Devoured by locusts.

View 711 Tuesday, January 31, 2012

It’s late and past bed time. The day was used up in household activities, and of course yesterday was devoted to family matters. Richard and his family are off to the East coast where they live. About half my stuff seems not to work well. Alex updated some things last night and nothing works properly now. My twenty year old hi-fi stereo has stopped working and I haven’t replaced it. I was using I to listen to the radio, but now KFI is directing me to something called I heart Radio rather than live streaming, and that keeps telling me oops something went wrong but we’re working on it. Real competence. I don’t want I heart Radio I want to listen but apparently they no longer offer that. Instead the link takes you to I heart radio which gives me the oops. As I say, real confidence inspiring competence.

The Florida election is over and Romney won big time including among those whose main concerns are economic matters and the budget. Of course Romney has saturated Florida with negative ads, and most voters are sick of them. As am I. I’ll think about the Florida primary later. It’s really bed time.

The Author’s Guild has a piece worth reading on Amazon and the publishing revolution. http://blog.authorsguild.org/2012/01/31/publishings-ecosystem-on-the-brink-the-backstory/ The Guild is increasingly more representative of the Guild and less of authors and writers, but then so are all the writers organizations now. Pournelle’s Iron Law seems to apply to the lot of them. As you would suppose.

There’s a related piece here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/amazon-s-sales-miss-estimates-profit-drops-as-expenses-surge-shares-drop.html

I should have the first Chaos Manor Reviews column of the year done soon. I am sorry it didn’t get done in January but things have been a bit busy here, and for some reason the house and general household chores are demanding more attention than they used to. Or maybe things just take longer.