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Category: Wednesday Wrant

Facebook, I don’t “like” you. Wednesday Wrant 2/22/2012

Today finds me ranting about something I think we can all rant about… Facebook. I have a general policy that my Facebook is a social media outlet completely separate from my author brand or persona, which I think is probably mostly healthy.

So for me, Facebook is all personal, and zero business (except when I am giving my book away, which I think is fair). What bothers me is other people who don’t respect those same boundaries.

“Like my page!”

“I want to play you in Scrabble!”

“I just bought a new pair of Toms and I’m doing a shitload of good for humanity with my overpriced $54 shoes!” (Hmm… there’s a topic for a future rant)

There’s also this new thing where it’ll show you where Person A commented on Person B’s status, even if you have jack shit connection to Person B. I unwittingly saw a uterus photo that way (again, a topic for a future rant).

Maybe it’s just me, but I get advertised to enough in my life; I don’t need it from my friends on my news feed in Facebook, and I don’t care to see status updates from people I don’t know. The interface has changed so that you can only determine what types of updates appear on your feed on a per-user basis. I’m not about to go through and set this for every single friend of mine, so I figured out a little trick that I thought was brilliant (and, behold my technical writing day job skills in action):

  1. In Facebook, in the left pane of the news feed, in the LISTS heading, click MORE.
  2. In the Lists page, click Create List.
  3. In the Create New List dialog box, in the List Name field, enter “All” or something and click Create.
  4. In the list page, click Add Friends.
  5. In the Edit <list name> box, add all your friends and click Finish. No, there’s not a quick way to do this. Thanks, Facebook.
  6. Now that you have everybody, click the Manage List arrow and select Choose Update Types. You might have to click this twice to see all the categories, because the UI is very finicky.
  7. And voila, you can uncheck games, likes, comments on people you don’t know, music, etc.

I was ridiculously proud of myself for figuring this out. Here’s the problem, though, it only works about 60% of the time! I still get “So and so is listening to Nickelback on Spotify!” (Really? Are you sure we’re friends?) or “Suzy just watched 20 YouTube videos and here they are in chronological order!” from time to time. So, it’s not perfect. But if you wanna hack your way to a better news feed, this is a start.

And no, I won’t host a 31 party, a Scentsy party, an Arbonne party, or any other party. I thought you were an “independent” distributor! (Yet another rant for the future.)

So, having ranted the following, it’s now the first day of Lent. Do I or do I not give up Facebook in hopes I’ll be less cranky after celebrating Christ’s resurrection?

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Wednesday Wrant – What is this ebook thingy?

I don’t really have a whole lot to rant about this week, but ever since I self-published my first novel on Kindle, I’ve been paying more attention to people’s feelings about books vs. ebooks. There’s a wide swath out there, and to be truthful, I’m getting kind of sick of it. So, you know, I’m gonna add to the slush pile of book vs. ebook hoopla.

Yes, I love physical books. I love the smell of the pages, the feel of the cover, the crack of the spine. I get that curling up with a good book is an experience, and I get why people would think you can’t have the same feeling with an ebook.

Except that you can. And it’s actually easier. I can huddle under the blanket, arms and all, prop the Kindle up against my legs, and turn the page with just my thumb, without even needing to move my arms. Take that, Snuggie… and you can keep the book light.

I tried explaining the fact that I published my book on Kindle to my mom, which was probably a mistake in the first place. After about five minutes of going over the process over and over, she simply asked “When will it be available in print?” Then, when I did a CreateSpace paperback edition (for her, and my family who feel the same way about dangerous ebooks), she asked me what store she could buy it in.

She doesn’t have a credit or debit card because he tends to lose them, so she sent me some cash to get a CreateSpace paperback that I could autograph and send back to her. I’m not saying that a signed book isn’t valuable, but in the time that it took her to mail the letter, me to order an author’s copy, CreateSpace to ship it to me, me to sign it, and then ship it to her, she could have bought my book on Kindle 1,036,800 times. And that’s just a 12-hour day.

I volunteer at the library a couple hours a week. I love seeing all the books, the pretty covers, seeing parents reading Dr. Seuss to their kids. But I also have to sort those books. I’m not sure how many germ-infested books live at our branch at the library, but I’m pretty sure my Kindle could hold about half of them – no sorting, no shelving, no late fees.

I read more on the Kindle. Yes, Kindle books tend to be shorter, but I can set my Kindle on the treadmill at the gym, stick it in the pocket of my purse, all things I can’t do with a physical book. I do read physical books on my recumbent bike day, but it’s way easier on the Kindle. I typically have 2 books going at any given time – an ebook and a physical book – and I pretty much always finish the ebook first.

When we moved to Austin, we went through the inevitable stage of divesting of all the random shit we don’t use, which included – I shit you not – 8 boxes full of books. Oh yeah, and we still have 5 or 6 boxes of books in our storage closet that won’t fit on our bookshelf. What are they doing there? Nothing. To get to them, I’d have to go digging through boxes. When I want to find a book I want to read on the Kindle, I go to the index. If I don’t have it on my Kindle, I can browse Amazon right from my Kindle and get it. I don’t have to put on pants to go to the store, and I can get the Kindle edition for about 1/5 of the cost of a physical book.

I love both kinds of books, and I don’t see either of them going away any time soon. The bottom line, though, I’ve sold over 400 ebooks. Any idea how many paperbacks I’ve sold? 3. And I know the 3 people who bought them. Ebooks? They’re the future, and you can pry them from my dead, lifeless fingers like I’ll pry the physical book from yours. Stop squawking about how ebooks are destroying everything. It’s evolution. Get with it.

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Wednesday Wrant 2/1/2012

I haven’t written a Wednesday Wrant in awhile, mostly because the last couple of weeks, most of my ranting thoughts have been about Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum. But, I’d rather keep it mostly unpolitical on my blog, since I’m pretty sure my political opinion won’t skyrocket my readership. Also, the dog upstairs has been getting steadily quieter as the weeks go on, so I can’t complain too much.

So today, I want to rant about the sunroof of my car. Ever since I moved to Texas, I’ve been able to pretty well count on one hand the number of days it’s rained (which, for those who can’t count on their hands, means it hasn’t rained much). Some time ago, I thought I smelled a little bit of mildew in my car, but when it dissipated almost immediately, I didn’t think about it again.

Fast forward to last week, when we had a storm worthy of the Midwest in Spring. Nonstop thunder that left my fraidy-cat dog huddling under the bed, lightning that made me wonder if I was in a rave, rain and hail beating against the window thanks to the gale-force winds that came with it. I’m also a fairly light sleeper, so it kept me up for several hours.

Since I work from home and use the gym at my apartment, I only drive about once a week. So two days later, when I got in my car to go to the grocery store, I discovered about 2 inches of water in the floorboard of my car, a soaked and stained passenger’s seat, and a discolored roof. After finding a place in town that could repair a sunroof leak, which was of course not conveniently located for me, they informed me that there was a lump of mud lodged in the drainage tubes for the sunroof that they needed to flush.

Did you know that car sunroofs had drainage tubes? NO? Me neither. They looked at me like I was a neglectful car mom and cautioned me that I am supposed to flush the tubes once a year. Why have I owned no less than three cars with sunroofs and never, once, been told that part of owning a car with a sunroof is getting the tubes drained every other time I rotate the tires? Also, I get that you CAN charge $80 to run some water though some tubes, because I have no idea where they are and would probably eff something up if I did it myself, but that’s a little steep, don’t you think? Still, thanks for vacuuming out all the water. That was nice. Not $80 nice, but nice.

In other news, it rained again last night and the inside of my car and it’s nice and dry on the inside, so I’ll see you again next year, one place in town that flushes sunroof drainage tubes…

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New flash fiction piece up

When I started my Wednesday Wrants, I said that part of the reason I wanted to do them was to have some avenue for my ranting frustrations, but also a record of something I could write about later. My newest flash fiction piece, Johnson County Mr. Coffee, is just that.

I ranted a few weeks ago about our fancypants coffeemaker a few weeks ago in this post, and it inspired the following story.

https://kellyhitchcock.com/flash-fiction/#joco

Go check it out, and tell me what you think 🙂

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Wednesday Wrant 1/11/2012

It’s been difficult getting back into the groove of things at the office, since the holidays and being sick last week.  I had this nasty sore throat for several days, but I finally got healthy and ready to get back to work.

Unfortunately, something has been distracting me when I already have this motivation problem – the little dog upstairs has been barking.  All day, every day.  And it’s got this yip-yap whine that makes it sound like it’s in mortal danger.  At first, my dog would whine when she heard the dog upstairs, but after awhile, she’s just kind of learned to ignore it.

I wish I could do the same.  Typically, I just turn up the podcast or the song I’m listening to and try to drown him out, but then I have a meeting where the only background noise I have is YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP over and over and over.  Normally, I would call the apartment office, but I’m a little hesitant to do so.  You see, my dog is part chow, and the Texas Apartment Association expressly prohibits any mix of breed they want to call “aggressive”: Akitas, Pit bulls, German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and Chows.  Never mind the fact that my dog is scared of her own shadow.  So I told them she’s a Retriever mix, which isn’t a complete lie, but I hate to invite complainer karma lest someone decides they want to complain about my dog.

When the owners are home, the dog doesn’t bark, but it runs from one end of the apartment to the other all the time, which would make me wonder if it were thundering outside if only it weren’t Texas, where it rains about two days a year.  If I write the dog into a story and then murder it violently, I hope you all won’t think less of me if it turns up dead the next day.  I would think it’d be barking itself hoarse by now.

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Wednesday Wrant 1/4/2012

I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday, filled with magic and wonder.  If nothing else, I hope it was preferable to mine, because mine was kind of a disaster.  But hey, I am home now, and we’ve begun a New Year.  And next year, I’m staying home for Christmas.

So without going into too much detail, let me just say my holiday was filled with a head cold, a stomach bug, a teething one-year-old, a blaring car alarm 12 hours away, and family that generally drives me crazy.

It was actually, seriously, comforting to celebrate with my boyfriend’s parents.  No one was vomiting, teething, showing up late, talking about the evils of microwaves, etc.  The first day we went over for a visit, I was just getting to where I felt somewhat normal again after my stomach bug.  No more vomiting or other rapid fluid loss (lovely).  We’re sitting around chatting when all of a sudden I start feeling a sharp pain in my upper belly.  It gets worse and worse, so I go lie down and finally decide I need to go to an Urgent Care.

Which brings me to my Wednesday Wrant. Urgent Care my ass.  We’re in Olathe, which is the Kansas City equivalent of no man’s land.  The closest place to us was a Walgreen’s Care Clinic, so we went over there, after waiting for what seemed like 15 minutes for a train. We get to the clinic, which has a sign up saying they won’t be accepting any new patients for the evening.

We Google the closest place, which takes us out to an empty parking lot.  We start calling Urgent Care places left and right, all of which are either closed or about to close in 20 minutes – at 7 pm.  What the crap is the point of an Urgent Care that closes at 5? That stops taking patients at 6:30? Luckily I got to feeling better before we resorted to the emergency room, but the unhelpfulness of the Urgent Care industry in Olathe, Kansas has pissed this nice Midwestern gal off.  And Google Maps, sometimes you really suck, too.

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Wednesday Wrant – Your ads are showing…

I had a hard time decided which of the things I’m currently pissed off about to be pissed off enough to write about…

I finally landed on ad-stuffed blogs. I recently started back up with Google Reader so I can have a good list of self-publishing and author blogs to check out. It’s part of being an author, building relationships with others to help advance you books. The beauty of Google Reader is that I can just view the plain text of the posts – no fancy script, no colorful backgrounds, and most importantly, no ads.

Just reading isn’t enough, though. You have to comment on posts to build those relationships (plus it’s another avenue of exposure), which requires me to leave the relative comfort of Google Reader and go to the blog page, where I am immediately inundated with sidebar ads that go on for forever. I understand that people want to leverage their blogs to make a little extra cash on the side. I also know that building a website isn’t cheap. I begrudgingly renew my domain every year and pay the chunk of change to keep it going.

Let me just share a little bit of my own opinion here – if you’re writing an author blog to make money from ads, you’re doing it wrong. Your author site exists for the benefit of your readers and for you to spread the word about your books. Ads make your site look cheap and unprofessional, especially when you’re using a free site framework like Blogger or WordPress. And some of your ads are *really* egregious. Some of your ads aren’t even for things your readers and fellow authors would be interested in, at all. And you put ads in every single place one could possibly put an ad – in the banner, in the footer, in the left sidebar, in the right sidebar. This cheapens your content, which is what your readers are visiting your site to see.

Lucky for me, there’s AdBlock Plus 🙂

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Wednesday Wrant: Coffee machines are polished turds

I use Twitter pretty prolifically for expressing my distaste for things, people, and events, but sometimes 140 characters just doesn’t cut it. It occurred to me that I really have no designated place to get my rant on from time to time, and having seen other author blogs do this week, I am adding a new feature to my site… Wednesday Wrant. The twist is, at some point, I plan to turn these rants into a manuscript of some kind, so stay tuned!

So, as the title might imply, my rant this week is about coffee pots. My fingerprints are, apparently rife with some kind of crazy Kryptonite for coffee machines. This is a fairly recent development, about the last four years or so. Before that, I always just kind of bought a cheap-o coffee pot because, hey, coffee is coffee, right? But a few years ago, when my boyfriend and I were dating, and lived in separate apartments, we each had our own cheap-o coffee pots. His was a little 4-cupper that he’d had for about eighty years, and the little on/off switch (yes, the kind you actually switch, not the button) finally stuck in the off position, meaning it was time for a new one.

He had some gift cardage to use up, so he decided to get a fancy-ish coffee pot to replace it. When we moved in together, I still had the coffee pot from my apartment, which we kept as a backup. The entire time we had the backup, nothing went wrong with our fancy-ish coffee pot. Fast forward to the time we move to Texas, where I still have the backup coffee pot at our old place while my boyfriend gets things ready at our place in Texas. There’s only so much stuff we can take, so I relinquish the backup coffee maker.

As soon as we finish moving me to Texas, our fancy coffee pot decides that it, too, prefers the power button in the off position, and it decides to stay there, as if it knows we have no backup coffee pot anymore. So our solution, naturally, is to go out and get a more expensive, fancier coffee maker. Fast forward four months, and the thing is now stuck on “clean”. I Googled the problem, which is apparently in our coffee pot’s model. Lots of people have had it, but no one has solved it. I tried running a few pots of water through it and unplugging it for a few hours, and the clean button finally went off, and it didn’t beep incessantly. I did a happy dance around the kitchen and did an Aaron Rodgers touchdown dance (or discount double-check, whichever you prefer), displaying my amazing human triumph over machine.

Until the next morning, when I went to brew a pot of coffee and the Clean button came back on. I pressed, and pressed it, trying to get it to go away. It just beeped at me. Thank you, fancy expensive coffee pot. I am just going to tell myself that you’re making nice, clean coffee for me, and buy your cheaper cousin when I inevitably break this one.

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