Tim Cook: my first-person impression of Apple's new CEO

Tim Cook: my first-person impression of Apple's new CEO, article.

Tim sounds like a real mensch*. Not a Walking Suit. I've had some cool bosses in the past, all my major jobs actually. And if I ever had to have one again, I wouldn't mind at all if he was like Tim Cook seems in this report.


*"...a decent, upright, mature, and responsible person."
Great definition, eh?

Origin: 

1950–55;  < Yiddish mentsh  man, human being < Middle High German mensch  ( German Mensch )

Are books dead, and can authors survive?

Here is a discussion about the future of publishing and writers.

Already, in the world, on the Internet, there is enough free media to take a man from cradle to grave. We can watch non-stop free movies and videos, listen to non-stop free music, play non-stop free videogames, and NEVER run out of free content for our entire lives.
And yet movies, TV, videogames, music, along with books and porn, continue to make billions of dollars worldwide. Even though all this free stuff already exists.
While the future will no doubt offer more free content, the whole "race to the bottom" is fear-mongering BS.
Newsflash: We're already at the bottom. And artists are still making money.


Granted it's a complex issue, but I think there are many good points put forward in this article. There's no evidence that advances by publishers is the only way authors can make a living. In fact I've already heard of many writer who have only gotten affluent after starting self-publishing digitally. I don't know exactly how many, and I doubt anybody have collected reliable statistics on it yet. But it's clearly enough to be at least strong anecdotal evidence.

We should not forget  that also before e-publishing, it was only one book in thousands written which got published, and only one in thousands being published which made good money. I heard the statistic of 200,000 books traditionally published annually in the US, and only 300 of those selling more than 50,000 copies! That's less than one in fifty.

And while, if you were one of the few chosen to be taken under the wing by a publisher, sometimes they gave important support, they also take a big, big bite of the cake. And they often take 1.5 years to put out a book. All the while I'm told from many sources that these days, they don't even promote the book most of the time, they expect the author to do that.

To do or to talk

If you really want to do something, you do it. You don't save it for a sound bite.
- Liz Friedman

A friend of mine said something similar many years ago, as a realization he'd had:
"I realized that you either talk about doing something, or you do it." 

And it fits with my observations. I think we all know people who are full of great plans, and talk about them at great length. But ten years go by, and none of those things have actually gotten done. And then there are people who actually get things done, sometimes remarkable things, and you rarely hear them talk about these things a lot before they happen.

And of course the same divide can happen inside one person, not only between people. You talk or you do, but rarely both. I'm not sure of the causal relationship. Maybe either talking or doing gets rid of the energy of interest you have in something, so if you are doing it, the need for talking disappear, and if you talk about it a lot, the need for doing it disappear. Maybe. Or maybe if you want to do something and it just isn't happening, but you can't really face up to that fact because you have too many hopes riding on it, you start yapping about it to prop yourself up to yourself.

"And Another Thing..."

A sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series came out last year, by an Eoin Colfer.

Obviously for a series which is so intensely, almost obsessively beloved as THHGTTG, any book by any author which attempts to continue it, will be met with a storm of criticism. Heck, even if Adams secretly had written it himself and people thought it was somebody else, many would hate it from the word go. But in any case, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was inventive and funny. Okay, there were a few details in the middle I thought had escaped the editor's knife by mistake, but not a lot.

So in other words, don't buy or read it if you feel strongly about Douglas Adams, or feel that, for example, a Zaphod Beeblebrox who has had his left-brained head taken off to run the spaceship is sacrilege.

And of course you may also want to steer clear if you think that the idea of another author continuing a seminal work is simply Wrong. I'm not sure, I can see both sides of that one, very often it feels like it seriously dilutes the originals. For example the Asterix books have been weak since Goscinny died and Uderzo took over the writing on top of doing the art. Ah well.

Watching "Trollied"?

Is anybody watching that current TV comedy in UK, "Trollied"?
Am I getting slow, or is much of it pretty durn opaque humor? Is it a new advanced kind? Or just so much "English humour" that it leaves a poor Dane behind?

Ugress - Wulfhöken Spaceport Affairs

Ugress - Wulfhöken Spaceport Affairs, new kewl EP from Ugress. (And free too, unless you want to pay.) 

Regular readers will know I'm a long-time fan of Ugress. Several posts and free songs here.

BTW, I just wrote this to U, and it might have interest for other artists:
I don’t know if it matters to you if you earn money on your music, but if it does: I think it would make the sets sell noticeably better if you put in an extra track in the set which you charge for. People like to pay for things they like, but they also feel good about getting a little something for it beyond what they got for free anyway, so they can justify the expense to the Inner Scrooge most of us have. 
On the other hand, I've heard that in some countries at least, if people pay fully voluntarily, without getting something more than they got for free anyway, it counts as gifts and is not taxed. So that may be something to ask your accountant about. 

Body and/or lens stabilization

I put a Panasonic stabilized zoom lens on an Olympus Pen Lite body, and I wondered if the lens stabilization would clash with the in-body stabilization of the Olympus, and how much.
Answer: yes it does, and a lot!

Here is both lens- and body-stabilization turned on:

... And here is only body-stabilization turned on:

... Here is only lens-stabilization turned on:

(This is the sharper of two, the other looked like the middle pic)

These are hardly conclusive, since these things vary from second to second. (It's always a good idea when using dicey shutter-times to takes several pics at once, preferably in serial-shooting mode.) But it's clear that having both turned on is a bad idea.
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Below: cameras can look funny when fitted with a lens of a different size-ideal.       :-)