Self-Publishing

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28selfpub.html?em

This is a good overview of the industry. My reprinted Postcards book is of very good quality. Blurb was very good about replacing the badly printed books. I chose Blurb because the software is easy to use. I'm not planning on selling many books, so the fact that I could publish it for the cost of buying one book was very attractive. Their help is responsive and good!

Enough Already!

This is the view from my front porch after spending 3 1/2 hours scraping off the inch of ice and who knows how many inches of snow. I estimate at least 5 inches on the part I did at 8 in the morning. ENOUGH, ALREADY!!!

The Way We Were (30 years ago)

The person who created the caption did not know from anything! Left to right: Georgina, Mike, Ann, Me, Stewart, Carl and Calvin. What a trip! Thank you, Alma!

The reason that Keith Aaron is not in this picture is that he was frantically trying to remove my home phone number from the code that was in the process of being shipped. He only remembered he had not removed his little joke until the very last minute and paid handsomely in sweat to redo the entire release package!

At Last!

No way could I wave as Bush's helicopter took off on the TV today. And now the task of cleaning up after that crew who couldn't shoot straight begins. It will be a long haul, but hope we all have now. What a breath of fresh air!

Another Damn Pill

Learned yesterday that a vitamin pill is not a vitamin pill.  When my podiatrist told me to start taking Stresstabs for diabetic nerve pain ("it's nerve food"), I stopped taking my usual vitamin pill.  After reading an article in the Columbus Dispatch about vitamin D deficiency, I decided to take a look at my vitamin D intake.  Abysmal is the only possible word for it.  There is no D in Stresstabs.  And comparing labels, there is a whole lot else missing from Stresstabs.

Since about the time that I stopped the multivitamin pill, my blood sugar goes up in November and stays up for winter and early spring.  The time of year when there is little sun and I get very little exposure to the sun.  Sunlight on your skin produces vitamin D!  Mystery solved!  But the price is another damn pill to take.  And the number of diabetes related pills continues to climb:

1. 3 - 5 mg Gliptizide
2. 1 - 500 mg L-Arginine (more on days with high bike milage)
3. 1 - Stresstab

Stroke prevention pills (long term study shows these delay stroke onset by 14 years)are:

1. 81 mg aspirin
2. 10 mg Lipitor
3. 20 mg Prinivil
4.  100 mg Q10 to counteract what Lipitor takes out of my body.

General pills:

1. multivitamin
2. anti-gas pill to counteract the ground flaxseed needed to 'keep things moving'.

And I wonder why I have taken to swallowing pills by the hand full. 

Latest Ice Storm

Postcard Book

I have removed the link because the print quality of the two books I ordered is terrible. I will restore it when Blurb is able to provide acceptable print quality. It was an exciting idea.

More CORE!

That was the cry when a mainframe computer program would not run.  But in the olden days, the entire mainframe could have only 40 million words of memory, each word containing 36 bits.   Roughly 160 megabytes these days.  I have never worried about "more core" with PCs as they usually have plenty.  But I have been complaining lately about my Windows PCs as they all run slower than dirt.  The Unix based Mac runs fine on 512 MB and 8oo Mhz PowerPC.  My son in law Mike suggested "more core" and showed me an easy way to upgrade (crucial.com).  Or mostly easy!  IBM Thinkpad was no sweat, but the 2 HP computers needed a BIOS upgrade to handle the larger memory.  A fairly easy thing to do.  If you are going to upgrade, you might just as well upgrade the BIOS as well.

Things now run MUCH better!

January Fog

Ireland Bike Ride

Cliffs of Moher just south of Doolin

Atlantic coast at north edge of the Burren

Doolin

These are 3 pictures from the area I will be cycling in next summer.  I use the middle picture as my wallpaper on the photography computer.  If you double click the picture, you get the full sized JPG file.  This should cover any screen, even though it was taken with a 5 megapixel camera.

Diary

Every year US News and World Report has a list of 50 things you can do to improve your life.  From this year's list, I decided to do a diary that consists of one sentence per day.  Being internet oriented, you can find it at:  www.geocities.com/fortymile/diary.html

2212 Miles on a Bike in 2008

The last day of the year served London with a few blasts of snow and and some very cold temperatures.  With no chance for a bike ride, my yearly total was 2212 miles.  This is far below the efforts of the leaders in this small community, but I am happy with it.  Now I know how much riding I do.  That translates roughly into 221 hours on a bike or a little over 4 hours a week on average.  But some some months are better than others.  The 4 two digit monthly totals came in February, October, November and December.  Working and two trips in October gave me very little riding time.  Weather was the issue in the other months.

With any luck, I will join the January 1 bike ride at 1PM today.  It should work if the sun continues to shine!