She's been missing from this street since Sunday and really needs to be found now. Note the excellently distinctive nose. Email me or phone me over the weekend (number is here and starts with 0790) if you see her, and I'll put you in touch with the author.
Thanks, ever so. Having a cat go missing is one of the worst feelings in the world. Let's hope she gets found.
]]>(Also, guess what, guess what? Rob and I just saw Patrick Stewart* in Chipping Norton in a left hand drive racing green Jag with the top down, looking fabulously Captain-like. Do you think he might just whisper under his breath 'engage' when he starts up the engine? Oh, I hope so...)
*Jean Luc Picard**, if you don't know.
**Lordy, if you don't know that, you don't deserve to know***.
***Oh, OK. STTNG****!
****Star Trek: The Next Generation.
But it reminded me of a point Rob first made ooh, about 12 years ago, because, in the press release announcing the news, Borders' Head Office was referred to not as the Head Office but as the Store Support Office.
Anyway, Rob's point was this. If Head Office is there to support stores, why isn't it staffed at the weekend and bank holidays, with a freeze on vacations over the Easter and August peak seasonal events and double staffed over Christmas? Aren't these the busiest times, the times when stores need support the most? And surely the point becomes even more relevant if you actually call your Head Office the Store Support Office...
Or, in fact, do stores work best when they're busy serving customers without emails, faxes, dictates, reminders, bulletins, allocation reports, sales challenges, and bits of paper marked 'JFDI'* in the top right hand corner (like the Ops director at Superdrug used to use) arriving every quarter of an hour?
Personally, I think that if stores were doing as good a job as they have to in the first place, and if head office were organised sufficiently far in advance that there were no last minute changes of plan, there would be no need for all the bits of extra paper - but I'm a weird hybrid of an ex-store manager and ex-buyer, so can see both sides.
Makes you think, anyway.
* Just Effing Do IT.
]]>I am Miss ROSEMARY Davidson, single. Please, I want you to open this E-Mail attachment file as required of you, go through the business transaction message very carefully and, get back to me for more details.
I know that, you may think that it is a VIRUS that I sent to you. NO, it is not a VIRUS. It was because of the Confidentiality and safety of this business I sent to you, made me to send the message to you through E-mail Attachment.
So please, I would like that you open the attachment, read and get back to me for to discuss on how we are going to execute the business for the mutual benefit of us.
I wait your urgent response as soon as you read this message.
Thanks for your understandings.
Yours lovely one.
Rosemary.
Hey there -- it's Not-Often-Heard-From-Anna. It seems to me that whenever I make my presence known in the form of a Snowblog post, it's always because I have something to complain about. But not this time!
See, a friend of mine recently became unemployed freelance, and he was having a difficult time giving structure to his days. Knowing that I work from home, he asked me about my daily routine. I blinked a few times and then tried this new word out for myself. 'Routine?'
It turns out that some people are suited for working from home and some just aren't. And despite my utter lack of routine, I am definitely a work-from-home sort of person...
In any given day, I have to run errands, take care of the garden, cook meals, tidy the house, make books, etc, etc. Only one of those actually brings in money, but they all have to get done. It makes no difference to the outside world if I decide to do one before the other, as long as all my tasks are completed when they need to be. Sometimes I can sit at the computer for hours, working on a cover design, but other times I only manage to proofread ten pages of text before I flit outside to see if there are beans to pick for dinner.
The sort of work I do really lends itself to my approach. There are deadlines to meet, and as long as I'm meeting them, everything runs smoothly. I think my friend was a bit thanks-for-nothing after my explanation, since he was trying to come up with stories to pitch for radio -- something which takes much more 'push' than what I do. I imagine he would have done much better chatting with Em, who's driven in ways I might never understand.
So I wonder about other people. If you work in an office, are you one of those people who says, 'Ooh, I could NEVER work from home!' or do you think you would thrive on the lack of official structure? I certainly find that writing is best done on some sort of schedule, but are there authors out there who sit down and write whenever the urge strikes?
As for me, I'm on a big proofreading binge right now, so I suppose I should scuttle back to that. . . maybe after I check for ripe tomatoes.
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Check out this review of The Red Men, which gets it.
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Where's that trumpet of mine? Ah, here it is.
]]> I just got a lovely email from a Canadian publisher who I've helped out with his XSL (taking ONIX bibliographic data and doing neat things with it, like creating catalogues (link is a 3mb pdf) and web pages.) He found out about our XSL services through my YouTube videos and he writes:"What can I say?
Speedy, efficient, too fair, literary, entrepreneurial, smooth lilting voice and obviously fertile.
Are you taken? ;) Thanks just doesn’t cut it."
How's that for an endorsement! [Blush]
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Oh dear. It was a mistake to try to pull the wool over my eyes by bluffing about the capabilities of InDesign, as one hapless service provider has just tried to do. They wrote to say:
"The only templates that we hold are quark or pdf's. As we only accept high res pdf's we don't support indesign"
If you are au fait with typesetting software, you can imagine the email I wrote back. It was quite long. I haven't heard back yet...
(Apologies for the radio silence, by the way. I fancied knitting and pottering and tinkering with XSL over the weekend, rather than blogging. Still, back now, and at week 35 more well-rounded, in the physical sense, than ever. Hope you had a nice long weekend.)
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Today's blatant lift from BoingBoing is a blog post discussing why ice cream is clearly an igneous rock.
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My guess is that Rob has found out that the printer is installed on the server, not locally, so he can fire it up from anywhere else in the world. And yes, I did look round. Just in case...
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About the new site design, that is? Too spare? Or nice and clean? I thought the basic background could be quite low key so that when pictures and cover designs appear, they are the centre of attention. Is the font legible to everyone? Rob sent me through an idea for a lovely, delicate design yesterday, which made me think 'ooh, site redesign!', but when I started tinkering I couldn't get his lovely light design to look right and it evolved into this. I am less a designer, more a grand tinkerer.
Anyway, thoughts very much welcome. The only changes have been to the CSS and the images so it's a snap to tweak and fiddle. I use Firefox's Developer plug in to 'Edit CSS' in a live browser, so I can see immediately what the changes I make look like. Then I copy and paste that revision into a new doc and upload it. The only thing is you have to be very careful not to hit 'refresh' after tinkering for an hour, as I found yesterday...!
And of course, doing a redesign was a displacement activity to actually uploading some new content for our forthcoming books (which is also very easy, but I got sidetracked by the pretty colours). So those enticing new covers you see in the header up there? More news to come on them later in the day!
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I've got to say, I don't give a rat's whiskers about the Olympics. However, apparently Team GB (yey, go us, bleaurgh) have just won some cycling races. So in the spirit of very half hearted marketing, please now be encouraged to consider buying one of our cycling titles (which are much more interesting and relevant than the poxy Olympics).
Both look nice. Both smell nice. Both are written by experts. Both will last you a lot longer than any excitement you might feel about the Beijing Games.
]]>For UK and Irish sales of The Affinity Bridge slipcased edition, priced at £30 with free delivery, click the button above.
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For non-UK/Irish sales of the slipcase edition, priced at £30 with postage at £2.75, click the button above.
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Problem solving, when the problems aren’t too grievous or pressing, can be fun. Provided you’ve got a metaphorical easy-chair to recline in and a figurative pipe to puff upon, then thinking up neat solutions to whatever pickles you encounter in daily life can be every bit as rewarding as tackling crosswords, blurting out the answers to University Challenge questions or dreaming up revenge fantasies. Unfortunately, when the problem has a social dimension, there’s a temptation to come up with solutions that are a little bit mischievous.
]]> To give the example that’s currently flickering at the periphery of my attention, I’m thinking of dropping in to a local bookshop to chat to the owners. I have met them on many occasions and have spoken to them at length. Em and I have taken them in free books, I’ve sought their advice on [deleted]* and even discussed collaborating on a book with them. In total perhaps we’ve talked with them for two and a half hours in our various meetings, and on each occasion the first few minutes are taken up with reminding them who on earth I am. To the best of their knowledge, each meeting is the first. Even hinting that this is how the last half dozen conversations have begun hasn’t helped, and I confess this is where the mischievous part of my brain comes into play. “What is needed,” it insists, “is an encounter that’s properly memorable: something so outrageous or eccentric that the next time we bump into each other there’ll be no need for a seventh introduction; they’ll remember perfectly well who I am.” Is this the impulse that leads people to wear colourful bow-ties, brightly coloured braces or florid and clashing waistcoats? Those tactics might work, but I’d like to try something a little more dramatic. Maybe wearing a magicians’ cape and concluding conversations by disappearing in a puff of stage smoke? Or would it be in poor taste to pretend to have Tourette’s? And would the excuse ‘I’m on my way to a fun run’ fail to fully assuage their curiosity if whenever we met I was dressed as a giant fox? In reality I’ll probably just continue to repeatedly introduce myself, but that doesn’t stop me having fun inventing gaudily theatrical ways of being a little less forgettable.* Was a bit too obvious who I was talking about so I've zapped the clue to avoid embarrassment.
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Lately, one of the books I’ve been visiting in my spare moments has been the semi-classic Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. There’s something very satisfying about reading the catalogue of bad designs which led D. Norman to put quill to parchment. Less thrilling, but rather unsurprising, is that what prompted Donald to begin the book was an extended stay in Britain where he was regularly baffled by which light-switch controlled which set of lights, or which combination of button pushes would put a telephone caller on hold. You’d think, like a stand-up comedian doing a routine about the difference between cats and dogs, there wouldn’t be much to say about the design of taps, light-switches, phone keypads and door knobs – but actually this book, which is now twenty years old, is full of critical observations which still apply and simple recommendations which still need taking up.
]]> Unfortunately, that twenty year delay across which Donald’s words are reaching us means his scorn is frequently ladled upon video recorders, cassette decks and computers which give you a more or less blank screen when you start them up. He tackles the eternal problem of the right height for a typewriter desk. He’s right to imagine that one day an ‘undo’ function would make computers less frustrating to use, he’s farsighted to imagine that the Apple Macintosh might hint at a more user-friendly interface, but it’s difficult to read anyone’s advice on software design after they’ve felt the need to explain what a mouse is and what you do with it. But (and you might have to take my word for this) there’s quite a bit of fun to be had re-imagining plumbing, electrical and interior design bad habits – once you’ve read what he has to say about doors, you’ll be all set to design your own – but I recommend skipping over any mention of consumer electronics or computing. In 2002, when Donald Norman took a look at the first edition, he decided that all it needed was a more up-to-date introduction. He even changed the title on the front cover without feeling the need to do a search-and-replace on the text itself. What he really should have done was to roll his sleeves up and drag the manuscript in to the twenty-first century. But given that he hasn’t, you can still have quite a bit of fun with the original edition.]]>