One More Good Adventure

September 14, 2011 · 4:36 pm

New Orleans Music Is World Music

As my regular readers know, I lived in New Orleans for nearly 10 years from the mid ’70s to mid ’80s and, of course, fell in love with the music. I mean who wouldn’t? In my travels since leaving the Big Sleazy, I mean Big Easy, I’ve run across New Orleans music many places.

When I was living on the French Riviera the Neville Brothers, who were once upon a time a $5 cover charge at Tipitina’s on a Saturday night, were featured at the Juan les Pins Jazz Festival. Unfortunately for the Nevilles an acapella group of young girls from London opened the show and blew the audience away. They were called the Mint Juleps and though I posted a couple of videos of the group before I’ll post one to either jog your memory or introduce you to them. This was the song they opened their set with…

Now you understand why the Nevilles didn’t stand a chance after the girls left the stage.

A few years later when I was on my single-handed trip through Mexico, Belize and up into the Rio Dulce in Guatemala, I pulled into the small town of Placencia, Belize. After getting anchored and securing everything on board I hopped into the dinghy and headed to a funky bar built out over the water, and who should be wafting out over the water from the juke box? One of my all-time favorites, Marcia Ball.

A few days later as I was walking down the sidewalk in Placencia (there was no road or streets in Placencia when I was there, just this half mile-long “sidewalk” down the center of town) I heard another New Orleans music legend coming out of someone’s house. It stopped me dead in my tracks and I just had to stand there in the broiling afternoon sun until Johnny Adams, also known as the “Tan Canary,” finished singing this famous song…

I only saw Johnny Adams live once, but it was something I’ll never forget. Now, hearing Marcia Ball and Johnny Adams, each within a week, tells you that Placencia, Belize is one VERY cool little town.

Last Friday I was down the hill a little way helping a gringo friend saw up some lumber. David, who also lived in New Orleans for a while, streams music into his shop from some feed in the States and there was an “I can name that tune in three notes” moment when this famous piano pounder from the Ninth Ward started to drift over the sound of the circular saw.

I sort of give that one a pass since I know it was beamed in from north of the Rio Grande and shouldn’t count but it’s MY blog and I LOVE the good Doctor.

But this next selection DOES count. I got onto my bus at the terminal in downtown David to head back up the hill this morning. People like to get on it as soon as the bus pulls into its berth because the air conditioning is on in the bus and it’s HOT in David this time of the year at noon. The buses all play music, mostly the “Tipica” rhytms of Panama which I really love, but you could have knocked me over with a feather when the local “Tipica” station aired THIS song…

You can travel all over the world, but if I keep my ears open New Orleans music will creep up on me and say, “Hey, Richard, WHERE Y’AT?”

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Filed under cruising, New Orleans, Piano Players, sailing

Tagged as cruising, Marcia Ball

September 12, 2011 · 8:02 am

PDR Ocean Explorer Weekender

You all know I have a soft spot for the PDR (Puddle Duck Racer). Eleven months ago I wrote a post about how a Finn, Perttu Korhonen, modified the standard 8’X4′ PDR into a cool, but tiny, weekender. http://houseboatshantyboatbuilders.wordpress.com/2010/10/ In today’s issue of Duckworks (if you haven’t bookmarked this great blog, do it now) there was this video of Perttu taking a cruise on Lake Konnevesi. The lake is located in the middle of the country and the whole area seems to be covered with lakes. http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=62.613562,26.559448&spn=0.721399,1.774292&z=9&vpsrc=6&output=embed
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I love the Ocean Explorer but I’m not sure I’d want to have one in Finland. I understand that summers are great there. They had it on a Thursday last year. Take a ride with Perttu in this YouTube video…

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Filed under cruising, Living Small, Microcruising, Minimalist Cruising, PDR Racer, Puddle Duck Racer, sailboats, sailing, Small Sailboats

Tagged as adventure, cruising, Microcruising, Minimalist Cruising, PDRacer, sailboats, sailing, Small boat cruising

September 8, 2011 · 9:50 am

e-Book Covers

It’s said you “can’t tell a book by its cover” but every book needs a cover that will “hook” the prospective reader so they’ll pick it up and look inside.

I’ve just finished editing and rewriting A Pirate of the Caribbees by Harry Collingwood. When I say rewriting I mean I converted a 100 year-old text with such archaic writing as:

“For pity’s sake,” I ejaculated, “give me something to drink!”

“Ten thousand pounds?” I ejaculated.

“Thanks,” answered I, with alacrity.

I spent the last four months working to turn the book into something that reads as if it were written in the 21st Century. I pared out nearly 9,000 words from the original text that were just unnecessary but left the basic story line intact.

Next I had to come up with a cover for the book.

Getting cover art isn’t easy. Most writers hire an artist to do this for them. Fortunately I’m working in a genre where there are plenty of images in the public domain. That is they aren’t covered by copyright and can be used by anyone. In my search I came across a fantastic illustrator named Howard Pyle. Pyle even opened his own art school and one of his students was N. C. Wyeth who did the illustrations for Treasure Island that those of us of a “certain” age surely remember.

I loved Pyle’s pirate illustrations and it was a tough job picking the one to use for the cover of my latest effort.

There are certain things you have to look for in a picture when you’re choosing cover art. Your first consideration is, where are you going to put the text so that it doesn’t interfere with the picture. There has to be enough blank, or empty space for you to do this. Next, you have to go to some sort of photo tampering program and create the cover.

For my first four efforts I used the Microsoft Paint.net program. It was fairly easy to use,”user friendly” and quite intuitive. But then I got hit with an incredibly vicious virus that forced me to reformat my hard drive back to the original factory settings. Fortunately I’m pretty good at saving my work as I go along so I didn’t lose a whole lot of stuff when I reformatted. However, no matter what I tried I couldn’t get Paint.net to reinstall.

I searched all over for another program to use and believe me there are a ton of programs out there. I needed simple and I needed FREE. I downloaded several that just didn’t meet my needs. One that kept popping up and that I loaded is called GIMP. It’s a great program, so I’m told, but the learning curve would challenge a PhD candidate at MIT. I downloaded YouTube videos showing how to “work with layers,” resize photos and everything you need to monkey around with a picture to get a cover you wanted. I couldn’t figure out how to make the damned thing do what I wanted. The frustration kept building. I didn’t want to spend days learning how to make the program work.

Then I found something called Photo Pad Image Editor. It’s WAY better than Paint.net in what it does and within less than an hour I got it to do what I wanted. Talk about “intuitive” and “user friendly.” This is the program to have.

So this is what I came up with:

What do you think?

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Filed under digital books, digital publishing, e-publishing, ebook, indie authors, indie writers, writing

Tagged as creating an ebook cover, self publishing, writing

September 6, 2011 · 7:08 am

The Saddest Day Of The Year

When I was a kid this was the saddest day of every year. No, not September 6th. Some times the saddest day could come as early as the 2nd of September. It didn’t really matter. It was the dreaded Day After Labor Day. (For those who don’t live in the States, Labor Day there is the first Monday in September, so, like Mardi Gras and Easter, it’s a movable feast.) Summer was officially over and it had nothing to do with solstices. The Day After Labor Day was the day we literally packed up our tent, left Nickerson State Park in Brewster, Massachusettes, on Cape Cod and headed back “home” and school. Since I went to five different schools in my first seven years there was a special dread of leaving the park.

As the last day of school approached each day seemed to be a week long filled with the anticipation of returning to the park and the summer seemed as though it would last forever. Labor Day was so far away. On that last day of school my mom and dad would be waiting outside. My mom would be driving the Ford station wagon, a woodie, and my dad would be in the old Chevy panel truck with Philbrick’s Catering in big gold letters on the side and the family coat of arms on the driver’s side door. Hitched up behind the truck was the trailer my mom and dad would stay in. My brothers and I would live in a tent. And perched proudly on top of the truck would be the 8′ pram my dad had built in the basement with a shiny coat of white paint each year waiting to join the small flotilla made up of our boat and those of the Brenners and Cullums.

In those days, the late 40s and early 50s, you could reserve your spot each year and stay the whole summer. You can’t do that now: no reservations and two weeks max. While each Fall was a new school and fighting for a place in the pecking order, summer was always the same in Area Five. Just above our camp site were the Bolducs with their daughters Suzanne and Julie and then the Larabees with their son Don and across from them the Taylors and their son Tony who was only one hour older than me. Down the slope a ways were the Brenners and their daughter Susan and the Cullums with their son Fran and daughter Jan who had had polio and was confined to a wheel chair. Up from them were the Morrises and their daughters Sara Ann and Jeniffer (oh did I ever have a crush on Jeniffer, completely unrequited). My uncle Bill and aunt Stephanie with their daughters Helen and Lois pitched their tent across from the Morrises. I always knew where I fit in in the summer.

Back then it took about three hours to drive from Watertown, just outside of Boston and where, I found out a half century later, both the Philbricks and the Eatons had settled in the 1630s, to Nickerson. As we drew closer to Bourne and the Cape Cod Canal you knew you’d left the city far behind and the wonderful scent of the pine woods would start filtering in through the car windows.

Our tent was literally just steps away from Flax Pond.

There was great fishing in that pond. There was bass, pickerel, perch and catfish, but we called them hornpout, and were they great coated with cornmeal and fried up for breakfast with blueberry muffins with the blueberries picked off of bushes just a few feet away from the camp site.

Eventually, and inevitably, the day would arrive when there were only two weeks left of summer. The last two weeks of school dragged on for an eternity, but those last two weeks of summer flew by in the blink of an eye and then it was all done.

The day after Labor Day was always the saddest day of the year.

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September 3, 2011 · 8:26 am

Getting Use To My Kindle

Okay, I’ve had my Kindle for a couple of weeks now and here’s what I think of it.

I like it a lot but it’s definitely NOT like reading a dead tree book and in some ways that’s a shame. The tactile experience is missing. You don’t get to actually turn the pages, and while playing with font size makes the page you’re reading about the same size and word count of a paperback book it’s just not the same thing.

Since I got the Kindle I’ve been doing a LOT of reading. I actually wander away from the computer, dig out the Kindle and read a book. I read Teddy Roosevelt’s account of the Rough Riders. Not only was it an interesting story but so well written that you’d never guess it was penned a century ago. Reading the Roman histories by Tacitus and Caesar’s Commentaries, books I’ve wanted to read for years but just didn’t want to spend the money on to buy even in paperback.

While my literary tastes may run towards detective stories like the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke and the Prey series by John Sandford or the complete Butch Karp saga by Robert K. Tanenbaum I’ve been absolutely delighted with a couple of free books I downloaded by some female authors: Talk of the Town by Lisa Wingate (when it was available free) and Charlotte Figg Takes Over Paradise by Joyce Magnin. I enjoyed Charlotte Figg so much I had a hard time putting it down the first night so I could get some sleep and finished it off the next day.

One thing I like about the Kindle is the included Oxford Dictionary of English. Occasionally I come across a word I’m not sure of and you simply scroll down to it and it’s defined for you. A great feature.

I naturally bought a cover for the Kindle to protect it from getting scratched up just through the process of daily reading and carrying it around in my knapsack for my trips down the mountain to do my shopping. Holding it open with the unit on the right hand side and the cover to the left it’s almost like reading a real book except you only have a right-hand page.

My only real objection to the unit is that the little thing-a-ma-doodles that you press to “turn” the pages happen to be right under your thumb as you hold it and the slightest pressure flips you to the next page. However, you can configure the screen in several different ways but I’m just too lazy to do that.

I’d give it 4-1/2 stars and am glad I finally caved in and bought one.

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Filed under digital books, digital publishing, e-publishing, Uncategorized

August 25, 2011 · 11:34 am

Quotes

In today’s “Freshly Pressed” I clicked on to Amanda Rudd’s Blog post where people have inked their favorite literary quotations permanently into their skin. From there I went to http://tattoolit.com/ and got hung up on the page after page of photos of people’s tattoos. I’m not a big fan of tattoos in general, but I’ve found some of these rather interesting.

One that I particularly like is”

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. –The Buddah

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August 21, 2011 · 9:24 am

My First Contact With Hewlitt-Packard

My friend, Omar, who writes, hosts, the blog Lingua Franca recently had a post that said that Hewlitt-Packard disclosed plans to stop making smartphones and tablet computers running on Palm’s software. HP is also looking to get rid of its personal computer business in a sale or spinoff.

That HP might be getting rid of their personal computer business is a bit disappointing to me. Two of the three notebook computers and one desktop unit have all been HPs and I have only had minor problems with any of them and usually after much hard use. For instance, the notebook I’m using to write this I’ve owned for about four years. The only problem I have with it is that I can no longer write to the CD though I can still read CDs without any difficulty. I have an older HP notebook that I brought with me here to Panama as a back-up to this one. It went through some very hard use and the CD component is completely dead as is the sound card. Except for those two problems it works just fine. I’ll be in the market for a new computer in the not too distant future and if there are no longer any HPs to buy I don’t know what my alternative will be.

My first contact with HP came back in the winter of 1973/74. I was living in Chicago then and was working as a “head hunter” for a firm that specialized in computer geeks. We only dealt with the higher echelon of these geeks: systems analysts, department heads, that sort of creature. No programmers. It wasn’t essential to the job I held to actually know anything about computers, simply the buzz words associated with them.

Now, this was back in the days when computers were monster machines. They took up whole floors of huge buildings and ate up in a day more electricity than Niagara Falls could produce in a month. They gave off so much heat that the spaces they occupied had to be kept so cold that you could store sides of beef alongside them and technicians in white lab coats were like religious acolytes scurrying around with huge reels of tape needed for the machines to do their calculations.

One day I made a call to an HP geek whose name I’d gotten from another geek. After getting his CV out of the way I asked him what he was working on at the present time.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s an exciting new project to make ‘mini-computers.”

“Mini-computers? What the hell is a mini-computer?” I asked.

“It’s a computer that people will have on their desks.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, not at all. We’re working on a project where everyone will someday have their own computer sitting on their desk.”

“Yeah, sure thing, loser,” I thought to myself. “Good luck with that. Let me know how it works out for ya.” And I quickly wrapped up the phone interview because there was absolutely no possibility of putting this whacko in another job.

My how times have changed.

This doesn’t relate to the story above but it made me laugh out loud when I saw it:

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August 20, 2011 · 8:55 am

Surrender

Let me say in my defense that I am not a complete Luddite. I have had a computer for over 15 years but it took me a while to overcome the technophobia attached with such a purchase. At the time I was living on a small sailboat so a desk-top model was out of the question and the price of a notebook back then was simply out of the question. Not only was it a question of space and money but it centered around what I wanted to do with the equipment. All I wanted to do then was to write about the previous five years in France, sailing across the Atlantic and my single-handed, nine-month trip to Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, and I couldn’t justify the expense of a notebook computer to do that and to play a few games when I got bored.

One day when I was at one of the big box stores looking at the notebooks I came across a Brother notebook word processor. Perfect. It would do what I wanted and it was about a fifth of the cost of a “real” notebook computer. It also had a version of the Tetris game which I became really, really good at. But the machine was also very, very, I mean molasses slow. I believe it probably used an old 286 chip and you had to store whatever you’d written onto a floppy disk. Remember those? It wasn’t one of the big floppies but the ones with the plastic shell. As my stories got longer it took forever for the machine to work its way to the end so I could continue writing.

In 1994 the Pentium chip was introduced to the market and I boldly entered the computer age. But my Luddite gene did influence my purchase. My first notebook had a 486 processor, not a Pentium. Naturally the prices were slashed on the 486 hardware and I also figured it was probably better to have the last of the old technology than it was to have the first of the new that didn’t have all the kinks worked out of it. I was very happy with that piece of equipment. It had MS Word on it and when I wanted to get to the end of a piece I was working on it went there instantly instead of taking two or three minutes, literally, for the old word processor to work its way to the last word in a story.

I am not technophobic, but you’re not going to find me camping out all night waiting to be one of the first to buy a new iPad or anything like that. I don’t have a “smart” phone. The one I have is a “dumb” phone. It does one thing. It makes phone calls. Period.

Now, I love to read. Have since I was a kid. I mean when I took the standardized tests in school I had the reading level of a college freshman before I even hit junior high. But when Amazon came out with the Kindle and Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook I didn’t run right out and buy one. No, I like “dead tree” books. No way did I need or was I going to buy one of those electronic doo hickies.

But I moved to Panama. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find books in English here? There’s a terrific used book store in Dolega called the Bookmark and they fill a very big niche. But over the years of living on boats I’ve developed an aversion to collecting books. They’re big and bulky and a real pain in the old wazoo when you move from one place to another.

But still I avoided the temptation to buy an electronic reader even though I wrote and published a book that is only available in electronic form. I got my reading material in a couple of ways that bow to modern technology. I subscribed to Audible.com and download wonderful books to my iPod. Yes, I’ve had one of those for quite a few years and it’s loaded down with over 3,000 songs. I “read” 40 hour-long books when I would take my dog Penny for her afternoon walks and I listened to books when I was living in Boqueron and didn’t have a television. Listening to audio books takes me back to the days of my early childhood when I’d sit on my maternal grandfather’s lap and we’d listen to the evening news with H. V. “There’s gooood news tonight” Kaltenborn, Jack Benny, Amos and Andy et al on the big console radio in the living room together.

I’d also discovered Project Gutenberg with over 36,000 free public domain ebooks. I’d download the ones I wanted, copy them and paste them into a Word document and save that into a special folder in My Documents to be read at my leisure.

When it was announced that Amazon had come out with an app you could download for free that simulated their Kindle for your PC or Mac, I did it instantly. The only problem with this solution is that it’s not easy to read a book outside in a hammock. The glare on the notebook’s screen makes it nearly impossible to read. Besides that the computer is heavy, it gets damned hot sitting on your stomach or in your lap and the battery life is quite limited.

Slowly I developed the urge to actually get a Kindle or my own. Trying to get one delivered down here isn’t easy. First of all there is no home mail delivery and I don’t have a mailbox at the post office. Also there are no real addresses. For example, on the water bill the address for the house in Boqueron is listed as “The two-story house near the health clinic.” Personally, I think that’s priceless. I mean no company in the States is going to deliver something to The two-story house near the health clinic, Boqueron, Republica de Panama.

There is a gringo couple I know who live in the third house up the mountain from me. They’re in the States right now but will be returning in October. I thought that I’d buy a Kindle, have it delivered to them in Montana and have them bring it to me. Since they could declare it as their own personal property it would circumvent having to pay import duties on it. So, I’d only have to wait another couple of months or so and I could have my own Kindle and be able to lay out in the hammock and read on a lazy, rainy afternoon. That’s like every afternoon, folks, since we’re now deep into the rainy season here.

Then I saw a post on the Yahoo “Gringos in David” group from someone who said they were coming to Boquete and did anyone here need anything brought down from the States. A Kindle is quite small and light and wouldn’t take up much luggage space so I immediately got in touch with Al and we made arrangements for him to bring down a Kindle for me. We got together this past Thursday and voila as they say in Antibes, here it is along with the holder I bought to protect it:

I’ve used it in the hammock and it’s great. Yesterday I spent a lot of time riding buses. I went from home to Bugaba to buy some cigars from the factory there and then from there to Boquete to pick up the charger for the Kindle since Al forgot it when he came to Potrerillos to give me the unit. Then I had to ride the bus back down from Boquete to Dolega in order to get the bus back to Potrerillos. In all I was on the road for nearly eight hours and while I ususally listen to an audio book while riding on the buses I read my Kindle instead. On the ride from David to Bugaba a young guy sat next to me who was fascinated with the Kindle. He’d never even heard of such a thing. So, it’s turned out to be a way of meeting people, too. Turns out the young man is a border patrol agent. He showed me his I.D. I guess if I ever have any problems trying to get into or out of Costa Rica I’ll have someone I can appeal to. Who knows?

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Filed under digital books, digital publishing, e-publishing, ebook, Living Abroad, Retirement Abroad

August 11, 2011 · 4:27 pm