The Vent and Rant Thread

[covingtoncat73]

*Sigh* Mid-May and record heat and already something brewing in the Gulf. I still will bike to work. I just need to bring a change of shirt and some toiletries.

I am almost to my Weight Watcher's goal weight. However, that doesn't seem to be doing much good for a couple of health issues. At least bicycling seems to be good for my left hip/leg.

The cataract I got taken out? The lens implant in that eye has a film/build-up on it. Looks like a bug-splattered windshield and it'll be June 6 before I can see the cataract guy and schedule to get it fixed. Hopefully the film can just be lasered off rather than having to replace the lens implant.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

I'm with you there - even though I have no (more)allergies. Just "non-allergic rhinitus", meaning there's no cause that they can fix. I'm already on 7 prescriptions, just for nose and lungs.

If he suggests anything non-prescription, let me know too!

Nothing new ... sigh ... amoxicillin, pseudoephedrine, and Flonase

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Nothing new ... sigh ... amoxicillin, pseudoephedrine, and Flonase

Okay. Drat. I'm not allowed pseudoephedrine with Coumadin. I'm already on fluticasone (the generic for Flonase). And when the face pressure gets bad enough, I go in and get an antibiotic prescribed for a week or two.

They've got me doing nasal rinses too. Doesn't affect much, but it might help you.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Okay. Drat. I'm not allowed pseudoephedrine with Coumadin. I'm already on fluticasone (the generic for Flonase). And when the face pressure gets bad enough, I go in and get an antibiotic prescribed for a week or two.

They've got me doing nasal rinses too. Doesn't affect much, but it might help you.

Yeah, SOSO, amoxicillin for the face pressure -- today it felt like my right nostril & cheekbone were going to explode out of my face ....

Nasal rinses never really seemed to do anything for me either ...

[CRussel]

Steroids. Serious, systemic steroids. And screw the side-effects! That stuff that Bradley Wiggins used to win the Tour de France -- triamcinolone. That's the ticket. An antihistamine of truly serious effect! Or, if not that, the more common prednisone. I defy anything to be inflamed with that stuff in your system.

[Hemmi]

I must say, my allergies are so much better since I started on Nasacort last year. Triamcinolone Acetonide nasal spray. I had one of those allergy attacks that I literally could not breathe or make my nose stop running. Had to take some Benadryl and go to bed. Next day, I went to Walgreen's and bought some Nasacort and now I would not be without that stuff. Every morning and it has made such a difference.

Best price is at Target. You can get a 2 pack of the generic 120 sprays each for $20.

[Hitch]

Honestly, I don't know how I can do this one justice.\

The Past:
...client emails me, saying she's a new author, creating a kids' book. She asks me questions, about getting the files ready to be made into digital fixed-layout kids' books. I answer these questions, and, I also give her some pointers and advice on the print layout files--I tell her to make sure she picks a trim size, and that her illustrator uses bleed, live element areas, etc. Right?

These convos happen over a period of let's say, 7 emails, give or take.

The Present:

Client shows up with this book, which I get in PDF, in spreads (Two-up, which means, I see two pages at once, the way you would if you open a book.) Fine. I'm writing to her, discussing the options around fixed-layout (having popup text boxes, versus not, zoomability versus not, etc.). Suddenly she says something in passing, around Createspace, and a penny drops in my brain.

I look at the files again, and these are 20x9", or, 10" wide and 9" tall. That means that they are ever-so-slightly more rectangular, in an individual page, than a square. And it's meant to be printed, in landscape, and side-bound.

Moreover, the illustrator has sent this PDF with zero bleed. Okay, that's not a huge deal, perhaps she just sent it this way--if you've set up a page/document with bleed, in InDesign, it's only a moment's work to output it with bleed for printing, right? (FWIW, I have this horrible feeling that the illo thought that full bleed just meant, run off the edge of the page, and didn't set bleed settings in INDD, but, foolishly, hope springs eternal...)

But when I view the pages, this thing has all the dialogue/narrative boxes at the bottom of the page, WELL within the live-element noflyzone. These should NOT be where they are located, because there's a very good chance that they'll get cropped, at least partially, off the page. I mean...wth?

And then I realize, this trim size doesn't exist. Not in Createspace, not in KDP print. At this point, my forehead looks like a crumpled piece of paper, it's so squooshed together in WTF???

I write to her, saying.."I'm not sure what's going on here, but this file isn't going to fit at Createspace. I don't see bleed, I see live elements in the margins where they ought not be, and the size is simply wrong."

n.b.: let's not forget--I have NOTHING to do with the print file. That's completely out of my bailiwick. Our only concern is making the Ebooks. But, I'd spent that time, telling her "pick the trim size, make sure the illustrator remembers the bleed," etc., so I'm gobsmacked here. How the HELL did this happen?


FIRST, she writes back, saying:

Spoiler:

"If we used an 8.25x8.25 trim size on Createspace....how do we know if the file size of our current pdf can accommodate that? This is where it gets fuzzy for me."

Whut? This is where it gets FUZZY for you? Are you kidding? This is a 9" tall, 10" wide page. Firstly, it's not square. What are you going to do, crop 0.75" from the height, and 1.75" from the width? These pages are fully illustrated. They have NO white margins/borders around them, etc. The illos go to the edge of the page, as they ought, in full-bleed. I don't even know where to start, in discussing this with her.

And then I get this:

Spoiler:

What my illustrator did was she made the book larger so that we could go smaller with the size if needed. I guess im stuck on the right trim size to pick for the book. I have been looking at the link below to make sure and choose the right trim size for expanded distribution but it looks like there is no trim size requirement?

With a closing para that says THIS:

Spoiler:

I think I'm feeling stuck. Is it the illustators responsibility to somehow 'set' the trim size to be a certain trim size on their end?

I'm honestly utterly boggled. I don't even know HOW to help her at this point. I mean...how do I tell her that whatever she paid, she's completely thrown it away? She might as well have taken her money, in cash, and burned it in the fireplace.

I'm completely smacked. I wish I could think of some way to help her, but...I sorta also want to scream, "did you think I wrote you all that info, for fun? Why didn't you read what I sent, read the guidelines I told you to download, etc.?"

I don't get it. I really don't. If you're going to spend that much money...what the HELL?

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

I must say, my allergies are so much better since I started on Nasacort last year. Triamcinolone Acetonide nasal spray. I had one of those allergy attacks that I literally could not breathe or make my nose stop running. Had to take some Benadryl and go to bed. Next day, I went to Walgreen's and bought some Nasacort and now I would not be without that stuff. Every morning and it has made such a difference.

Best price is at Target. You can get a 2 pack of the generic 120 sprays each for $20.

I'm using the Walgreens generic. I was massively allergic as a small child but grew out of most of them. (I still can't wear wool against my skin, but baby me lay awake and cried because I had a wool blanket in my crib till a doctor suggested switching to cotton.)

As I've aged, however, some allergies have returned. I'm sensitive to climate changes, and don't need to see a weather report to know a front is moving in. And pollen which never used to bother me does. I was trying to sneeze my nose off a couple of years ago while inside and behind A/C. The culprit turned out to be Bradford Pear trees planted near my building. (My dentist and her internist husband live in CT. He doesn't even come into the city when Bradford Pear trees are blooming, because he's really allergic to the pollen.)

Pollen is especially problematic at the moment, so I use the nasal spray upon waking up and before I go to bed. It helps a great deal (and means I don't wake up in the wee hours of the morning with a runny nose I need to blow before I can get back to sleep.)

Overall, I'm lucky. My needs can be handled by OTC generics, and don't require prescriptions. Benadryl is my friend...
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I don't get it. I really don't. If you're going to spend that much money...what the HELL?

You spend that much money so you don't have to actually know stuff. You can pay someone to deal with that for you. Except when it's not that simple, and you do need to know stuff.

An old friend wrote a series of posts elsewhere on job hunting. She's an older woman who has been in finance for many years, and writing about financial topics. After a dozen years at her last employer, she ran afoul of a new HR Director who didn't like her and pushed her out. (I believe the HR Director is no longer there because she rubbed too many folks the wrong way, but that doesn't help my friend.)

She's been on the job market for a while, but didn't expect the process to take as long as it has, and was blogging about her job hunting experiences and dealing with recruiters. She decided the blog posts would be a decent eBook for others in the market (and raise her profile in the market and make potential employers more aware of her.)

She knows nothing about eBooks, so a friend who does helped her put the collection into a Kindle volume available through Amazon. That's all well and good, but the whole world doesn't use Kindles or Kindle apps, and doesn't get content from Amazon, so while Amazon is certainly where you start, it should be the only thing you do.

I tried to explain that there was more than one eBook format, and she needed to cover other bases. My one paragraph explanation was completely non-technical, but the response was that that level of detail would have scared her off from trying in the first place. Detail? If I wanted to go into detail, she would still be reading next week...

My concern is that I think she's defined herself as someone incapable of grasping tech. The woman has a PhD from Harvard and is comfortable with explaining abstruse financial topics, so it's not a question of intelligence. But I've seen this before. If you define yourself as being incapable of doing something, you won't be able to do it, and closer off a range of opportunities. Somewhere she internalized that someone like her wasn't supposed to understand tech, so she can't. That sort of thing dismays me.

(She just landed a new position in finance that will be a challenge, because she'll be customer facing and trying to sell services. I think she can, but she's never done that before, so it will be a learning experience. Crossing appendages...)
______
Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

I'd much rather stick with understanding tech, and not being able to grasp finance.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You spend that much money so you don't have to actually know stuff. You can pay someone to deal with that for you. Except when it's not that simple, and you do need to know stuff.

But, Dennis, my sweet...she DIDN'T! She knowingly hired an illustrator that hadn't ever made a book before. I mean....

An old friend wrote a series of posts elsewhere on job hunting. She's an older woman who has been in finance for many years, and writing about financial topics. After a dozen years at her last employer, she ran afoul of a new HR Director who didn't like her and pushed her out. (I believe the HR Director is no longer there because she rubbed too many folks the wrong way, but that doesn't help my friend.)

She's been on the job market for a while, but didn't expect the process to take as long as it has, and was blogging about her job hunting experiences and dealing with recruiters. She decided the blog posts would be a decent eBook for others in the market (and raise her profile in the market and make potential employers more aware of her.)

She knows nothing about eBooks, so a friend who does helped her put the collection into a Kindle volume available through Amazon. That's all well and good, but the whole world doesn't use Kindles or Kindle apps, and doesn't get content from Amazon, so while Amazon is certainly where you start, it should be the only thing you do.

(sigh). I feel ya. EVERY time I quote someone new, I have to go through the whole song and dance that we're giving them the ePUB files for a very good reason, not merely to line our pockets. They all think that a quote w/o an ePUB will be 50% of the price, which of course, it's not.

I tried to explain that there was more than one eBook format, and she needed to cover other bases. My one paragraph explanation was completely non-technical, but the response was that that level of detail would have scared her off from trying in the first place. Detail? If I wanted to go into detail, she would still be reading next week...

Yup. I get this all the time.

My concern is that I think she's defined herself as someone incapable of grasping tech. The woman has a PhD from Harvard and is comfortable with explaining abstruse financial topics, so it's not a question of intelligence. But I've seen this before. If you define yourself as being incapable of doing something, you won't be able to do it, and closer off a range of opportunities. Somewhere she internalized that someone like her wasn't supposed to understand tech, so she can't. That sort of thing dismays me.

(She just landed a new position in finance that will be a challenge, because she'll be customer facing and trying to sell services. I think she can, but she's never done that before, so it will be a learning experience. Crossing appendages...)
______
Dennis

Ye olden self-fulfilling prophecy. "I can't understand tech" becomes, "I really don't understand tech."

I get a ton of clients--by design and definition--that are admittedly "not techie." But I also get a bunch that seem bizarrely proud of it. Some will tell me, "well, I'm OLD, so I don't understand this newfangled yadda," and are a bit taken aback when I tell them that pretty much everyone here is over 60. Then they don't know what to say as their excuse. (One client at least had a sense of humor about it--"oh, no!," he exclaimed when I said that to him, "Hoisted upon my own bulls*t!")

I had a client--you can't make this sh*t up--to whom I sent one of our ClickByClick Guides, which means, I walk them through something, screenshot-by-screenshot, as it says, "click by click," right? This was a "how to upload to the KDP Guide," and the first screenshot was a picture of the KDP Login page.

This client kept clicking the screenshot. In the PDF. (She didn't know what a "PDF" was, either. I should have known, when she said that, to run for the hills.) When I explained to her that it's a screenshot, she said "what's a screenshot?" I literally was not able to help her, because her lack of knowledge was so profound it was like expecting Helen Keller to read skywriting. Thank GOD she had a son that was in his 50's, that at least could muddle through the guide.

How do people survive, in this day and age, without at least a modicum of understanding of how computers work????

Hitch

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Hitch

(One client at least had a sense of humor about it--"oh, no!," he exclaimed when I said that to him, "Hoisted upon my own bulls*t!")

LOL!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

I'd much rather stick with understanding tech, and not being able to grasp finance.

I have some understanding of both. I know more about tech, but I know enough about finance to normally understand what's being said.

My point was simply the issue of defining yourself as being unable to do something.

I got a basic grounding in finance in the 80s, when I found myself working for a bank. One of the roles I wound up filling was end-user support for bank systems users in my area dealt with. It was the days before Lotus 1,2,3 was on a PC on every desktop, and my area of the bank used a mainframe based financial modeling package to generate reports for senior management. I became the resident expert on it. I needed to understand what the numbers meant and how they were calculated, because I wrote (or rewrote) a number of the report programs. I reached a point of printing out a master copy for Xeroxing and distribution, saying "That number is wrong! There is no way it can be what the report says!", whiting out the number on the master, writing in what it should be, distributing the report, then going back in and correcting the bad data.

It was the responsibility of financial analysts in the areas to input the underlying data. I got asked by a manager to sit down with and train an analyst in his area who was consistently failing to do it right. When I tried to explain things to her, her first response was "I'll never understand that!" I finally said "Joanne, your boss asked me to sit down with you because doing this is part of your job. You have three choices - sit down with your boss and see about getting your job restructured so you don't have to do it, work with me to learn how to do it, or continue to do it badly and lose your job. If your choice is number two, you have to stop saying "I'll never understand that!" whenever I open my mouth." She wasn't stupid, but had defined herself as being unable to grasp certain things her job required her to do.

I you don't believe you can do something, you won't be able to do it, and won't even try. I see way too much of that. A comment I made to the woman in my earlier post was "We step on our own toes, trip over out own feet, and get in our own way. We spend too much time listening the the little voices whispering in our ear saying "You can't! You shouldn't! You mustn't! You aren't supposed to! You aren't able to! You don't deserve to!", and we don't even try. (And too often, if we listen carefully, those voices sound like mom and dad...)" Another older woman in the topic said I was so right, because she had gone through the same things, and my friend should listen to me.

I can't undo a lifetime of negative conditioning with a pointed comment, but I can at least try to chip away at it and give folks the notion that if they tried, good things might happen, but nothing would happen if they didn't try.

Sure, the game is fixed. But you can't win if you don't play. I encourage people to play.
______
Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I you don't believe you can do something, you won't be able to do it, and won't even try. I see way too much of that. A comment I made to the woman in my earlier post was "We step on our own toes, trip over out own feet, and get in our own way. We spend too much time listening the the little voices whispering in our ear saying "You can't! You shouldn't! You mustn't! You aren't supposed to! You aren't able to! You don't deserve to!", and we don't even try. (And too often, if we listen carefully, those voices sound like mom and dad...)" Another older woman in the topic said I was so right, because she had gone through the same things, and my friend should listen to me.
______
Dennis

Yup. I've been lucky enough to succeed at most everything I try -- and had parents who expected me to do so. So I hear different voices "Of course you can!" It does make a lot of difference.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

How do people survive, in this day and age, without at least a modicum of understanding of how computers work????

Not very well.

An old friend does telecom and networking for small businesses. He described a client he just dealt with. The client said his wifi sucked.

His network name was "wifi". The network password was "wifi". He used "wifi" as his password for ease of remembering. And his employees were giving it out to others in the building, so everyone was using his bandwidth. Gee, no wonder his Wifi sucked.

But he's the sort of guy who puts his passwords on Post It notes on his monitor to reduce what he has to remember. They were the bane of my existence when I was doing corporate IT support.

My SO is on a bookkeeping list, and mentioned another poster talking about a client with the same network name and password, for the same reason. The client was in financial services and the British equivalent of a CPA. The response from the list was "Words fail me..." Given current European focus in privacy, I have to wonder how many regulations he might be in violation of with non-existent security.

The problem is two-fold.

First, it's possible to own and drive a car without knowledge of the principles of operation of the four stroke internal combustion engine, or being a mechanic and doing your own repairs beyond changing a flat tire. You don't have to know that stuff, and can pay someone else to maintain the vehicle.

We aren't there with computers (though we're better than we were), and it still helps to understand a bit about how they work and have some mechanical aptitude to fix things and do upgrades.

The second problem is that a lot of what people think they know is wrong. That will bite them, but they won't believe they are mistaken until it does. (And even then they'll try to find reasons why it wasn't their fault.)

I told my friend
Axiom 1: Some people are smarter than others.
Axiom 2: You get to deal with the stupid.

He had to agree.
______
Dennis