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Email Brian Bilbrey

EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.

I am disappointed. I work really, really hard at maintaining my equilibrium. But I lost sleep over this stinking book last night, over our political battles with IDG, and over a copy editing team that seems determined to change our book. That's not terribly surprising, in either hind- or foresight. But I don't like that I am letting it get to me.

As I've read and heard, time and again, unless you're very lucky, you end up with editors who like to piddle in the soup - it just doesn't taste right 'til they've pee'd in it. However, when they clearly don't understand what it is they're modifying, but instead just blindly making changes to fit some corporate template without concern for our intent, and then play stupid... ::sigh:: I am definitely thinking that LinuxDoc looks appealing. Maybe some magazine work if I can get it. And Bob thinks I ought to try for a project at O'Reilly. But no more idiots like these, please, please! It's too much work on my part.

Good Morning. Sorry for that, but I had to get it off my chest, and hell, it IS my soapbox. <g> Anyway, in Linux news... I did enough testing to confirm to my satisfaction that Mandrake 7.2 runs OK on Gryphon, as long as I don't install XFree86 4.0.1. Why? I don't know. I suppose I could help out in that arena, but right now I am working at migrating my systems over to Debian and/or Progeny.

You know Debian, I've talked about it before. But Progeny is new - it's a Debian-based distribution run by Ian Murdock and Bruce Perens, along with a number of other people with serious creds in the Open Source world. They are incorporating bits of Woody (the Debian development tree), plus a hardware detection setup, and apparently, with Beta II, due out shortly, a nice installer as well. I've signed up to participate in the limited Beta II; we'll see if they pick me. In the meantime, I've put Debian 2.2.1 Stable on my system, yesterday while I was fighting with edits in Chapter 16, and I am currently upgrading the little guy to Progeny Beta I. It's half done.

Now I must away to work. More board work to do - I think we've just about closed the loop on this new Cat5E jack compensation design. The odd jacks are all just great, both near and far cross talk. I have to replicate the capacitive tuning for the even jacks on a new board today, then we'll see what we see. Meantime, y'all have a lovely day.

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Good Morning! Well, we closed one job yesterday. The new Cat5E patch module works fine. Two different sets of RJ45 Jack compensation are in place, depending on whether the traces route to the upper or the lower (or right or left, depending on installation orientation). Point is, it works, samples, test data, and Gerber files are on their way to the customer. Lovely.

OK, another little hink on the Progeny Debian front. Their beta install routine puts in... taaa - ta - ta - daaah ... XFree4.0.1. I walk away from the box for 2 hours, come back and it's locked. Not just display locked. It's like it's suspended, but I can't figure how... Maybe this is intended behaviour, power management or some other silliness, if I am really, really lucky. I am going to track down the right newsgroup or mailing list, and get to the bottom of this. I spent an hour trolling through archives yesterday, looking for other indications of this type of behaviour - none evident.

For the moment, I'll pass on that, and stick with straight Debian for Gryphon (already back in place, KDE2 later today) - Once the book's done, I'll boot Caldera off Grinch's back 15G, and put Progeny Debian back there for testing. That'll still leave me with a couple of Caldera installs, one in 3G on the front drive, and in VMware as well, for answering reader questions as they come up.

No book work yesterday, as we're running out of AR chapters to work on... Tom may have one spare chapter for me to work on tonight, we'll see. Meantime, I am off to the day job. Have a good'un.

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I know. I know. I was checking my email, and tying my shoes, in preparation to head out the door and put the truck in for service... the phone rings, it's 9 AM. "Did I wake you?" "No, why?" "Well, you hadn't put up a post on your website yet, so I figured you weren't out of bed yet." Heh. Yeah, I am awake, the truck is now in the shop, and I am getting around to this now. Thanks for your patience and good morning.

Gryphon seems to be pretty happy - I've got him setup with Debian 2.2.1 stable, plus Gnome Helix and KDE2. Why both? Good question. While I am definitely preferring the KDE environment these days, I am trying to keep my hand in with both, for questions that come up, etc. I'm still running Grinch in Gnome most of the time, but the Konqueror browser and KMail together on Gryphon look solid to replace Nutscrape. Yes, I know that I can run them from inside Gnome if I prefer... we'll see what I end up with in the long run. I sure haven't had time for much experimentation in the last 8 months.

From [email protected]  Wed Nov 22 04:39:23 2000
Subject: this and that


Biran -- You have my sympathies... been reading about the trials of 
getting the book done, and now the AR problems. Everybody thinks 
they know best, even the authors :) But, yeah, a lot of publishing 
boils down to corporate politics and the (arbitrary) whims of the 
current editor. I felt we were jerked around a fair bit by ORA in 
terms of style guidelines, and I realized that there was more staff 
politics involved than I had expected. Ultimately, of course, I also 
realized that I was being kept out of the daily-update loop by Tom. 
Even so, I've heard from many sources that it gets far, far worse in 
other publishing houses. With Addison Wesley, on the other hand, 
I've been very lucky and experienced essentially no hassles at all. 
Remains to be seen what the production team will do with it however.

Remember, though, it's only a book. It can seem like the be all at the 
time, but in the final analysis, it's always going to be a compromise in 
so many ways. The best you can make it in the given circumstances, 
yes of course, but not worth ruining your life, or even your week for. 
In the face of inane copy-editing, at some point you just have to say 
to heck with it and move on. A good friend of mine had a book 
project that had the publisher all gung-ho about the proposed layout, 
margin notes -- heck, they even talked him into putting time and 
effort he couldn't really afford into crafting the very best index 
for it. He liked the concept, but really hated the work of making the 
index, despite seeing the enormous extra value it gave the book. 
Nevertheless, he produced one of the best you could find. So, in due 
time he gets the galley proofs. WTF? -- Another layout, no margin 
notes, and they had inserted a totally useless index. No explanations, 
no apologies, just "the way it was done". The production editor had 
other ideas than the writing editor. So it goes.

I wonder if it isn't a bit like tax auditing. Make sure the auditors can 
find a few obvious and trivial errors, and everything is fine. On the 
other hand, if the auditors can't find anything on the surface, they'll 
send in the accounting-SWAT teams and shred your accounting to 
bits in an attempt to uncover some really serious mistakes.

Playing catch-up on a slow flu-ridden day, I ran across...

> I really, really liked What Dreams May Come, both as a story, and for
> the effects.

Amen.

I was really looking forward to see that on a big screen. But. When 
the film finally screened here in Sweden, it ran a single week in only 
a few locations, without any real advance notice. I couldn't believe it 
when I found out after the fact. The responsible for the national 
cinema chain, when I complained, said well, the critics had trashed it 
and in any case hardly anyone went. Not surprised. I kept badgering 
the video shops, and for the most part, they had a list of current and 
coming Robin Williams films, but WDMC was a total unknown to them, 
not in the lists.

About 10 months after the so-called cinematic release, I  (Nov 99) 
ran across a single copy of an odd-looking video in a shop. Yes! It 
was WDMC, although I had to double check because of the oddly 
translated title ("World of Dreams") and the unclear cover 
illustration. Grab!

We made a family evening out of it, and the film was everything I 
had hoped it was. Several scenes went straight to my heart.

One reason I was keen to see the movie version, was that for many 
years I've had and reread the book it's based on by Richard 
Matheson. I'd heard that the movie version was very true to the basic 
story, albeit updated to a more contemporary context.

Stay well.

/ Bo
-- 
Bo Leuf
Leuf Consultancy
LeufCom -- http://www.leuf.com/

The problem with the politics is that even the corporate drones that
an author works with are getting jerked around. It doesn't make up
for large amounts of editing without consultation. *They* aren't
paid to write the book, dammit.

I really want to hold them up against the wall and say... 

"If you were technical people, you'd write the book yourself, and
save having to deal with us. However, since (for you) a chip is
something that requires a dip, we are consulted. Not only is content
a significant portion of what you want from an author, but you
actually want a book that sells well, and keeps selling, rather than
going out of print in the course of a year or two."

"Well, we want that, too, for different reasons. But a good book is
content and presentation together, in a way that works for the
target audience. *We* are your target audience, we're just doing all
the leg work for the rest of the people. So stop fscking with the
style, if you want to change anything, be polite and ask *first*,
and let us refer to any outside reference work we want, not just
those that are published under your mark."

"If what we do doesn't match your stylesheet, don't blindly change
it. Ask yourself why. Do your other technical titles stay in print
for 10 or 15 years the way ORA books do, through 4 revisions? Ooops,
that would be a 'No', then, would it? Give it a try, you don't have
anything to lose."

********

Heh. Well, I am unlikely to get a chance to do that, and the
marketing droids are so well programmed that they're unlikely to see
light at all. Oh, it was fun, and a soul-purgative, anyway.

Thanks for the missive.

Here's the gig - I have two, maybe three chapters to work on today for AR. I have an apple pie to bake. There's laundry and a bit of shopping to be done. The DSL connectivity is a little... off this morning. I sincerely hope it doesn't stay that way. Have a good day, gentle readers.

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I've been a whiner, I know it. I do use these pages as a way to dump some of the stress of authorship and life in the lane next to the fast lane. I appreciate your hanging in there with me.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. This is one of my favorite secular holidays, since we get to eat bird and pie. All the rest is nice-ish, but I can get by with just bird and pie. I do have a lot to be thankful for in this season, first and foremost my lovely Marcia, who has been an absolute rock during this time that I've been so busy, and really rather a pain in the tuchus. We would have had more time together if I had dropped the job, and kept the book, but then I would have been a pain in the assets. I am also rather thankful for my health, although I am far too sedentary to be considered "in shape". Given how I've been pushing myself, I'm doing quite well, thanks. That's in no small part due to being 20 months clear of smoking (It'll be 2 years in March next).

My family is wonderful, though they don't like being discussed online much, so I'll leave it at that - I love'm dearly. Friends and co-workers (I really don't make any distinction, because I won't work with people I don't like) make up the balance of my thankfulness ledger this year. Jack and Trudy, Tom and Leah, Bob and Barbara, Dan and Shelly, the list goes on and on -- all y'all know who you are. Thank you for being around. I'm really very lucky to know you.

We got the truck away from service for just over $400. It was only the water pump this time. Last year it was alternator, battery, intake manifold gasket... I am looking forward one day to owning a new car that's under a real warrenty.

Now I have some last minute things to do - baked two pies last night, with a slight modification to the recipe - we'll see how it goes over. Anyway, have yourself a lovely Thanksgiving, and say hello to my alter ego for the next month or so... the Grinch (not that amateur Jim Carey, but me, 'da real thing). We'll be back sometime tomorrow, so don't look for an early post here. You could, if you wanted, have a look at the meta-Journal, and see if there's anything you missed in the past.

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Welcome to leftovers day. I don't have much energy, what with all the L-Tryptophan running around in my system. Got a few snaps of a lovely misty sunset last night, as well as the bird (a joint effort) and the apple pie (baked it myself, thank you very much), down below.

Slight structural changes in process around here - still work to be done, but the Grafitti links (on the home page, and the redirector) are now going to go to the top of the page, with a link down. I find it easier to use Bob's and Tom's pages, than my own, so I'll try this. I will be redesigning a couple of features on the page, and I got rid of the last picture, and put in one a little more current at the top. Every time I looked at the old one, I kept thinking of Bob's comment: Walker, Texas Ranger. Heh. Not my cup of tea, and I am glad to be shut of it.

See you bright and early tomorrow. Later.

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Good Morning. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. I've (for the moment) finished the process I started yesterday, and I am reasonably happy with the result. A stronger daily demarcation, and a rebuilt page top suit me just fine. I've also modified the links and "dedication" bit at the bottom to be a tad closer to how I actually credit all of this hoo-fo-raw. As always, I am happy to get feedback from y'all.

All I am going to say about Author Reviews and <mad giggling> Hungry Minds, Inc. (the newly inane corporate identity for the former IDG Books Worldwide)</mad giggling> is that I am going to be really, really happy when it's over. I'll take their money for as long as this book sells, but I won't work for them again. There are nicer people in the world to work with when you're only earning 39 cents an hour slaving over a hot keyboard.

Now Tom Syroid, I'd work with that feller again any day. Even when he reads the manual a little late in the process <g> Also, I note that Shelley (whose name I finally note has a second 'e' in it, sorry) Bowman has started 'Blogging. 'Ray, Shelley (or should we use your h4X0r name, 5h33113y?)

I have one more chapter to work on today, then we're out until our editors get their act together, so I'll best be at it, and perhaps back later today. Who knows? As I intended to mention yesterday, we're likely to be out for supper tonight - a late second Thanksgiving supper at my grandmother's to visit with an aunt and uncle that we don't see as often as we like. Take care.

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Lot's going on, sorry I'm late. I'm working the sanding and final coats of semi-gloss on a few chapters that Tom's worked over. And the weekend connectivity blues have come to visit, meaning DSL is up and downish. For those of you interested in election hoohaw, sorry, none of that here. No chad in sight.

Yesterday encompassed a haircut, then a run to Frys where the new Creative sound cards have finally arrived. I picked up a SoundBlaster Live! MP3+5.1. Dunno about the MP3 bit, but the 5.1 gives me digital output for the speakers that I'll be looking for (probably something from Cambridge Soundworks). It works great under Linux, too. Much more stable sound (being a PCI device, rather than the old ISA SB16 that was in the system).

Although her cold appears to be better today, Marcia didn't join me at my grandmother's house last night - one doesn't want to give grandmothers colds, eh? So the three of us (my Aunt Dr. Trish was there) had fish, and a collection of nice side dishes, plus I brought over the second apple pie for dessert. Nice evening.

I've got Mandrake 7.2 running HAPPILY on Grinch, as well as Debian 2.2, Caldera 2.4 and Win2K. Now I just have to head over to kde.org and pick up the latest CVS of Konqueror, so that I can use the browser on Bob's messageboards over at Greg Lincoln's place. Right now, I just keep getting accused of hacking the board. Sigh. Greg told me that he's been fine with recent development versions. We'll see. I have some more work to do, then I'll post a screenshot or two. Overall, I really, really like KDE2. Gnome and Gnome Helix had KDE1.2 beat hollow, but KDE2 has edged into first, mostly due to integration, which I admit to being lazy enough to like, much as I make use of the command line.

I should have another chapter arriving from Saskatoon as well. That should keep me out of trouble for a bit, as Kurt Wall, our capable technical editor has apparently asked some really good pointed questions in Chapter 22 that need my attention. Y'all take care. Maybe later.

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