I have recently published ‘Desert Creek’, a post-apocalytic western novella by Jeff Lassen. Published through my imprint, StreetWise Publications and printed by and available online from Lulu.com, ‘Desert Creek’ is a great read and just one of many works by Jeff Lassen I have the rights to. Earlier this year I published his poetry anthology, ‘This Poor Collection’ and that was a great learning experience for me as an editor and publisher in the making.

I have to admit I find the publishing business very interesting and I am very much aware it is a business. At this stage I don’t think I will be making much money for either the author or my imprint but it is all a learning curve or journey one must take.

I am preparing my PhD application and during my reading, I discovered the award of a PhD by Publication. I applied the criteria listed and believe I could apply using the body of my work published both electronically and in print. This would include my several titles covering Philippines related topics as well as the web site content and free download guides, all of which do advance the body of knowledge on this topic.

Why do I want to be a PhD? Apart from the vocational opportunities, it would be something I could point to when telling my five kids how important an education is to your future and how lifelong learning is more than just a catch phrase. It would also add credibility to my work and give potential customers confidence they were not buying rubbish as all publications must be peer blind reviewed.

I have been aiming at a PhD by artefact and exegesis, but that means creating something new like a novel or play. I already have an oeuvre (body of work) to draw from, so why not make use of it? Additionally, I see it as another tick in the credibility box for all eWriters and online content writers. Our output is just as valid and real as those who are published in print on pieces of processed tree. It would be uber cool to be academically leading the way to some extent for all eWriters.

Steve Jobs, the Big Guy at Apple, is upset with me. In the space of a few weeks I have returned his iPad and Mac Speech Dictate. I realize the latter software isn’t an Apple product as such but it does seem to have a lot of problems working on the mac compared to its Windows cousin. I tried my best to train the program but it simply got worse!

Some of the gobbeldegook it came out with was hilarious but the amount of time required to edit the text meant it took longer, far longer, than if I just typed it in by hand from the start. Three hundred bucks wasted but fortunately they refunded my money, thank you Apple.

As for the iPad, what a disappointment. The thing kept dropping out when online and then it would switch off and we couldn’t get it to switch back on again. Even when fully charged, it refused to switch on for days and then it would just come back to life. Another $629 refund was sought and received but not before I had transferred all my iTunes to the iPad and learned you can’t transfer them back to your Mac! Well you can, by emailing them as attachments but it wouldn’t let me write in the email text area or attach any files!

I guess you can get ahead of yourself when it comes to gee whizz technology. I have ordered an  iPod Touch for my eldest daughter for her 12th birthday. Hopefully that has the bugs ironed out by now and works as intended. Meanwhile I am back with my Kindle as my latest toy.  It doesn’t do all the things the iPad does (when it  does them) but what it does, let you read eBooks, it does well. Maybe there is a lesson there for all of us?

I bought the MacSpeech Dictate program today. had a few frustrating moments getting the microphone sorted and then training the program to my voice but the trial read went well. I have a couple of printed manuals I want to publish as eBooks and as paperbacks and re-typing every word is too time consuming. However I can read a heck of a lot of pages in an hour and just one hour a day will see the manuals in edit ready format in a week or two.

The program has a lot of trouble with some words, eg Corral System Arnis (a Filipino martial art) becomes ‘paralyses and loneliness’. There are ways to spell out foreign words and so on but I haven’t got there yet. I know some people hate the program as much as others rave about it. I think it is all about training yourself and the computer to work together.  In time I will even dictate these blog entries but it will be some time away. Creative writing is harder as you can pause and think and edit on the run when you type. When you speak the words you tend to pauses and um and arr a bit and so on. Practise will fix that as I well know. Back in the mid-eighties I used to dictate my investigation reports when I was a private investigator. We had a woman in the office who would use the Wang word processor and write up the reports as she listened to our tapes.  I soon learned to say my punctuation as I composed COMMA which isn’t as hard as it might seem FULL STOP

As for productivity, I think I can produce three times as much writing once I get competent with the program. So the $300 investment will hopefully pay for itself in no time at all!

The other week I took the two eldest girls to the Apple Camp at the Apple Store where they learned how to make an iMovie and then edit it. All great fun and they scored a nice Apple t-shirt out of the two day free event. I bought OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard to upgrade my iMac and an iPad. It was a mistake. The iPad. I was very disappointed because as cool as it was on the video and in the flesh, it just didn’t perform. I had to upgrade my iMac to Snow Leopard to set up the iPad so it was a good thing I had bought it as nobody had told me this would be necessary.

I had to set up iTunes and do a few other things I wasn’t told about and everything is predicated on the fact you can get online to set the iPad up via your Mac. No idea if it can be done off a PC. If you are not online then the thing is worthless as it requires Wi-Fi in the home to operate. You can buy a more expensive model I believe that can pick up Wi-Fi elsewhere like 3G but don;t quote me on that. Suffice for us it was ok as we do have Wi-Fi Broadband in the home.

So I downloaded all our music and photos, bought some games apps and Pages (the Mac writing software like Word) for iPad and thought we were going to have a great addition to the family. I even bought a leather cover from ALDI for ten bucks compared to the five times that amount others wanted.  But the iPad simply didn’t live up to the hype. It failed to allow access to all the web sites we wanted to visit, including G rated ones my girls play games on. It wouldn’t let me write a reply to any emails I received in my Yahoo email account. I could type in the return address and subject but no text!

Then it refused to turn on. At first the reset using the hold down the Home and On keys simultaneously worked but soon even that stopped having any effect. I couldn’t remove my music or photos unless I was to email each file and as I mentioned, it wouldn’t let me ‘attach’ files or do anything but type in the address and subject! Then it stopped letting me in no matter what I did and we knew it was fully charged just moments before it had shut down because the battery indicator said so. After just a few days we had all had enough and today I took it back to the retail outlet and received a refund. I wonder if I can get a refund on the Apps I bought? Maybe a credit against future purchases? I can’t be bothered trying to chase them down!

Sorry Steve (Jobs – Apple CEO) but your iPad didn’t live up to the hype and hope we had for it.  I think it is ahead of its time and not quite fully worked out. A case of getting ahead of yourself perhaps? I’ll get the eldest an iPod Touch for Christmas but we won’t waste time or money on an iPad ever again.

I crashed the iMac the other day. Silly me gave the wife the OK to pull the plug out of the back without shutting it down properly and the end result is we lost everything we didn’t have backed up or online. I learned a lot about Macs during the two and a half hours I spen t on the phone to Apple, as well as the trip to the nearest Apple Store and my session with the ‘Genius’. Of course they push the company line which was data recovery would set me back thousands and probably not work and I would need a new hard drive and fitted, that was $500. In the end I ignored them and simply reformatted the drive off the boot disk and accepted my loss. I also learned that the HD is not a special Mac one costing hundreds but one I could replace for a hundred or so! Even the tricky operation of getting it swapped over was doable by oneself… if you dared to. YouTube have lots of instructional video clips covering the process, some better than others.

I did buy an external 320GB HD for $179 and now run the Time Machine backup system that comes with OSX10.6 Snow Leopard. Sometimes I enter the Time Machine just to go WOW! at the cool graphics. So ok, I lost some stuff I can never replace but that won’t happen again. I finally learned my lesson. I also love Yahoo for keeping copies of all the files I sent as attachments since the last time I backed up onto a flash stick. Plus, I keep a lot of business stuff online in the Files of my Yahoo Groups. I use them for more than just social networking but also as a kind of free ‘MobileMe’ or Cloud. They are secure and reliable and just another layer in my new, multi-layered data protection system.