Australia, having become a partner in PwC there back in 2004.
• The closest Andrew Wheeler physically to me is the Liberty Mutual sales rep in Connecticut. If you're looking for auto, home, or life insurance in the Nutmeg state, there couldn't be anyone better.
• The SEO expert Andrew Wheeler shows up next, since he concentrates his efforts on his clients, instead of using his powers to pump up his own image.
• An Andrew Wheeler is a sculptor in Oregon.
• The other online marketing expert Andrew Wheeler -- this one based in the Midwest -- has an impressive array of expertise and responsibilities.
• There's another Dr. Andrew Wheeler -- this one's a Lecturer in Experimental Aerodynamics at the University of Southampton, which sounds deeply cool.
• Another Andrew Wheeler whose areas of professional interest slightly overlaps mine is the barrister of London, with a focus on fraud, compliance, and money laundering cases.
• There an Andrew Wheeler who is Intranet Managing Editor for the company so recently named Research in Motion, who will prove to be instrumental (I'm sure) as the Blackberry 10 saves that company.
• I wonder if this Andrew C. Wheeler -- a digital marketer for a Gannett company -- is the one I met ten-fifteen years back? (That one was married to a Mary Wheeler, whom I did business with in the large-print books line.)
• And there are always new Andrew Wheelers coming up -- why, here's a twenty-year-old photographer.
• Around about this point in the Google rankings, there's a whole bunch of Twitter handles and some LinkedIn profiles (and some Facebook results, but those are mostly searches). These are almost all from the fine men we've already met.
• The Andrew Wheeler who is a fine art and paper conservator in the UK comes up next, and I'm always happy to see him -- the world needs more people who lavish attention on paper.
• Andrew Wheeler is also Mission Pastor for St. Savior's, Guildford -- and, if anyone is up to that mission, it'll be an Andrew Wheeler.
• I think the Andrew Wheeler at Google Ventures is the one with a bunch of patents when he was still an MIT student a few years back -- he's clearly a mover and shaker.
• Andrew Wheeler should be your first choice if you ever need electrical work in Kings Langley, New South Wales, Australia.
• There must be an Andrew Wheeler who is a professional bagpiper, and you may find him in Dumfries (or nearby, on his many gigs).
• There is clearly something about the name Andrew Wheeler that makes great photographers -- here's another one, concentrating on family photos and based in Vancouver, BC.

And that's more than twenty-five Andrew Wheelers, which is probably far too many for a Saturday night. I'm sorry to see that the composer/conductor seems to have disappeared -- he was one of the top-ranking Andrew Wheelers in the early days of this blog, had what sounded like an awesome life, and was the owner of a highly impressive head of hair. But, like all Andrew Wheelers, I'm sure he's still out there, being the best at whatever it is he's doing now.

To all of the rest of you: it's true that you will never be an Andrew Wheeler, but don't despair: it is still possible to be happy in life even under that handicap. I'm sure you can do it.

Here's How You Know You're Not Blogging Enough

The spammers start to circle, like sharks -- first one little comment here, then another, and then several a day.

Eventually, I assume, they'll hit the site continually until it finally succumbs. (Or, perhaps, regular posts start back up.)

I've been seeing more comments than posts on Antick Musings for the last few days, which is not a good sign, at this level. And I do know the solution.

Look for solutions in this space in the near future.

Behavior I Don't Want to Encourage

Since I'm a blogger who has a handful of people reading his rants -- even though those rants have been thin on the ground lately -- I get the occasional pitch from marketers, asking me to promote this whatzit or mention this thingamabob. I'm entirely in favor of people sending thing to me for free -- e-mail me if you have anything in that line -- but I'm grumpier about offers that don't include the sweet touch of the Package Fairy, or which have that faint whiff of shadiness to them.

(A few days ago, I was offered untraceable money via PayPal -- though, tellingly, it was only after the fact and "if the client was happy," which I assumed meant it was just as solid as it sounded -- if I would post a link, recommend it, and never mention that it was sponsored. I politely demurred, of course -- I probably could be bought, but I don't go that cheap.)

But, today, someone asked me to post an infographic about an oscilloscope. Why? I have no idea. I guess SF is congruent to real science, if you squint really hard, but that hardly seems like a good enough reason to hit me up for it.

It was completely random, there was no whisper of quid pro quo, and oscilloscopes are pretty neat. So what the hell -- here's an infographic about oscilloscopes.

The maker of that particular oscilloscope -- Tekronix, which I thought also made some kind of consumer computer peripherals (networking stuff, maybe), though their website shows only technical measuring tools and similar gee-whiz Buck Rogers stuff -- would really like it if you clicked here to learn even more about oscilloscopes, including a spiffy Tutorial page!

But the next time a marketer wants me to do something, I'm going to be looking for some tangible benefit out of it.

Possibly the Worst Infographic Designed by the Hand of Man

There's an old saying to the effect that a little learning is a dangerous thing, and this here infographic about bestselling SF is a sterling example of that.

It's breathtaking in its stupidity and mistakes -- I'm half-convinced that every single "fact" in that image is utterly wrong.

For one example, it chirpily announces that Slaughterhouse-Five has sold more than 60,000 copies! Actually, the current trade paperback edition has sold about that many copies in the last two years -- the total number of sales is vastly higher. (I'd ballpark it in the 5 million range.)

It's also nuttily inconsistent in its aims -- it's far too long, to begin with, and doesn't present books in any coherent sequence (such as a countdown or countup), but tosses them at random, with odd (probably incorrect) factoids that usually, but not invariably, are numbers connected to sales figures.

(There are also plenty of grammatical, syntactical, word-choice, and other errors as well -- a fully-annotated version of this thing would be massive.)

In fact, if any of you out there are also marketers, as I am, this infographic is a perfect bad example of the form. If you ever set out to make an infographic, this is exactly what you don't want to do.

(Hat tip to Making Light, which discovered and made fun of this before I did.)

Trillions! Trillions! Trillions!

Most of the projects I work on for my day job never get mentioned here, because they're deeply technical and only of interest to accountants, CIOs, and similarly specialized business folks. But, once in a while, I do have something that's more exciting that that, and this is one of those times.

Yesterday was the official publication date for Trillions, a great book on what pervasive computing will mean for business and society, from three very smart and very savvy technologists/designers/thinkers, Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus. They're all part of MAYA Design, a Pittsburgh firm that does amazing work on interface design and other things I don't even have the terminology to describe. (When I visited them last year to talk about marketing for Trillions, they showed off an amazing system called Visage that they created for DARPA to manage and control manifold real-time dataflows for a battlefield.)

So Trillions is genuinely visionary, and comes from three guys who really know and live this stuff. It's an exciting book to be (a tiny) part of.

I'd like to get more copies of Trillions out there, particularly in the hands of SF folks and influential Internet people. (And who else would be reading this blog?) In the past, I've sent out queries to people I knew on books of less direct interest to the field, but I think I've already outstayed that welcome. So, this time, I won't spam anyone; I'm just looking for inbound interest. I'll be happy to send a copy of Trillions to you if you'll read it and possibly blog/talk/write about it -- I'm not looking for guarantees, just interest. I might be able to swing e-books in some format as well, though it's still much easier to ship blocks of dead tree.

Check out the website, which has a bunch of fascinating videos about what MAYA has done and the topic of the book, and shoot me an e-mail if you're interested in a copy of Trillions.

C'mon! It's the only book at Wiley I've worked on that has a quote from a SF writer! (And probably the only one that ever will!)

"Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce. Always entertaining and mostly right on topic."

 - David Brin

Bacon Numbers and Pointless Quests

So today's Internet buzz is that Google has quietly rolled out another way to waste time interesting searchable thing: you can now google a name and "bacon number" (in either order) and get that person's links to Kevin Bacon. (A la The Oracle of Bacon -- every previously standalone website will eventually become a minor Google app.)

And the wailing and gnashing of teeth has followed, as we should have expected: some because it ruined their party games, and some because it's difficult to get a number above 3 for any person recognized as a movie actor.

I've been doing a little poking around, and found a number of 3s -- all either old or odd cases, including Tor Johnson, Richard Thompson, Jimmy Page, Syd Barrett, Leopold Stokowski, Zeppo Marx, Edward R. Murrow, Harry Secombe, Vera Lynn, Erich Von Stroheim, and Mary Pickford.

Getting higher than that, though, is thorny, and it may be exacerbated by Google -- it's not clear if they've built logic to allow bacon searches on every name in IMDB (or whaterever other back-end they're using), and some names I'm putting in aren't coming up with any number at all.

But I have found a handful of 4s: Bettie Page, John Bonham, Tempest Storm, and Johnny Carson. (And it seems to get a 4, you need to pick someone who appeared either in only one movie with "real" Hollywood actors, or who is from an film industry in an entirely different language. I tried to pick names I could think of without help from outside help, but I did cheat a bit when I couldn't remember specific names -- as with the Ritz Brothers, none of whom have definable Bacon Numbers in Google.)

In older articles about Bacon numbers (and the Oracle of Bacon itself), there's indications that there are a few people with 5s and even higher -- the Oracle claims there are 27 people with a Bacon Number of 8, even. But I haven't been able to find or replicate any on Google today.

(And, sadly, Paul Erdos has an undefinable Bacon Number.)

Because We All Need It, Sometimes

Via Johanna at Comics Worth Reading, I discovered Boggle!

It's not the letters-on-dice game I remember vaguely from my childhood: this Boggle is an owl, and this owl worries about you. And the people who write into Boggle have things to be worried about, and need someone to tell them that they're just fine, that they are loved, and that things are probably better than they fear.

Maybe that's you, today or some other day. Maybe it's a friend of yours.

Boggle is genuinely touching and consistently positive and relentlessly helpful. And even this grumpy misanthrope can admit that is an entirely good thing.