Participation vs Competition-

My driving style has changed over the years. Like many young people, I drove rather competitively in my youth. I tried to ace out that guy weaving in and out of traffic. I refused to give way to that jerk trying to edge a few spaces ahead when traffic was getting bogged down. I fought for position, even if it was just one car length.

These days I watch for that guy weaving in and out of traffic. I try to make room so that he (or she) can just move right on past me. I figure my sleight adjustment of position and speed won't significantly impact my own journey, and this person is just going to do what they are going to do no matter what I do. If nothing else I have made sure that Mr. Bob-and-weave will have his accident somewhere far from me.

I give way. I try to make the journey of others around me go more smoothly. I have found that giving way does not make me late to my destination. In more than one case I have pulled into a parking lot at my destination and found Mr. Bob-and-weave just getting out of his car. He gained mere seconds at the cost of great risk to himself and others. Seconds.

What has happened is that I have switched from viewing my journey as a competition to one of participation. How can I make traffic flow better? What can I do now that will make the shared journey go more smoothly? They are usually tiny things. Mostly just not insisting on having something of little value, such as one car length.

My perception has altered. I actually perceive traffic flowing better as a consequence of my new attitude. Is this just an illusion? I really don't know. I don't particularly care, as long as my experience is made better. As long as my participation seems to me to make things better, things are better.

Today (while driving) I realized what I was doing, and gave it a name. I came up with the title for this blog as a description of what I was doing. Participating in the journey I was sharing with all of the people on the road. We may not all have had the same destination, but for a time we were all together and moving in the same direction. It cost me very little to try to make the journey better for all of us.

I have to wonder if this kind of thinking could be applied to other situations. Granted, in a game or in a true survival situation head-to-head competition may be the better way. However, in most of life participation might well be the better choice. Politics? The economy? My local community affairs?

My purpose in the future is to keep an eye out for opportunities to be a participant rather than a competitor. It will always come down to little things. Small courtesies performed to make my journey and the journey of those around me a bit more pleasant. Kindness need not be costly, and courtesy is an affordable luxury.

Live long. Live well. Choose wisely.

Farewell, Steve-

Lots of people will be blogging farewell to a creative and powerful figure of our era. I, too, wish to express my appreciation for the man and his work. He has truly impacted our world. I have visited the Apple campus, a nexus of innovation and creativity. I have been directly and indirectly involved in Silicon Valley, and the amazing culture it spawned.

I am particularly amazed at all he did toward the end of his days. Pancreatic cancer is particularly painful, and to do battle for so long is truly impressive. I have a dubious honor in that I had an attack of acute pancreatitis years ago. I sampled the pain. It is a most amazing pain, and for him to work through that kind of pain on a regular basis for years is astounding. That, and continuing to perform at a high level in a challenging industry.

He will be missed. Missed by multitudes, around the world. And rightly so.

I now turn to another page. In the course of my own career I never met Steve Jobs, but I met other people. People not so high up on the scale of human achievement. Dregs, actually. In particular, winos. Drunks. Wasted humanity. Failures as deep as Steve Jobs was successful.

I watched them die, over time. Penguin. Pathfinder. Scotty. Scotty was a particularly nice guy. Vodka Ron. Ron would often continue conversations with me that we had never started. Others whom I could name. One took the name of Harry Blackstone Jr., and was a magician at the end of his magical rope. One went by the name of Sarge, with some unclear military background.

Some were broken warriors. Others just took a wrong turn at a bump in the road of life. A few had college degrees somewhere in the past. Others had failed businesses, failed relationships, or just failed life management decisions. All found themselves at the bottom of a bottle. I never saw any of them that got in this deep make it out, except Pathfinder. He just quit. Got a job and a place to stay. Then died.

I choose to sometimes remember these forgotten humans. Steve Jobs earned the honor of being remembered by multitudes. That is good and right. I remember him, too. The others, those who did not fare as well, will go unremembered. I choose to sometimes remember them, not for their successes or failures, but for their humanity.

Human, just like Steve. Farewell, Steve. You ran a good race. Rest in peace.

I/O Magic Technology Review-

I/O Magic 3.5 IDE/SDA Enclosure, to be exact. First a little back story. Trust me, this may someday be useful information. My scintillating report will embed the information in the back of your mind where it will come forth when technical disaster strikes. It will, someday. Someday.

My wife's desktop computer finally gave up the ghost-in-the-machine, so to speak. Within the cold case lay a hard drive, filled with data. Photos and stuff. Important, in a personal kind of way. Now inaccessible. What to do? The Geek Squad geeks said it would take around four hundred dollars to even determine if the machine could be rebuilt. Recommendation? Yep. The computer retail section.

My wife now has a rather cheap Toshiba laptop, which even in it's cheapness is far better than the machine she just lost. However, the pictures and a few other things remained inaccessible. What to do? See the Geeks, again. Prospect; $100 to pull the data off to the media of our choice. We already have a portable hard drive, so that would be the total cost.

We later stopped by Office Depot to pick up a USB hub, one of those things that gives you a few more USB ports. Part of the Toshiba's cheapness was having only two USB ports. (Office Depot was next door to the hardware store where we were shopping for, uh, hardware.) I inquired as to the cost of getting the data off of the hard drive. It was $50, but I would have to buy a housing to make the hard drive an external hard drive.

"You can use this I/O housing." said the tech. "In fact, if you used this you could probably retrieve the data yourself." We left the store with a four port USB hub and the I/O Magic hard drive enclosure. Once I got home I followed the clear instructions and had the hard drive out of the old computer and into the new housing in about fifteen minutes. The kit includes everything you need, including cables, a power supply and very clear instructions.

As to using the drive, there were no instructions for that.  Fear not. It was much like plugging in a thumb-drive or any other USB file saving device. I searched the old drive, found the files we wanted, and moved them to the new machine. Total time, less than an hour.

Now we have a spare external hard drive. I haven't done anything with it, yet, but I figure I could reformat the device and use it for extra storage or as a back-up device. The old computer still has some usable memory, a DVD drive, and a wireless interface that can be cannibalized. Parts is parts, you know.

Seeds of our lives-

http://www.growseed.org/seed.html

I once worked for a time for a gentleman who sold bee keeping supplies. I built some of his personal hive boxes for him. Being a retailer, he would quality control parts to be sold. The parts that were not of sufficient quality to sell to the retail public were set aside. These he would have assembled (by myself and my friend Sam) to use for his own bees. "My bees don't really care that much." he said.

As a consequence I got to know some beekeepers. One beekeeper kept a tray full of clover seeds in his truck. As he traveled around he would cast those seeds out to provide flowers for bees to use. His bees. Somebody else's bees. He didn't really care. He was seeding the future.

I also knew another fellow who would cast seeds freely from his vehicle. Let's say he was a horticulturalist dealing in herbs of a questionable legal status. In those days the status was really not in question. His motivation? Hey, you never know when you will need herbal fortification to improve the quality of music or movies. Seeding the future.

In my back yard I have some bird feeders. The seeds I have used are not the sterilized kind. Birds are sloppy eaters, and the have 'planted' some interesting things growing abundantly around their feeder. Some have grown up to provide even more seeds. The sloppy eating habits of those birds have provided even more seeds for them to eat. They were seeding the future.

Stories have seeds. I gather them wherever I go. I write them down in a little note book. I sometimes record them in my phone. I have emailed them to myself, and lost far more than I have saved. Where are they? Somewhere out there, seeding the future.

So, next time you are out there in the real world and do something a bit embarrassing or slightly off, you needn't worry about what may come of it. Just change your perspective. If beekeepers can cast out clover seeds, and fringe herbalists cast out future experience enhancements, it must be a very good thing to cast out story ideas into the world.

Relax. Be yourself. Seed the future. I will try and write it down.

Spam Sushi-

The comment management software I am using is called Comment Kahuna. It is free, and though rather rudimentary it does the job. You can create profiles which include a user name, email and website information that is auto-filled into the various blog comment forms you will be filling out.

The process begins by entering key words for which the software will search. The user interface is clear, simple and easy to use. Lists of blogs are generated and you simply tab through them to read and add comments. It all works rather well, and I have found a lot of blogs I otherwise would not have ever found.

There are some weaknesses in the software. It logs where you have been, but does not use that information to eliminate blogs you have commented on from the list. So, as you tab through you will see the same blogs come up again and again. If you run several separate searches using the same or similar key words you can find yourself thumbing through a great many blogs you have already seen.

This free software is a marketing ploy. You will subsequently receive offers to buy a more robust and automated software. The marketing is not too aggressive, and I find it easy enough to simply read the offers and delete them. I do read them, since the software marketer offers bits of advice with his pitch and some have been useful.

I have enjoyed using this product. I have been to blogs I otherwise would not have visited, and learned some things I would otherwise not have learned. Some are just a lot of fun to visit, and even my least positive experience taught me a few things about how to do this.

Karen, who was clearly critical of my marketing approach, offered the advice to make a sincere and genuine comment, and not add my link to my book right in the comment section. She suggested that I instead have a clearly placed link in my blog. I immediately modified my blog to have such a link, which I simply had overlooked before.

Using her helpful criticism I modified my way of doing these things. On blogs that are obviously personal projects and not intended as marketing vehicles I would not include a direct link to my books. However, on such sites as are obviously not just information sharing venues but vehicles for marketing I would place a link following a suitable comment.

As a consequence of using Comment Kahuna I have also discovered a community of independent self-publishing authors. Some, like Randolph Lalonde, have achieved sufficient success in independent publishing to quit the day job and write full-time. Most others are still building a following. Many purchase, read and revue other independent publisher's works.

However you use Comment Kahuna you gain what are called back-links. I don't fully understand how all of this works, but ultimately it makes your own website or blog more visible. You gain higher and higher placement in search lists. In other words, you shine brighter and people can find you.

If you are marketing yourself or a product on a very tight budget Comment Kahuna will prove to be a useful tool to add to your tool box. Since it is free it will cost you nothing to try.

Spam Maggots

So, did I mention I have been learning to promote my book? Yes? Well, I won't mention my book again this week. What I am learning about right now is Social Networking. This does not relate to Social Security, which is often in the news these days. Neither is it about Socialism, which might or might not be the same thing. No, this is about reaching out and meeting people both online and in real life.

I have spent part of the last week probing various blogs and web sites seeking people who might want to know about my book, which I said I wouldn't mention until at least next week. I tried to find blogs related to fantasy adventure and reading and things like that. Well, mostly those two words in particular. I found some. I read them. I posted a response here and there and a link to my book. The one I am not mentioning.

It was slow going.

I have been the recipient of SPAM over the years. Indeed, I have been constantly surprised by the number of people on the Internet interested in the size of part of my anatomy, how many people think I need reproduction Rolex watches, and how much I want to work from home, (which I pretty much do now.) So, I didn't want to become a Spammer. That would be bad.

Still, I sought a tool to assist me. One quite affordable was my thought. I found one. It was free. I find free quite affordable, so I downloaded it (after checking reviews and finding out if anyone had been killed or maimed by this particular software.) I tried working with it today. It really is a good tool for what I am doing.

Now what I don't want to do is leave a general comment in broken English with a very obviously unrelated link attached. That, I do believe, is SPAM. Not good. However, if I actually read the article, and deem the writer as one who might genuinely want to read my book, that is not Spam. Not really.

I tried to be respectful. For example, I read the article by a lady who was a writer and reader of fantasy literature. She should have been a good choice. I discovered that she was coping with a mental illness, and that the writing was as much a therapy and compulsion as anything else. I did not post there. Sure, she might like my book. You know, the one I am not mentioning. However, it just did not feel right.

It felt like SPAM.

Even so, I used the software to find a lot of sites. Interesting sites. Sites where I could leave a nice message relating to the material being covered and also refer to my book. Yeah, that book.

So, as I move on in my Spam-free adventure and get to know this software I might just eventually write a review. Some of you may have works you want to promote. Without Spam, of course.

Meanwhile, if you feel the need to drop a link to your site or product in the comments below, feel free. Just comment first in fairly sound English, with a related and nicely presented link. Oh, and don't post anonymously. I won't authorize anonymous posts with unrelated links.

That would be SPAM.

Electronic Book Readers-

One of my Facebook friends asked me when my books will be out in print. She wanted to read my works but did not have an electronic book reader. Unfortunately, the traditional way of getting into print is a long and arduous process, with winning an agent who must win a publisher and then the whole publishing circus.

Alternatively, I could go with a print-on-demand service. If someone orders my books a copy will be printed and sent to them. Not a bad system. At this point in my publishing adventure I am not prepared to shell out the hundreds of bucks to get the document formatted for print on demand. My budget for all of this is small. Ebooks are an affordable option, and the one I chose.

Ebooks have a lot of advantages. They all fit on smart phones, devices like the iTouch media player, pad format computers, and computers of all sorts. Most of these devices simply require you to download an ereader as an application or standard piece of software. These devices have various advantages and disadvantages.

For example, the smart phone you have with you always. Therefore, you will have any books you have loaded on the device with you wherever you go. The disadvantage is the size of the screen. Some people will find reading on a phone (or iTouch like device) difficult. Others will find it pleasant. I know of one woman who has read many books on her iTouch, and finds it just fine as a reader.

My reader of choice is the Nook, sold by Barnes and Noble. When they reduced the price to my chosen trigger point ($150) I bought one. The first model. I like the paper-like screen, as I can read it in full light and not get the computer screen wash-out common with phone and computer screens. By the way, the current prices have units below $150.

To get started it is easy to download a reader to your computer. There are quite a few free books available from various sources. They are easy to download and open with you reading software. Give computer reading a try and see how you like it. If you have a smart phone, try a reading application. The cost of getting started is quite low.

From there a reader can move on to evaluating other electronic reading devices. Sony has a nice one. Amazon has their Kindle, which was first on the market and still an excellent device. Kobo, which had been associated with the Borders distribution network, seems like an adequate device. Of course, there is also the Nook. Prices vary depending on the device and the features you might prefer.

If the cost of the device is of concern, don't forget the free books I mentioned. There are a lot of books out there that will cost you nothing. Paper books will never disappear, but the convenience of ebooks will grow on you. With the right kind of account you can often download a book in minutes, and be reading right away.

I recommend you give it a try. And, while you are trying, have a look my own works. I have enjoyed writing them. I would love for you to read them.

(Note: at present I am unaware of any way to read epub format writings on the Kindle. My works are not currently available in Kindle format.)