The TechSmiths

I Join ACX.com - Audiobook Creation Exchange

2011-12-01T17:21:00.001-05:00

It appears that Hugh McGuire had a good idea when he founded Iambik.com.

He had founded LibriVox.org in 2005 to bring together enthusiastic volunteers to make audiobooks for works in the public domain. That effort was so successful that Hugh turned his mind toward figuring out how many, many more copyrighted works could be turned into audiobooks. The problem has always been that studio-produced works with paid narrators, directors, and engineers are costly. Convincing a publisher to advance sufficient money to pay for these with no guarantee of sales tended to restrict audiobook creation to best sellers. This left huge numbers of worthy books that would never escape print.

But LibriVox proved that modern digital technology could be harnessed to make audiobooks outside of a studio, and that many people possess the skills to produce audio works with the clarity, energy, and drama required by the buying public. This makes audiobook production an investment in time, not in cash.

The result of Hugh's thinking is Iambik. There, audiobooks are created for no money up front. The company and its agents are paid from royalties on sales. This arrangement is favorable for even very small publishers, because there is no down-side risk. An audiobook meeting certain minimum quality standards gets produced and sold, and all parties profit from the sales.

Iambik is just at one year old. Today, its catalog has 94 titles, as well as a number of collections. (I've produced six of those titles, by the way!)

This year, Amazon took note. As the owner of Audible.com, it already has a virtual monopoly on sales of downloadable audiobooks. In May it launched ACX.com - Audiobook Creation Exchange. ACX uses the royalty-share method of compensation, just like Iambik. It matches up rights-holders with producers of audiobooks within a standardized legal and quality framework. The difference is that with Amazon's book-marketing muscle - plus standard contracts that assign exclusive audiobook sales rights to Audible - it can convince the big boys of the print world to troll their catalogs for audiobook candidates.

I've seen intimations on the Net that ACX was created to satisfy legal requirements. Whether or not that's true, from my perspective, it allows me to compete for production contracts with established narrators who may have a following. (Theoretically, I bring my own following from LibriVox - but there's no evidence yet that consumers of free material are also the people who buy commercial audiobooks.) I can compete aggressively, because I can submit auditions for specific books - not just produce audio samples of my voice to be stored alongside hundreds or thousands of others... and then wait for offers to come in.

It's working! Last week I finished my first two audiobooks under contracts through ACX. (See my "Professional Narrations" page.) I've also been offered three other books which I could not accept for timing reasons, but may yet be able to negotiate. So stay tuned! 2012 is shaping up to be a great year!

Eating Crow?

2011-08-31T12:18:00.001-04:00

The great philosopher (??) Pogo once famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." I reflect on that as I eat my words.

I joined Facebook.

I knew I didn't intend to, but I did after all. And now I wonder why all the fine classmates I visited with at last year's XLth (that's Roman numerals, not size) Reunion aren't likewise Facebooking, so we can keep up with each other. I guess they (as I) assumed it was a fad for young folk.

So that somewhat explains why my blog has been neglected of late. I've been connecting in another forum.

I Love House Designs!

2011-05-25T21:54:00.000-04:00

When Brenda and I conceived the idea of downsizing our home once we became empty-nesters, we spent a lot of time thinking about just what kind of house we would like to move into.
Right at the outset, I'll admit that it was mostly I who wanted to nail it down. I grew up thinking that my money ought to spent mainly on durable goods. Pizza, or music album? I'll take the music album, thank you. And what's more, I internalized "A man's home is his castle." You spend a lot of time in your home, so it needs to agree with you and facilitate the way you live, not oppose it.
We started acquiring and poring over those books of home designs you can buy at home improvement and grocery stores. We would talk about what features appealed and which did not.
Then Brenda gifted me with "The Not So Big House" by Sarah Susanka and from it we learned a lot about the value of proportion and finish. We became more conscious of our activities and how we like to accommodate them. Not being formal people, we agreed to give up formal living and dining rooms.
Our time with books of plans began to be supplemented by walking through subdivisions under construction and discussing the designs that were being built. We started talking with the builders about why they put in certain things.
Now we found that there were large repositories of house designs on the Internet. I set happily to work to review them, and being an engineer, developed a spreadsheet for rating how closely a design follows the features we've identified as "desired."
We started talking with realtors about what's on the market. We rapidly found that their check-offs for "what everyone wants" are greatly difference from our wants. So, OK, we're going to be statistical outliers. No biggie - this will hopefully be our last home.
Brenda found us a class at Furman University on house designing and remodeling, led by an architect. That was good! We learned about "programming" a house, by considering each room, one at a time, and describing its function, its probable furniture, its probable size, its relation to other rooms in the house, and its relation to the outdoors, and also any change in function it's likely to undergo as time goes on. We wrote our own program - a 19-page paper describing how our "dream house" would fit together.
Knowing that the choice of a community and a specific lot will affect the choice of an optimal house design, I determined to put together a sheaf of the highest-scoring designs we had perused that would cover the bases of such things as: architectural style, foundation, window exposure, and footprint.

I know I've looked at over 2,000 home designs in our square footage range. I bought a home designer CAD program and I've "built" a couple of my own designs on that. All great fun. And someday, we'll actually make that move.

Where did this "hobby" come from?? Last Fall I was thinking about that, and I recalled seeing a LIFE magazine article in the 60's about a free-form house built with polyurethane sprayed over burlap. It was so different from the old farmhouse I grew up in that my imagination was piqued. So I, on a whim, googled for that house. I found the LIFE article:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qVAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP5&ots=qCXDlopRE0&dq=%22A%20House%20Made%20of%20Spray%22&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=%22A%20House%20Made%20of%20Spray%22&f=false

AND, I found that old house was for sale! The owners died and their daughter lives in Mexico, so she's selling it.

It's called Ensculptic House (Environmental Sculpture in PLastic). Mechanically, the house needs work to be lived in again. The local realtors don't know how to price such a one-of-a-kind house, so it's listed for the land value (8.4 acres).
I've thought about Ensculptic House every time I play through one of those grottoes on miniature golf courses. They're made of gunite, but the vibe's the same. I try to imagine living in a house with no orthogonal corners. 'Way cool - and if I can find $194K I can try it!

Curses! Foiled Again!

2011-03-31T18:37:00.001-04:00

News today is that Google decided to make Kansas City the site of its next-generation superfast Internet demonstration project.

Sure, there was a lot of competition for the honor. Lovely Greenville, SC, threw its hat in the ring (see "Hi Google!" in my March, 2010, post). It would have been perfect! With Greenville County being the densest (population-wise! No smirks!) concentration of engineers in the nation, we have the need and the want. And as Greenville is on so many Top 10 lists of Places to Live, Places to Retire To, etc., there would be some extra cachet for Google if they built here first.

So where did their decision come from?? Was it a consolation prize for VCU kicking Kansas' butt in the Elite Eight? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING???!!

Googling Myself

2011-03-12T13:32:00.001-05:00

Every now and then, it's instructive to discover what the Web knows about you.

After having preached to the kids that employers and other decision-makers will regularly check online for additional information about them, I decided to google myself.

When I was yet a teen, I realized that "Mark Smith" would be a name I shared with many others (and there were twelve others in the phone book, when I lived in Charlotte, NC!), and I decided then to use my middle initial to narrow down the field. Even "Mark F. Smith" isn't descriptive enough these days, with 310 million Americans.

I found the expected links to my audiobook narration. I found a link to this blog. I'm pleased I did not find links to a serial murderer or a scandal-ridden politician. There is a fairly good PhD out there with the name and there was an important executive in a nonprofit who is being missed. A list of "Mark F. Smith patents" went back only a few years and so did not uncover the two I was granted in the 80's.

But what moved me to write this post, is that there is someone on Facebook with the name, AND IT IS NOT I. So don't post to him, thinking you're reaching me! I have resisted the Facebook craze so far. Maybe later...

2011-03-11T17:22:00.002-05:00

Suicide Casanova Comes Out

The book's been done since January, but Iambik.com has orchestrated a full collection of crime thrillers that were simultaneously released today.

We narrators who contributed to the collection have been advised to yell, dance, jump up and down, post, and generally call attention to our offering! You'll find it here:

http://iambik.com/

I don't mind saying that Suicide Casanova was a difficult book for me to narrate. The language and the topics are raw; still, if you have a stomach for the seamy side of life, you'll find it entertaining. I got choked up at the conclusion, which resolved the issues in a manner I could not foresee.

Cats in Hats!

2011-03-06T18:17:00.041-05:00

The annual Ready4Reading event in Greenville, which promotes early literacy, is structured around The Cat in the Hat.

All the (local) TechSmiths were present for duty at the Make-a-Book station March 5, where we helped hundreds of kids make their own 6-page books, using markers, crayons, pictures clipped from magazines, and stickers.

A New Model for Synthetic Speech

2011-01-07T16:31:00.001-05:00

It's I!

Toshiba Research Europe posted a letter on the LibriVox forum asking if it was OK with us if they contacted certain of our narrators to create synthetic voices of them for text-to-speech applications:

http://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=30499

Today I got a private message through LibriVox from Dr. Buchholz, asking me if I'm OK with being a model! This doesn't require any involvement from me - they process my recordings to break down how I pronounce the various syllables in their various intonations. And they probably won't attribute the result to me; I'll probably be known as something like "U.S. male with little natural accent".

Toshiba is (at least at first) planning to improve computer-generated spoken texts. (They already have their technology aboard some GPS models.) But someday, when you buy a new "smart" refrigerator or car or some-such, you may be surprised to hear it using my voice!

Off On a New Career

2010-12-30T16:30:00.001-05:00

I started contributing to LibriVox early in 2006 immediately after I heard about it, because I like reading out loud. I think I do a pretty good job of interpreting an author. At the end of 2010, nearly five years later, I've accumulated a lot of practice in narrating - 56 solo books on LibriVox and a good deal more contributed to group efforts. I've progressed through four or five recording setups, trying to improve the quality of my sound.

Along about Book #20, I began to wonder if I could transition to a professional position. After all, my books were being downloaded in good numbers and I was receiving gratifying remarks in feedback. In late 2009, I was asked by iPublish Press of Canada to do "My Problem With Doors." LibriVox never criticizes its readers - that's a real draw for people who want to record their favorite books, to know they won't be catching adverse commentary if they don't live up to someone's standards! Since iPublish Press proposed to pay me for narrating their book, they had every right to editorially comment on every sentence I sent them. Despite the change in standards, the experience was a positive one, and I was pleased to know that I could make editors happy who are in business to make money.

This Fall, I began two new forays into professional audiobooks. Mike Vendetti, a LibriVox contributor who also runs "Audiobooks by Mike Vendetti" and sells them on Audible.com, asked me to read for him. My first book, "The Defiant Agents" by Andre Norton, was finished in November, but through some miscue at Audible.com has not appeared for sale yet. They've promised to fix that.

I also was invited to be part of a new organization, Iambik.com. The founder is Hugh McGuire, the same fellow who started LibriVox. His business idea was to partner with print publishers to create audiobooks that normally would never be produced under the industry's typical business arrangements. By making audiobook production a profit-sharing exercise between Iambik and a publisher, no one has to "front" any money - all the participants share directly in the sales. Since our output is digital files, we don't have to buy supplies or keep up with inventories.

I'm currently reading "Suicide Casanova" by Arthur Nersesian, with a promise date of January 31. This will be one in a batch of crime stories to be released together. Hugh promises we'll be doing campaigns in several genres, so we'll be seeing a deal of variety over time.

I plan to continue devoting the major part of my creative time to these new professional endeavors... although I will still keep my hand in at LibriVox!

My Opinion

2010-08-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

There used to be a post on "Social Justice" here. As I thought about it, though, I began to think it was out of keeping with the rest of the site. Hitherto, this was only more or less a record of what I/we were up to. I guess many, or perhaps most bloggers use their digital spread for sounding off about topics that interest them. I can't resist the pulpit either... but I can cordon it off in its own space.

So I've started a new page, "Opinion" - available from the links on the right. If you're interested.

World Boardgaming Championships

2010-08-10T13:45:00.000-04:00

I am recently returned from WBC, which is held annually in Lancaster, PA. About 1,500 gamers from all over the globe participate in 100 "Century" events and others which are on "Trial" status, over a week's time. The winners get plaques and notoriety. The losers get experience and the fun of playing.

My status as a member of The Greenville Mafia meant I was part of the best-run team apparatus at the convention. The Mafia took four carloads of people, and we stayed in a block of rooms reserved for us. Our first activity was the ceremonial issuance of this year's Mafia shirt, a handsome grey polo with our Puppetmaster logo on the chest and a black heart embroidered on the left arm. Since Mafia people have been going to the WBC since it began 13 years ago, our veterans have more team shirts than they can wear in a week, so we had a schedule of what color to wear when. We newbies simply matched colors as best we could. When our group gathered, people noticed! One person spotted near the venue for "The Kaiser's Pirates" (a naval wargame played with cards) was asked if he were joining in the competition. His reply: "I see all those gold shirts! No way I'm getting sucked into THAT vortex!" (He was well-advised to steer clear! "Kaiser's Pirates" is a favorite of the Mafia, and our members won 6 of the top 7 spots!) The Mafia has class, too. There was a hospitality suite run for Mafia & friends. We had monogrammed drinking cups, dice - and even our own microbrew beer: Mafia Stout, subtitled "A beer as black as our hearts!"

As is my usual custom, I played group photographer, and I have a site up with pictures. However, as the pictures are just Mafiaites having fun, I'll not put a link here.

I competed in Union Pacific, Santa Fe Trails, Medici, B-17, The Kaiser's Pirates, and Robo Rally. My best finish was #5 in Kaiser's Pirates. I also took in several seminars and many demos of games with which I was unfamiliar. The Mafia overall scored big, as it usually does. I believe our final tally was six 1st-places. The plaques in our game room commemorating world championships will grow accordingly.

Hi Google!

2010-03-20T13:32:00.000-04:00

GREENVILLE WANTS TO BE WIRED!

Google's announcement that it will select a community to be hooked up to next-generation fiber-optic 1Gb/sec Internet service brought out a bid from nearby Greenville.

Fortunately, we spotted the news in time to sign up to be among the 2,000 black-clad geeks who spelled out Google's logo in color in the beautiful downtown Falls Park for the benefit of a video made by helicopter.

No, the town council didn't rename the city "Google" for a day, as did another city in the running. But with this demonstration, we hope to show Google that there is enthusiastic support in Greenville to be Google's city of choice!

Data Protection - An Unhappy Story

2010-03-16T16:20:00.000-04:00

The technical literature for computers has always warned that hard drives aren't perfect, and that when they go, they often do so abruptly. Enough trouble-free experience with them can make a person complacent to the risks. I resemble that remark!

Trouble is: I tried to do the right thing. Knowing that with a computer above six years old there may be vulnerabilities, I attempted to keep important data present both on my C: drive and on a (much newer) USB-attached external hard drive. That worked until my main hard drive filled up. Then I moved several directories of family pictures to the attached drive to clear space.

So naturally, it was the newer drive that failed, as it now contained the sole copy of years of irreplaceable pictures. Here is the tale of my journey out of perdition...

I googled "data recovery" and got several hits for companies that make that a business of doing that service. From reading their web sites, I selected one that seemed to have a professional approach and a picture of a physical address that suggested a robust business.
I filled out a request for quote online and was gratified to get a call within half an hour from someone who spoke good English and who, on hearing the symptoms, immediately suggested the same failure mechanism I had figured occurred (firmware failure). I got a formal offer by email for services, laying out what would be done & when, and the likely charges - with a note that they try to make 80% of all recoveries for under $400. (This was encouraging, because $400 is a number I had heard from friends who had had data recoveries before.) So I packed my drive securely and shipped it off.

The company's communications with me were excellent! I got several updates by email and a link I could follow to get the chain of custody in real time, as the drive went through the diagnostics and recovery attempts. Then I got a call that the attempts to make the drive "talk" were successful, and an email containing a list of all files discovered on the drive - a list that went on many pages. It looked good!

I should mention that meanwhile I bought a Ethernet-equipped 1TB drive and hung it on the home LAN, and ran backup software on the family's computers. I hope not to be caught unprepared again!

With my assurance that the data I hoped to recover was included in the file list I received, then the company made its pitch: it would cost over $950 to get the data moved onto a replacement drive and sent to me! When I could breathe again, I asked why the steep increase in the expected price? Well, the technician had had to flash the firmware twice. Now, I've flashed EPROMs and I have an idea of the effort that cost. Believe me, it is not commensurate with the increase! And as a retiree, I didn't have an extra grand lying loose about. So, I had them pack up the drive and send it back to me. That's it - no data recovery, no cost. For trying to skin me, they got nothing.

Discouraged, I let the drive sit in my garage over the winter. After Brenda prodded me several times about the old family photos, I finally overcame my lassitude and looked into recovery services again. This time, I found a site comparing data recovery services, where I read many horror stories. My first company had a 1-star rating on a 1 - 5 scale! Arggh! Shoulda looked harder, first go-round! So for my second attempt, I chose one* with mostly good ratings. As the drive failed in September and it was now February, I said I had no pressing time limit for a recovery, which would help keep prices down. This company took more than two weeks, made no acknowledgments other than that they received the drive, but eventually I got an email with a file list. Still looked good; at least Company #1 hadn't screwed up my drive in pique at losing the paying part of the job. And with a telephone call, here came the pitch: $384 to recover what I wanted onto DVDs plus $8/DVD! That's it! Another week and I had the data in my hand.

The moral here is to choose your data recovery service judiciously. Hah! No! That's not it! The moral here is to back up your data so you don't go through a story like mine... even if it did have a happy ending.

* Because you asked - Company #2 is called Gillware.

My First Pro Audiobook

2010-02-17T17:51:00.007-05:00

If you've visited some of the linked pages in this blog, you probably know that I am a frequent contributor to the growing catalog of public domain literature on audiobooks over at LibriVox.org. I joined that group just over four years ago.

A couple months ago I was contacted by a publishing company in Canada, I Publish Press, to ask if I would like to produce an audiobook for them. I immediately subjected this idea to the following decision tree:

(1) Read a book out loud? Well, yeah! I've done this over 40 times already and I like doing it!
(2) Get paid? ??? YES!!!

As an additional inducement, they were asking me to do something current and interesting. Deal sealed.

The audiobook was being co-published with the print version. Both are out now. The book is "My Problem With Doors" by Scott Southard. The book starts with the premise that the narrator at an early age started to walk through a door in his house, and somewhere between the two sides was transported to another time and place. What's more, that behavior keeps up; he discovers that roughly 5% of the door transits he makes will whisk him away to yet another place and time. Lost past reasonable hope of return to his home and family, what can he do? In a thirty-year career of time-hopping, he searches for the meaning of why he, of all mankind, is subject to this anomaly. Good stuff!

The good folks over at I Publish Press only knew me from my LibriVox recordings, but they selected a good project for me. I was very engaged in the story and I hope that shows.

Now (shameless plug coming!) if this story premise at all appeals to you, I hope you'll mouse right over to ipublishpress.com and snap up a copy!

Stoking the Brain Cells

2010-01-12T17:17:00.000-05:00

I know it's important as we age to keep challenging the ole grey matter, so that it remains tuned-up and ready to go. That becomes probably more necessary in retirement, as job challenges (thankfully!) recede in the rear-view mirror.

Soon after I retired, I decided I liked the decoding of "Cryptoquotes" which are published six times a week by my local paper. These are pithy or amusing or revealing short quotes, usually of well under 100 letters, accompanied by an attribution. The trick is that they are encoded. Each letter stands for a different one (today a "T" may used for all instances of "K", for instance) and the code changes with each puzzle. The challenge is to unsnarl things that look like "PXOKA GRTYY" to the actual message.

Since I am (was!) an engineer, it is never that easy! I created a template in Excel that lets me rapidly make trial substitutions in the message and easily change them if they prove wrong. I developed a cheat sheet of common 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, & 5-letter words (and even some longer), and include stuff I found on code-breaking like the relative incidence of the letters, common doublets, triplets, and double letters, common prefixes and suffixes and contractions, and common words with repeated letters. Then I time my performance. And I think of ways to wring more efficiency out of setting up the cryptoquote. (I imagine myself competing against someone with a pencil, who can begin at once; I must first transcribe the quote to the spreadsheet and then link each letter to the first instance where it is used - which usually takes almost as much time as the solution phase.) And finally, I analyze the heck out of my performance!

For 2009, I decoded 271 cryptoquotes. I averaged 12.2 seconds to solve each unique letter, or 7.3 seconds for each total letter. For a normal quote of 66 letters, that's just over 8 minutes!

Charitably for you, I decline to bore you with the ranges, the standard deviations, or the graphs showing my performance improving over time!

I Join the Mafia...

2010-01-10T11:44:00.001-05:00

Well, that's what they call themselves! (Ourselves, now.)

The Greenville Mafia was in past years a prime mover in the start-up of the Boardgames Players Association (BPA) twelve years ago, and indeed the incorporation was performed by one of our members, Scott Pfeiffer, a local attorney. The BPA is an international organization that draws 1400 - 1500 participants to its week-long championships held annually in Lancaster. PA. See http://www.boardgamers.org/ .

This gives me the weekly opportunity to play board games with some of the best players in the world. We have our own meeting house, and there are three plaques on a wall just listing the names and years of members who won 1st place honors at the BPA championships in individual events - dozens, in fact. With normal attendance at our sessions of 12 - 14, there are usually at least three different games in play at any given time. And these aren't Monopoly or Scrabble - these are euro games like Dominion and San Juan, war games like The Kaiser's Pirates and Napoleonic Wars, railroading games like Ticket to Ride and Empire Builder, and many others.

I may not ever attain the level of play of other Mafioso, but at least, after a hiatus of decades, I'm playing games again on a regular basis!

Misty Photos

2009-11-10T19:00:00.022-05:00

Add strong sun to fog and a marina, and you can get some striking pictures.
I took these at Southall Landing in Hampton, VA.

Mice on Main

2009-10-20T12:30:00.000-04:00

Continuing on the theme of fun in Greenville...
A student from Christ Church Episcopal School conceived an idea for casting a series of metal mice and siting them in public-but-inconspicuous locations downtown. With inspiration from the children's book Goodnight Moon, he arranged the founding and installation of nine mice. Now, visitors to the city can pick up a hint sheet and go looking for these l'il guys while enjoying a walk down Main Street.
We finally made the hunt in October. It was a unique and entertaining hike, even if it was marred by realizing some of the mice had been stolen or damaged and that we were seeing replacements. (Also, one was temporarily resited while construction proceeded at his station.) Here's our proof:

Nearby Greenville

2009-10-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

One of the delightful things about living near Greenville IS Greenville! Recently my sister Porter and her husband Chuck visited with us, and we made several forays downtown.

"Fall for Greenville" is a multi-night orgy of al fresco samplings from local restaurants, along with street entertainments like musical groups and improv troupes. The streets of downtown fill with merrymakers.

You can cool off in the fountains over near
The Lazy Goat.

You can stroll across the Liberty Bridge
and enjoy the view of the Reedy River Falls.

And you can stop by and enjoy
numerous sculptures. Here, Charles
Townes, Greenville native and
inventor of the laser, reveals his
secrets to us!

Another Title on Traveling Classics!

2009-09-02T00:42:00.002-04:00

In February I wrote that a new group that produces an app for the Apple iPhone (www.travelingclassics.com) had launched with eight audiobooks, one of which was my version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I just checked back with them to see their current catalog. They're now up to 33 audiobooks, and one of the added ones is my rendition of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Of course you can get all LibriVox audiobooks for free at www.archive.org, but if you don't want to wait on a download, or like to be read to on your iPhone (with the text scrolling in sync), Traveling Classics is the way to go!

A Cautionary Tale

2009-07-31T18:17:00.003-04:00

Two weeks ago we finally put our house on the market. A day after it appeared on Zillow.com, we got an email inquiry from a fellow in Edinburgh, Scotland, who was with the U.N. Development Corporation and was being posted to the U.S.. He liked what he saw, but had questions: Did we have weatherstripping? Were there cracks in the walls? Other maintenance issues?

After about five more exchanges of emails, the man and his wife were sure: they wanted our house. They had recently sold their own house and could offer a cash contract (no contingency, hurray!) They would be in our state by the end of July to sign a contract, but they would have the New York office send us a binder immediately, taken from his hefty travel allowance.

Then we heard that he was posted to a 3-day conference on AIDS in Benin (Africa), after which he would visit the New York offices and then fly on to see us.

A few days later, a Fed Ex package arrived with three money orders of $950 each. It was never our intent to accept a binder to take our house off the market, and we had told him that; nevertheless, there it was, and it was more than the $1,000 he had said was coming.

So the next day we got an urgent email. The secretary had screwed up and sent more than she had been directed to, and now our would-be buyers were going to have trouble with getting to the States. (Are you beginning to get an uneasy feeling here?) So would we please wire the overage of $1,850 to his travel agent in Benin?

My wife, bless her, politely replied that there was no way we would send money, his or ours, to a travel agent in Benin. I probably would have been less politic.

Did you get the scam line? Send money to Africa. Yeah, sure, like we never heard of the Nigerians who wanted to sneak stolen government funds out of their country and only needed a little help from an American contact, for whom they'd split the take. (If you have ever fallen for such a scheme - I'm sorry for reminding you of a sore subject. I betcha wouldn't do it now!)

We started this exchange with the worry that it was "too good to be true." An Internet bite for a full price contract on our house the first week it's up for sale, in this market?? We decided to treat it as legitimate unless or until the other party revealed his desire to have us send money somewhere or give details of our bank accounts. But across half a dozen contacts, each with homey concerns like, "My wife is a school teacher. Will she be able to work in your state?" we began to trust. When the URGENT email came, although we knew not to follow the directions, we grieved some for a deal we hoped was going to be legitimate. Ah, well.

So I hope that this exposition will help YOU avoid being bitten by this clever scheme that relied, not on our sense of greed, but the building of a bond of trust.

Postscript - Some other things we discovered once we looked online for evidence of this scheme. We felt kinda good that the other guy was out the money for his Fed Ex package. Probably not so. It turns out these mailings are usually funded through stolen credit cards. So, if your identity was stolen, it might have been used to facilitate a scam to get major money out of someone else. The money orders? Faked. Close examination revealed giveaways, and online research shows that denominations of $950 are very common in scams, for some reason. There were over 3,000 complaints in one forum about faked money orders. Suffice it to say we ascertained that there is no such payee as shown on the money orders we got. Indeed, people targeted like us for scams are sometimes arrested for trying to cash these fake money orders. Check out Craig's List, read about money order scams there - you'll never want to accept a money order for anything, ever again!

The Census Guy

2009-05-13T21:14:00.003-04:00

By now, you should have had a visit from The Census Guy.

What?? Isn't the decennial census next year??

Well, yeah. But the Census Bureau is running a big effort this year to update addresses and find all the new homes constructed since 2000. Not to mention: tents, boats, and railroad cars, if people are living in them.

Yours truly was a Census Guy. For six weeks I walked the streets, ringing doorbells and verifying addresses. The effort (at least in my area) is now complete and my pith helmet is retired.

Total addresses verified: 5,015.
Total locations mapped: about 1,800.

Getting Serious About the Move

2009-05-13T14:28:00.007-04:00

It's been our intent to finally move "back home" once the kids were both off in college. Following Christmas, we started making good on that promise.

There's a real sense of inevitability once your belongings start disappearing into boxes. Finally, it's not just a plan - it's a project!

But once you've assessed your house and resolved to change the things that have annoyed you all along - like ugly wallpaper installed by the last owners - you start to wonder: "Exactly WHY are we moving?"

Because that's the plan, of course!

Well, the five-page checklist has shrunk to just a few items. And soon we'll open the nicely refurbished front door to...?

All the people out of work and foreclosed on?

One Million

2009-02-28T13:06:00.002-05:00

A million is a largish number - especially if it relates to individual decisions by a population.

They give gold records in the music biz to commemorate a million sales. After all, the revenue generated is substantial. There are no gold anythings in the free publishing biz. That's OK - "free" is not "worthless." When a million decisions have been made to visit the literature of the past, that's a lot of hours invested in hearing the thoughts of great writers.

I've been proud to be a LibriVox reader (for three years, this month, in fact). And I'm prouder for having brought to the homes and cars of many people a total of one million listens to my solo readings, a goal I hit today.

If you've been a listener - thank you! And I hoped I've entertained you. Stay tuned. there's more choice from the old masters coming!

Coming Now to an iPhone Near You!

2009-02-23T09:42:00.002-05:00

It's been strangely gratifying to see LibriVox recordings I've made for sale on EBay (What? Hadn't you noticed that yet?) "Strangely" because all LibriVox audiobooks are free for download from www.archive.org. But if people want to burn those downloads onto CDs and offer them for sale, that is actually an activity we LV'ers encourage, since not everyone has the patience for what can be long downloads.

Add to EBay a new outlet: http://www.travelingclassics.com/
Traveling Classics is a new application for your iPhone or iPod Touch which reads a classic book to you while scrolling the text on the screen, synchronized to the narration. As an application available at the iTunes AppStore, Traveling Classics has to submit all its intended content to Apple for permission.

On its opening day, February 12, Traveling Classics launched with eight audiobooks, one of which was my "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." So now, for a limited time only, you can have me read to you for over seven hours for 99 cents!
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304223424&mt=8

Cool, huh? Not quite free... but the feeling that gives me: priceless!

Myrtle Beach Off-Season

2009-01-01T15:16:00.008-05:00

Myrtle Beach has a reputation for being a big party beach. (And golf - don't forget golf; there's over 100 courses in and around Myrtle Beach.) But come the Fall and the crowds go away, and the beach shows its more contemplative side.

We made two sallies to the beach, in October and November, playing share-and-share-alike with relatives and timeshares.

Here are a few of my favorite memories.

Dawn

Sea Oats - Sunlit Waters

Quiet Enjoyment

Atalaya - Conch

With sister Porter & wife Brenda

The changing sky

Sculpture!

2009-01-01T14:08:00.004-05:00

I know of two world-class sculpture gardens on the East Coast. One is Storm King, near West Point, NY. Its collection runs to huge outdoor pieces, dozens of feet high. Most are fairly abstract. I've read it described as the best undiscovered secret in the state, and I agree. I was last there in 2005, renewing an acquaintance I began in 1973.

The other is Brookgreen Gardens, south of Myrtle Beach, SC. Originally the preserve of Anna Hyatt Huntington, herself a world-class sculptress, this collection runs from table-top to life-size and is strongly representational. We had the pleasure of visiting Brookgreen again in October.

The pumpkins are not sculptures! The Gardens were getting ready for a festival.

Children pledge allegiance.

Sancho Panza acquires a guest.

This guy is carrying a torch for you!

Young ladies find uncomfortable perches.

If this face doesn't say "Joy!" then nothing will!

October might seem to be a poor month to find floral color, but not at Brookgreen. Even the butterflies stick around late in the season.

For whatever reason, I have a long-standing interest in shooting interesting textures. Here, even the live oaks get into the act at Brookgreen Gardens.

Ka-Boom!

2008-07-08T01:37:00.003-04:00

Our subdivision had its usual crackerjack fireworks display this 4th. Here are a few of my photos.

The second one even looks like a palmetto, the S.C. state tree!

My Year Without Eating

2008-07-08T00:31:00.002-04:00

Well, I finally finished a long-term project. It took me eight years and three days, but I did it - I went a whole year without eating.

No breakfast, lunch, dinner. No dessert. No snack. Nothing solid for at least 24 hours at a time, and usually 36 hours. Three hundred and sixty-five times. I made Mondays my fasting day, except when on vacation or holiday. My normal routine was to eat nothing between Sunday dinner and Tuesday breakfast. If I felt particularly stressed, I sometimes trimmed it to midnight-to-midnight, going the calendar day without.

I grew up with the admonition, "Clean your plate! Children are starving in Europe!" And eating a meal on a regular schedule got to be, well, a regular habit. And then I would catch the other side of the coin: "You've never known what it's like to go hungry." So when emergencies or other events needing my attention took me out in the plant at lunch (or dinner), my stomach would grumble and complain about the disruption and I found myself distracted from what was causing me to miss the meal.

So, in part this regimen was to silence this inconvenient critic. It could inform me I was hungry all it wanted. After a few months of regular fasting, that became just background noise, easy to ignore.

Another part was a desire to lose some weight. My weight has always been pretty stable, but the middle-age expansion was quietly asserting itself. I'd heard that after age 40, most American adults gain a pound a year, and that was about right in my case. I'd tried to prevent it, but no combination of foreswearing midnight snacks and exercising had yet reversed the trend. But I finished my year of fasting at almost exactly the weight I started. I experienced some downs & ups. I can't recommend this regimen for weight loss for two reasons. First, you find yourself counting 2,000 calories not consumed on Monday, and so Tuesday you have seconds. Hah! You're going nowhere! But the second reason is that even if you control your impulses all week, your body is busy adjusting to the new dietary reality. It learns to be more efficient, and so you end up maintaining the same weight on fewer calories per week. I guess I can only claim the eight pounds I didn't gain over the last eight years! Ah well, that's something.

The gains have been mental. After the first successful trial, I knew I could survive and function even at work. After a few months, I could sit down with the family at Monday dinner and be content with a glass of tea while they ate. When I had done this for over a year, I took stock and asked myself where I was going with this. Surely any benefits that could be ascribed to fasting were already achieved (my doctor told me that if everyone did this, Type 2 diabetes would probably disappear from his practice). I looked down the road and decided to go for a year of fasting. Staring down seven more years of this was a bit daunting; it's not like weekly fasts are fun!

Two years ago I confirmed my plan to finish my 365 days and drop the fasts. The calendar told me I should be finishing up about the time Hunter graduated from high school and Brenda and I became empty nesters. I didn't want to impose on Brenda to eat alone or in front of me, so that seemed like a perfect time to finish up.

But I can't quite give up the habit. For one reason, I'm afraid my more-efficient metabolism might let me balloon if I go back to eating every day. So I'm now on a modified plan: two days a week I give up breakfast and lunch and only have dinner, so I drop four meals over two days.

A short calculation reveals I've gone without food 1.77% of my life. I think that entitles me to say I know now what it's like to go hungry. But it's over. I did it.

It was enough.

Close Call

2008-05-16T20:58:00.002-04:00

Driving carefully, being alert, not using a cell phone while driving - these are good things, but they only carry you so far. Sometimes the problem is with the other guy (or gal).
Today Brenda & I were beginning our daily walk; we were still on our own block. A teen neighbor backed her car out of the driveway across the street and hit me from behind. I hit the concrete of a driveway, did (I think) two rolls and a near-headstand, and ended up face-down and full-length on the pavement.
I finally found some use for the tumbling classes I took in high school gym all those years ago. At least part of my tumble was under control. And I got up unhurt and able to do our four-mile walk.
It was a close call. And I'm glad it was I who was hit and not Brenda. But the incident points up our vulnerability on the road. Watch out, folks. And pay attention when you drive. Please.

A Quarter-Million Reads!

2008-01-15T11:02:00.001-05:00

Today is a bit of a landmark for me. At this point I have 15 solo-read audiobooks available in the LibriVox catalog (http://librivox.org/newcatalog/people_public.php?peopleid=204).

Downloads are managed by Archive.com, which has been experiencing difficulties for several months. Their download counters stopped working sometime in November and resumed around the beginning of January, so perhaps 6 weeks of history may be missing... but, today the cumulative count for my fifteen books passed 250,000!

Book #16 (The Master of the World by Jules Verne) is finished and in validation at this moment. For more, see Mark's LibriVox Activity (link at right).

Taking a Stab With Bryce

2007-09-18T09:03:00.001-04:00

You know those cool landscape backgrounds you see in sci-fi art? I'd often heard that they are created in a program called Bryce (perhaps after Bryce Canyon National Park, which has some of the most AMAZING landscapes to be seen in America!), so when I got a free copy of Bryce 5 in an issue of a computer magazine I picked up at B&N, I had to give it a try!

The results? Mixed. I immediately determined that the great deal on Bryce (even if it was an expensive specialty mag) came with a drawback - no manual! Now, I am usually one to read half- to three-quarters of a manual before I try to operate an unfamiliar program or game. I am apt to get frustrated when my idea of "intuitive interface" doesn't match the prublisher's, if I am forced to guess how to do things. When I have a manual, I can read the rules; the publisher sets his rules out, and I learn to use them. Without a manual, I rapidly tire of try-this-and-see-what-it-does.

So I have to report that although I obtained images, they didn't come easily, as I fought with the interface to do things I knew the program was capable of, but which I couldn't get guidance on. In the end, my artistic vision lost the tussle, and I settled for
"something."

I'll probably give Bryce another try later. Maybe I'll find some hints somewhere on how to use it. For the point is, as a dabbler and not a pro, I only want to satisfy an occasional impulse - I am not going to go out and buy a shrink-wrapped copy of the latest version. (Which I think is 6. BTW, a quick check on Amazon offers Bryce 5 for $490.)

That's "Under an Alien Sun" at the top, and "Cross-Country Flight" below.

Chaos Maps

2007-04-30T17:23:00.000-04:00

Remember flame fractals? (See post: "Point Break") Lately I've been enjoying more fun with mathematics, courtesy of Chaoscope. This program creates a 3-D map of strange attractors. Here are a few of my favorite creations.

(Click for full-size)

"Arch of Sunrise"

"Sail Away"

"Green Heron"

"Escher Puzzle"

Fencing Class

2007-04-22T00:40:00.000-04:00

This family has a thing with swords.

Actually, we all like anything shiney and pointy or edgy. Brenda's big on pocket knives (especially ones with lots of utensils), but Mark, Hunter, and McKenzie like the long steel.

We don't get much opportunity to swash-buckle with the swords we own. (Mark used to get plenty of opportunity in the Society for Creative Anachronism... but that's another story.) So when Furman University published a continuing ed brochure with a fencing class, you can bet it pricked up ears around here.

Now, McKenzie took a fencing class at Rice University last year, which she greatly enjoyed. But Hunter had not yet had any formal training, and Mark's was abysmally long ago, so the two signed up together.

Furman's class was conducted by instructors from the Knights of Siena fencing salle. (www.knightsofsiena.com) We started with a great class: 12 adults and 12 kids. (That tailed off to 2 adults and 10 kids eight weeks later.) Mark discovered to his great satisfaction that the class would teach sabre, which was his weapon in college.

(At left, Mark and Hunter, foreground, practice attack/parry drills.)

Further to his satisfaction was the fact that his old fencing uniform still fit! Witness the Amateur Fencers League of America patch on the shoulder - that organization changed its name in 1982 and so hasn't been called that for 25 years! Actually, Mark got his uniform in 1970, so it's a bit older than that! He's not one to throw out anything that still works!

Here is Hunter, getting a good cut in against classmate Mattes.

Hunter was one of the oldest of the "kid" complement of the class. Certainly his reach helped him, but he also showed real quickness and good reactions. He pretty much defeated his opponents...

EXCEPT, when his opponent was Dad!

Despite his 55-year-old knees, Mark lost only one bout - to the instructor, 5-4.

The class is now over. Both Hunt and Mark wish they had a regular venue for fencing, but sadly, it is not that popular a sport.

New Photoshop User

2007-03-14T17:11:00.000-04:00

When Furman University sent out their Continuing Education brochure, this time I was ready! I signed up for a class in improving photos with Photoshop.

My instructor is an old-time photographer, with years in the darkroom, but who went digital about the time Photoshop 2 came out (that's what? Seven versions ago?). His emphasis in the class was correcting poor exposures and perhaps cropping for better impact, but I wanted to learn how to do things you can't do with a camera.

I never was an artist (my career was in chemical engineering) and may never be, but I am enjoying playing with images, So here are a couple of my efforts.

"Daffodils Giving Up Their Essence"

"Hunter at Panthertown Falls"
(NOT taken in Fall!)

2007-01-17T10:08:00.000-05:00

Family Portrait Update

This brings us up to date.

Gosh! Some of us are getting old!

Journey to the Manger

2006-12-12T20:16:00.000-05:00

One activity that rolls around every year at Christmas is the production of "Journey to the Manger" by our church (Simpsonville United Methodist Church, www. sumcweb.org). This is an outdoor, drive-through chronology of the Christmas story, from Isaiah's prophecy to the birth of Jesus. After a series of silent tableaus, cars turn through a set of rustic town gates and encounter Bethlehem in all its noise and clamor, and rumors of the appearances of angels and a very special event taking place. We typically play to 4,000 people in the three evenings of the presentation.

Here are Hunter and Mark in their garb for roles as a rabbi and his student. Brenda joined the kitchen crew, which restored the actors after their stints outdoors in 30-degree weather.

Santa's Volunteer

2006-12-05T21:03:00.000-05:00

Titanius has his eye on a new job. (Click on the picture.)

Catching Christmas Spirit

2006-12-05T17:33:00.000-05:00

Brenda and Mark just finished performing in the Christmas cantata. You'll notice that Mark is getting a grey beard ready for a role as "Rabbi" in the outdoor Bethlehem the church is presenting this weekend.

It's December! So, it's time to break out Christmas pictures. Since we don't have decorations up yet, we'll have to dip in the archives.

Here's the whole family last New Year's Day. We take an annual portrait in front of the tree.

Whoops! Almost forgot the furriest member of the family! He's always hogging the show!

2006-11-27T13:54:00.000-05:00

"Point Break"

"Phoenix-Peacock"

"Amazonian Waterfall"

Ah, the beauty of recursive mathematical functions! The pictures above are representations of the solution sets of a series of equations. I created them with "Apophysis", a freeware program.

Our Backyard in Fall

2006-11-27T13:02:00.000-05:00

2006-04-11T13:08:00.000-04:00

Chiefs of the TechSmith Clan

2006-04-11T12:17:00.000-04:00

Springtime in our backyard

2006-04-11T12:16:00.000-04:00

April 11: We open our doors as a new site on the Web!