Tech Dads

The old dad who fixed everything around the house with and adjustable and Philips head and a hammer, adjusting training wheels on bikes, the errant leaky faucet, the malfunctioning lamp that just wont stay lit, have been replaced by the tech dads of 2012. Tech dads around Christmas are not the men staying up late to put together the bike. The tech dad is hunched over his laptop solving tech problems for his kids much the way the old dads used to solve problems with a wrench.

Take Christmas day. I set up two notebooks complete with getting them online and punching in encryption codes and changing screen savers and passwords. Not a big deal really. The tech dad nightmare was my seven year olds Mp3 player. I get why Steven Jobs did such a great thing with the IPOD, because the old technology barely worked. Two hours to get the little bugger to talk with rhapsody and download music then I just started sliding over my own mp3 files from my laptop.

Then it was on to the remote control helicopter. No biggie really except extremely difficult to fly. Many crashes. Then onto setting up the digital camera so it would download. Not extremely difficult. The Uverse guy shows up and I have to transition all computers to the new provider. Rebooting and passwords and encryption keys. Setting up the phone to Tivo and control the television. Some tech issues to resolve between televisions.

The mp3 player craps out. The notebooks cant find the WIFI and my sons speakers need to be hooked up and his phone wont sync to the axillary jack on his receiver. Encryption keys and rebooting and the tape monitor circuit for the phone and recharge the mp3 player. All is well until the wife's laptop crashes.

Tech dad is on the job.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...I have one word...plastics!
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer

Kindle and our Libraries of Old

My fondest memories are rolling through the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore and finding new books to read. I always read what I wasn't supposed to be reading because I wasn't supposed to be reading it. Rosemary's Baby or a book about drugs called Tuned Out or just about any flashy cover on the paperback rack. But then I disappeared into the stacks and looked for my Henry Huggins books or Romona and Beatrice or Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys. Then I would sometimes just walk the stacks and find the big picture books from World War II and sit down and pour over the photos of battle and gore and marvel at men who actually went and fought and died.

Finally, I would check out my books and walk home in the crisp twilight with the excitement of the books under my arms. I still feel that excitement when I walk into a library today. Something about a building of books just gets my mind rolling. All that possibility in those carpeted aisles with the lady in the beehive and reading glasses glancing at those that would disturb the inner sanctum. The slightly harried younger woman working behind the front desk that are forever cataloging books or trying to find a missing library card because a mother and her kids are imploding.

Communities are defined by their libraries. It is one of the first things a town builds. And the biggest towns (Chicago) have incredible libraries. And it is hard to believe that world might go away. Maybe not be anytime soon, but the Ebook is the first foot in the door of a world where people don't have to leave home to go the library. The library as we know it with the cranky women keeping order and the pulpy smell of old books could well one day be reduced to a server.  A strange thought.

Amazon  just opened up the Kindle to libraries.That means people like myself can now zap a book into my reader at my kitchen table and never leave the house. The overwhelming advantage of the Kindle or any Ereader is one of convenience. It is simply easier to plunk a book out of thin air and read it. There is none of the driving to the bookstore or library and parking and paying for gas and searching out the book. You simply do it in seconds. This doesn't bode well for bookstores or libraries.

The faint erosion of library traffic will not be noticeable at first. There are simply too many people who prefer books. But as times passes, the people who grew up on Ereaders will not reach for a book the way we don't reach for an eight track tape or a  record. The medium has simply passed. And it is a sad thought that our collective isolation from technology might just spread to even our libraries.

I don't know. Even if all the books are gone, I'll still go to the library and walk the stacks. Me and the lady in the beehive with that sweater she is forever pulling together, looking over her glasses. Shhhhhhh. People are reading. For now anyway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...one mans fight to get out of suburbia

Back to the Pony Express

Did you hear the Post Office could close this winter without funding from Congress? Five billion is due to fund retired health care costs and they don't have it. The volume of mail has dropped almost thirty percent and the layoffs will start commencing. They already have with 124000 on the chopping block, but the Union intends to fight it all the way. Saturday deliveries will be done away with in the new austerity program and even more heads will roll ,but lets face it, technology is kicking the postal service back to the days of the Pony Express. That is how low tech it has become.

And it is sad. The postman walking from door to door with our mail. It gives us a sense of community, something America is losing and desperately needs. What is in that mailbox? As a kid I walked down a long driveway to wait for my latest issue of Boys Life or the gadgets I sent away for with the order form from the back of comic books or cereal boxes. I remember vividly the time a crystal radio set came in the mail I had bought for two dollars. And then as an adult with all those rejection letters coming back in after bombing New York with hundreds of partial manuscripts. That one letter always was amazing, the one saying, sure send on the rest of the manuscript.

And not a lot has changed. My kids are the same way. They sent off for live turtles and checked the mailbox everyday. Did our turtles come? Did our turtles come? Not yet I said bringing up our diminishing mail since most of our bills come directly into our online banking account. Mail is certainly becoming as derivative and nonessential as a land line. We still have a land line, but I rarely use it and when it rings nobody answers it. Much like the mail. Yeah, there are things that still come as a surprise, but it is the assumption that whoever really wants to get hold of me will email is really the nail in the coffin of the perambulating postman.

Still, I hope the postal service can hang on. It still processes billions of pieces of mail and is vital, but technology has a nasty habit of making what is vital one day obsolete the next. But a real country should have a real postal service. We lose this one and you really have to wonder about the United States. Although, now that it is the hands of Congress to save the Post Office, maybe we better just start over and  post those signs: WANTED YOUNG MEN TO RIDE LONG HOURS OVER DESOLATE COUNTRY TO DELIVER THE MAIL. MUST HAVE OWN HORSE.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man ...The story of one mans search to find the new American Dream James Frey

From Scroll to Kodex to reading The New York Times in Wisconsin

Up in a cabin with nothing but my kindle I downloaded the NY Times and read Lev Grossmans piece on the limitations of the digital format versus what he called the the codex  (book) which evolved from the scroll. He says if anything we are not making enough of the change. He is right and he winds up his piece saying the constrictions of the digital format is it's undoing. He is right. You cannot go from the end to the beginning with the kind of ease of a book. You cannot find  a page you wanted and then shoot ahead and back again to the place you wanted to be. Ebooks are just harder to navigate and they do feel contained.

Saying that Grossman finishes up saying that he will stick with the book. It is everyones choice and I understand his frustration. Reading on the ereader is very different. You just don't have that physical book in your lap to tear to pieces and mark up and read and jump around in. It's almost like the story is caged and you can't quite get to it. But here is why the new medium trumps all. Convenience. Humans move to convenience like ships to water. I can think of no better example than sitting up in Wisconsin and reading Levs article and then the entire NY Times Sunday paper in a cabin in middle of the woods.

There was no way for me to do this at my in laws place before. The town five miles away had the Milwaukee Journal and if you drove further to a grocery store you could get the Chicago Tribune. But NY Times, no way. But I read Lev's piece and then Maureen Dowd and here was the big thing, I could drop it on the couch and then fall asleep and then pick up where I left off. I would have never read any of this without the ability to snatch the newspaper out of thin air.

And I have written about the limitation of reading the NY Times on the Kindle and I stand by preferring the paper over the digital. But there is no doubt that conveniencewill trump everything. We are only getting busier and more pressed for time. Going to a bookstore or to a grocery store will be a luxury we will pass on because it's just so much easier to sit in our cabin and start reading. The scroll gave way to the Codex for much the same reason. It was just so  much easier to read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Ebooks level the playing field for Authors

Mass market paperbacks are dying. This is due in large part to ebooks taking away the normal paperback buyer in airports, drugstores and those large racks that used to sit in front of department stores and every convenience store. My second novel came out in mass market and should have been trade. Tobacco Sticks went out the there as a literary courtroom drama set in the South in Virginia in 1946 and had to fight it out with spy novels, thrillers, slasher novels, mysteries and just about every mass genre out there. I had no choice in the matter and the publisher later admitted that trade would have been a better fit for the novel.

The beautiful thing about Ebooks is that the author is in control.  There is only one format and that levels the playing field. No longer is an author competing with hard covers, trade, or mass paperback. No longer is the author stuck in a format that doesn't fit because of publishing realities. The book goes out there as an Ebook and it is on the same footing as every other author. Bestseller or unknown, the reader will receive the same product without the stigma of mass versus trade versus hardcover.

And the book can stay out there. No publisher will remainder your title falling into the dreaded OUT OF PRINT STATUS. You book will not be pushed to the back of the store or worse not displayed at all. One copy will not be stocked while five hundred copies are stocked of other titles. Books will not be sent back to the publisher because they didn't sell out in the first month. The ebook revolution has put the author in the drivers seat finally.

So mass market paperbacks will disappear. Eventually hardcover will  probably go away. The big authors will dominate the ebook sites and will be pushed out there first, but the reader can search for the author he wants and there the book will be for all time in  electronic mass, trade, and hardcover glory. The authors best effort will be there without publisher interference. Can an author ask for anything more?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The March of the Digital Age

If you watch Keith Obermann then you inevitably see the same contributors, one of which is Howard Fineman the political editor of Newsweek Magazine. Howard usually brought a sort of lighter side to the discussion, giving sage assessments of candidates and the strange machinations of our polarized country. Last night Howard was on but he looked curiously unkempt. His hair was longish and on his collar. He looked like a man who might not have gotten a good nights sleep. He was with Keith at the desk instead of in a remote studio. Something was up.

Keith Obermann then wished him good luck on his new assignment. Newsweek Magazine is probably going kaput. The magazine has become so thin it was in danger of blowing away and now it will be a little thinner. Howard then told Keith he was joining the Huffington Post and had to get up on social networking. Again he looked cheerfully optimistic, but like a man who has been drafted a second time for combat duty, there was a strange deflation in his smile.

Lets face it, the Howard Fineman's of the world are becoming extinct. The march of the digital age is supplanting longtime journalists like so many broken levees as the flood waters of economic realities wash over print media. It is not Howard's fault he will essentially be a paid blogger from now on, it is that his time has passed, or that era of one man one salary one view has passed. You could see Keith almost hugging his desk as he shook Howard's hand, wishing him well, thinking--there but for the grace of God go I.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com