Your Electronic Life - What Do You Do When Stuff Goes Wrong?

Have you tried to get customer service on electronics lately? It’s phone tree hell! But why? One part of the explanation is that people are willingly or unwillingly not buying better service.

The basic problem is that so many people pretend they are buying a simple commodity, it will never break until you are ready to throw it out, and that low price is therefore the only determining factor. That’s OK if everything works fine. But computers, cell phones and the newer HDTVs (or even VCRs) are not quite as simple as toasters (or tires). And their complexities mean there are a lot more ways to break or, at least, not work correctly. Let’s discuss computers, and one vendor in particular: Dell. Read more

Green Ink and Paper!

In the “I’m going Green” zone some new items have turned up that will be of ihnterest to our readers in the US. Briefly: Xerox have created a new paper which should be released in a few years. The paper has a photosensitive ink that fades within 24 hours leaving the paper reusable. Read more about this here.

This could really do a lot for recycling of fliers, posters, newsprint, concert tickets, short-term advertising messages, and others I can’t even think of because I haven’t had enough coffee yet.

Solar Energy is becoming more accessible to customers and cheaper to get solar power installed. Read more about this here. I will admit solar energy has more appeal to me than wind turbines for maintenance and visual and noise pollution reasons. Solar panels seem so much more unobtrusive and sunlight is a bit more dependable than wind.

Green Power Generation Research

If you’re using a computer you’re most likely plugged into the national grid of your nation’s energy production company and paying a monthly bill to keep your connection alive. I’m starting to research the whole green idea and power is one of the biggies to address. I thought I’d head over to boycott-riaa.com as I haven’t visited in a while and see what they had to say and the first article I see is An Electrifying Situation by a guy who calls himself Dave. Could that be Dave Navarro? Well, I don’t know but let me tell you, he pointed out that hooking into an American Energy Company vs. an Electric Company is a much better idea and he explains why that is, and dammed if I can’t agree! So I do. Dave’s article points out that, at least in his state, surplus energy that you feed back into the national grid sets up a situation where you are paid by the Electric Company for adding to the available power supply. The calculations offered, if true, demonstrates a remarkable way to power the community and have a powerful green effect.

Closer to a Green Home

When I looked a little closer to home, I discovered that there is apparently some difficulty converting photovoltaic energy from solar cells into electical energy. Heat is pretty easy. but according to a Kiwi builder buddy, by name of Kevin, who has more than 52 years of experience in building and has built his own house to a design ahead of his time, you cannot get more than 12v DC out of a photocell - not enough to power a computer.

However, he tells me that a friend has a small wind turbine mounted on the roof of the garage at his lifestyle block and that this is generating enough power into batteries to power his computers pretty much every day. I’m going to be looking into that a bit more soon as I finish setting up establishing a legal library at Allforart.

Kevin’s house is ahead of its time in green design and accessibility. It has a wheelchair ramp and access, solar heating, a water tank that receives rain water off the roof - 3000 liters(!) on a beautiful rainy day, and a great vegetable garden which with a good compost heap coming along nicely and amply contributed to by the neighbors. Kevin designed the drainage before he built the house and laid the piping to ensure that water run-off would do the job of filling the tank. This tank cuts the water bill in half since it has been installed.

Now if he can harness the wind that blows reasonably steady up there on the ridge…free power! It’s that or find a lot of hamsters! I’m going to keep looking into this particular subject of wind-driven power generation and will let you know what I find out as it comes to light.

The Hollywood Writer’s Strike: It should go on longer

…because the longer it goes on the more it reveals of the conniving, untrustworthy character of the corporate ownership and management of the art & entertainment industry. These guys have to be seen to be believed and you can do that from this article at the Huffington Post: Damning Evidence in their Own Words. Read more

The Editor and the Medium: How to Ensure your Success

Editing and proofing any work of art & entertainment is the final part of the production process before the work is delivered to the intended public. It is the most important phase in the ending of the work, and it is a demanding process requiring a great deal of knowledge and experience that can only be truly gained by doing it.

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The Points of the Creative Artists’ Code: Eight - Your work is your responsibility

In this article explaining the eighth point of the Code of a Creative Artist, NDK Creative Artist discusses the responsibility artists have to protect the integrity of their art. — Joel Falconer, Editor-in-Chief

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Creative Tip: Working Across Time Zones - The World Time Server

A truly useful resource in the internet age where we collaborate across Time Zones and are constantly confused by date and time and trying to find a location and way to collaborate is the World Time Server, a free internet service that you can use to schedule online meetings or check out times around the world.

Take a bit of time to peruse the link and then bookmark it in your browser or add it as a tab (in Firefox) or a Favorite in IE, you will find it is very useful. We use it to help us shedule meetings with people working across many differnt time zones. It features a Time Converter, a World Meeting Planner (which we use regularly) and a number of other useful features that help us to locate a suitable convergent time for creative collaboration and business meetings. Fantastic tool to facilitate getting things done. No, we’re not sponsoring them, nor do we own share, we just like the service and use it to create and do business.

Creative Tip: Vocabulary Building - One Word A Day

If you’re a songwriter, a poet, a storyteller, a journalist, or indeed anybody who works with words or wants to improve their literacy, there is no better way to consistently add to your intellectual toolkit than by subscribing to A.Word.A.Day.

This fantastic free educational service is one of the longest surviving email deliveries in the world. Every day it brings in a new word, with definitions and often a little history about word origins that fleshes out your understanding of context, which can be very useful for those engaged in historical novel writing, as but one example.

I’m committed to lifelong learning (well, who can avoid it?), and I find that learning just one new word every day, can help me:

• remove a creative block
• stimulate new ideas
• enrich my knowledge of our culture and civilization
• refresh my knowledge of meaning and definition (aiding memory)
• help me write and create the precise desirable effect I want to have with a reader

When I’m editing the work of others, having a veritable cornucopia of words, definitions and meanings in my intellect’s databank makes me an organic thesaurus, banishes the overuse of the same words in repetitive fashion and thus keeps my writing and that of those I edit lively and engaging, rather than repetitive, stultifying and boring.

If you’re not already a subscriber to A.Word.A.Day, but are working creatively with words, then get on over there and begin refreshing and expanding your existing vocabulary. You won’t regret it. Language competence is a highly sought after and extremely valuable skill and even if you’re not creatively inclined, knowing what words mean improves how you work and communicate. Words and their meaning enhance our ability to experience and enjoy life.

There and back again - World Building for Storytellers - The Fargoth World Building Project

Through the miracle of modern technology today, it is now possible for a story to be realized and constructed as a virtual world and this has changed the nature of the marketplace and opened up tremendous opportunities for those writers who embrace the idea of not just telling a story, but realizing entire worlds, multiple cultures and races.

Tolkien captured it best when he wrote the immortal lines of “There and back again” for they capture beautifully and simply what is at the the heart of the reader experience when they fall in love with or become immersed in a story; the desire to go somewhere other than this world, and experience what it would be like to be someone else, live in any time, any place, and under conditions far removed from the real world in which we all live. Time travel? Read more

Pain & Suffering: do we need it to create great art? Part 2

This article is part 2 and follows on from Joel Falconer’s original where he finished off with this…

“So long as the traditional industry (and society) can point to the popularly propagated idea that ‘artists must suffer’ they have a reason to keep us in the dark, abuse us, rape us of our rights and suck us dry of every dollar, every word, every melody and every stroke of the brush that lies within us. Stop this myth now. Artists do not need to suffer to produce great work.

If you really believe “Artists need to suffer for their art” is a true and valid concept worthy of merit then next time you’re at the sex shop or visiting the CIA’s secret torture bases, pick up some whips and other instruments of torture, perhaps a waterboard and a set of fingernail pullers and bring them home to work over your local writers group, the garage band down the road who so obviously need help, and the painter whose delicate hands just beg for some knuckle crushing and thumb screwing and make them suffer, because the resultant works they produce will be guaranteed hits, oh, yeah. Success is just a whipping away. And of course, it’s firmly known by women and children everywhere that emotional and intellectual abuse makes them better people. Read more