Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to two lovely and talented young ladies: freyjaw and catsittingstill. Have a great one!

Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... also to mia_mcdavid! Have a great one!

Cory Doctorow on giving books away on the Web

Giving It Away - Forbes.com

But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants.

I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to charge for something else. That's not to say you can't charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information anymore.

This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don't buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day's equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?

Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer for them.

(from O'Reilly Radar, also available on LJ as radaroreillyrss)

This is why many of my songs are up on my website.

Sunday at the Dickens Fair

The title pretty much describes the day so far. After coffee and breakfast (yummy sourdough English muffins from our Trader Joe's expedition yesterday afternoon), we left about 9:45, stopping for gas and an attempt to pick up my cell phone, which I'd left charging at work. (The attempt was unsuccessful -- somebody had locked the back door from inside.)

Unlike last year, we didn't have to wait in the rain while they worked to get power back -- it was a lovely clear day. I gave everyone $40 for lunch and spending money, and paid the Younger Daughter two weeks' accrued allowance. Business as usual at Bank of Dad.

The faire was much less crowded than last year, and there seemed to be fewer shops. It may just have been fewer street vendors. There were also fewer and less interesting performances in the music hall. I hope this is just a temporary setback and not a trend.

The flower_cat got a pretty brass cat pin for her shawl, and she found me a great woolen cap, in a dark tweed. With a black suit coat (from a thrift store), shirt, and pants, it made a fairly respectable outfit. Respectable enough, in any case, that a tourist asked to have her picture taken with me and the Cat. (Of course the fact that the Cat's outfit was perfectly period helped a great deal.)

The kids had fun -- the chaoswolf bought presents for her assorted loves, and even the Y.D. (there for the first time) enjoyed herself. I think the kids stuck together; I know they played a couple of games of pool. In any case, they were done by a quarter of two, so in spite of the fact that we'd originally agreed to meet at 3pm, we headed for the door and were out by 2:00.

One of the better family outings.

More from Cory Doctorow

Boing Boing: Barenaked Ladies Are Me tour - great music, politics, and tech!

At the show, I bought BLAM on a 256MB USB key, for $25. The key came loaded with the entire new album in MP3 form, a ton of live tracks, graphics, videos, ringtones, and basically everything else you could want -- and when I was done moving all that stuff to my laptop, I was left with a useful USB key, instead of a lump of CD plastic that I would have to lug around with me every time I moved, pay to stick in a storage locker, and never listen to again.

The USB key is part of the BNL political/technical/social picture. Recently, BNL front-man Steve Page founded an upstart association for Canadian musicians and labels that takes the radically sensible position that DRM sucks, fans shouldn't be sued, and musicians should work the the Internet, not against it.

So, who out there would pay $25 for an album of mine on a USB key? Worth doing?

Tracks: teotw (again)

A rather frustrating session with TEOTWAWKI again. Interested readers (if any) will recall that it still needs a clean guitar track.

First I tried an experiment, recording the guitar track in stereo. It sounded a little better, but not enough better to make it worthwhile in my opinion, and the setup isn't really comfortable. It also went all to hell when the vocals started going out of sync around the last verse. That's a serious problem -- it's true that I had a three or four excess tracks that were just faded down instead of being muted. But still... that's going to make it practically impossible to add parts. More on that in an upwhen post.

Muted the offending tracks, and tried again. Twice. Some improvement, but probably not quite enough. I could probably edit what I have down to one clean track, but I suspect I'll be happier trying for a clean one.

Getting more crayons

Clearly, my 1GHz fanless Mini-ITX box (Harmony) isn't cutting it as a recording platform. Recording two tracks while playing two or three existing tracks works; trying to record while playing five or six tracks fails miserably. This is not good, folks.

Something Must Be Done.

When I did the multitracking on "Demon Lover" and "World Inside the Crystal" with Callie, I was using the machine that is now my main desktop. It worked fine, but was really too noisy for recording. And it's getting old -- the CPU fan and heatsink need replacing. The fileserver, Nova, is newer, faster, and a bit quieter. The simplest thing by far is to swap Nova and Harmony. That will also cut down on noise and power consumption in the server closet, which has been a goal of mine for some time now.

( geeky details and alternatives )

It's more fiddling with computers than I really wanted to do this month, but it won't cost anything and will give me a recording machine I can trust, and a low-power, low-noise fileserver. So that's a win, for a lot less than I was originally expecting to spend.

Switchplates

When I posted about the Dickens Fair I forgot to mention the pewter switchplates we bought for the living room and kitchen. A dragon on the kitchen one, and a pair of fairies on the one for the living room by the door. The castle might have been even more appropriate, come to think of it.

These were both double switchplates; there are spots for singles in the LR, kitchen (another dragon, I think), and bedroom (fairies).