Brenda Novak’s Auction

Every year, DP and I donate something to Brenda Novak’s Auction in support of Juvenile Diabetes research, but this year Brenda tells me the goal is 1 million, so we’re going all out. For the press, we’re offering a couple of manuscript edits, one full length up to 120k words, and one shorter work or partial. I’m personally offering 1. art; 2. an original poster; 3. a WordPress blog or CMS design; 4. a ZenCart or WordPress ecommerce design; and 5. a year of hosting and one domain registration.

Why it’s so important to me is under the cut, but beware. It’s pretty dismal and I whine a bit.

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Books!

This is an awesome week for me.  First, I won Muse and Reverie by Charles de Lint from Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review, which Tor kindly and speedily shipped to me in a squishy envelope (thanks Graeme!). If you haven’t visited Graeme’s web home, you ought to. He gives away books! All the time!

Second, Lucy Snyder (book list) offered my husband and me a copy of Spellbent (I published one of her short stories. The woman can write.), which also arrived promptly and in good condition, (and which he, knowing me, promptly put into my hot little hands, though it will go on his keeper shelf after I’m done. He’s already read it, the bastard).
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7 Emails That Make Me Blink

I like etiquette. My husband was startled to discover that, since I tend to be a “you’re an adult think for yourself as long as you remember there are consequences” sort of person about other kinds of rules. I think it’s because I’m somewhat socially awkward. Proper etiquette helps me understand which foot to start on. The downside is that I’m often startled by certain behaviors.

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Advertising

There is a television commercial I hate more than any other.

AT&T Wireless is determined to make sure everyone knows that they let you roll over unused minutes and you’d better be grateful for it. Unfortunately, they present this worthy quality in a story where children, through a series of commercials, ask their mother for more minutes. When asked what they did with the minutes they had, they tell her that they threw them away because they were old. “These are rollover minutes! They’re perfectly good! You know some children don’t have rollover minutes!” etc., etc., evoking the childhood memories of those children in China for whom you should clean your own plate. I get the point. Only spoiled children wouldn’t appreciate having a better deal on their wireless service, would effectively throw the deal away by using a different carrier.

I just can’t get past the kids. They’re not normal. Any normal kids, if they absolutely couldn’t bring themselves to use the icky rollover minutes, would listen to the diatribe once, and thereafter lie. They’d used all those rollover minutes on discussing homework with their friends, a really important test coming up, something that would shut the mom up. And of course, if they were real, they’d lie badly and the mom would, if she were real, take the damned telephones away from the spoiled snots and tell them that if they didn’t want to use the minutes provided they could do without.

I can’t get past equating unused rollover minutes with some sort of necessity. The only reason the mother reasonably couldn’t or wouldn’t take the phones is if they are as important, as necessary, as food, shelter, and clothing. Rather obviously more necessary than discipline or affection. There are children going without food. Without adequate medical care. Without access to computers and books. And, according to AT&T, without brand-spankin’-new cell phone minutes.

I was finally so annoyed with the commercial that I actually tried to find an email address or contact form I could use to tell AT&T what I thought. Unfortunately, their website seems to believe that if you’re not a customer wanting specific assistance with your plan, you’re not worth listening to.

As a result of the AT&T commercial, I have chosen Sprint as the sponsor for the cause I chose on Social Vibe (see the sidebar), an amazing site that matches givers to needs and creates opportunities to give for all of us, especially those of us without the funds to give cell phones to our children.

Besides, I like Sprint’s commercials.

Updatey Goodness

This is what happens when I make grandiose plans… I get muddy and my tailbone hurts. I can’t believe it’s been that long, but 9 months ago I made a grand plan, made it public on my blog, and then virtually disappeared off the face of the earth.

To sum up, because it’s much too long, I had some health issues, money woes, a computer crash, another computer mishap, another health issue, and actually did quite a lot of work for clients … leaving my website and blog very much like the house of the professional carpenter. I should know, my father is one (a carpenter, I mean, not a house, blog, or website).

To the update: The Linux operating system plan is a no-go for my primary work computer, since quite a lot of the software I use is available for Windows only. I did a lot of research hoping to find replacements, but that was a bust on some pretty critical applications. At least for now. I am working on moving as many systems as possible over to open source solutions and sharing my software dollars with their developers when I can.

During my inadvertent hiatus, my website was hacked. It was a frustrating, though not terribly difficult, experience fixing the mess, and pretty embarrassing considering how careful I am with other people’s websites, but all security holes are now plugged and all malicious code removed. I’ve also changed the design to something I kind of love. I was unsatisfied with my old design, worked out something colorful but not very functional in between creating this design for a client, and then, you know, mishaps occurred. Upshot, the client went out of business and gave the design back to me (I don’t duplicate designs), and so I tweaked it for my own purposes and here we are! … if by here we mean pretty new design but all the links don’t match and I need to drastically update the content. Working on it.

In the future? Learn more about Linux for my own purposes, find more open source solutions to my work flow, acquire an inexpensive system I can install Linux on for my kids. I think it’s the future and they ought to know how to navigate it at least as well as they know how to search YouTube for train videos and bad gummi bear music (and then, maybe they can explain it to me). Even if it, specifically, isn’t the future, no knowledge is wasted. And if they have their own computer maybe they’ll stop kicking me off of mine to watch Sesame Street’s performance of the Mahna Mahna song…again.