When she returned to the phone, she asked,”Are you the Joe who wrote the book about the store?”

“Yup, that’s me,” I said.

“Wow!” she replied. “I’m so thrilled — we’re all so psyched and proud of you! It’s so great to see someone put out a real book!”

“Um, thanks,” I said. I gave her the customer’s name, and she said that she’d put the book on hold.

“But tell me,” she said, “is your store swarming with way more cranky people than you usually get on a Monday?”

“Yeah, we are. The news brings out these people, I’m told.”

“Have you heard anything solid?” she asked.

“Nope, just rumors from customers. I’m tempted to stop answering the phone with ‘home of the in-stock guarantee’ and switch to ‘where we don’t know what’s going on either.’”

She laughed. “Well, good luck with the Death Eaters,” she said. “And congrats, again, on the book.”

What word we had gotten wasn’t good, but wasn’t solid. Our chain had gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy months ago, and had set Tuesday as the deadline for auctioning off the stores. Things had looked hopeful for an equity firm to buy us and keep at lest part of the chain running, but the latest word was that everything was going to fall apart, and that we would be sold to a group of liquidators. Rumors abounded of possible white knights, such as another chain, coming in at the last minute. But nobody knew anything at all for sure.

The store was, indeed, quite busy for a Monday. A good deal of the phone calls consisted of people asking us if we were still open (we were) and by how much everything was marked down (it wasn’t). People whom we had never seen before swarmed in to use their old gift cards and to look for books that they suddenly had to have. Many tried to finagle discounts, but nothing unusual was available.

The store looked like hell. We had been in the midst of several shifts of product around the store, all of which had been put on hold. Many of the people who came in had chains of loud, scruffy children who reveled in pulling books of shelves and throwing them forcibly to the ground. Apparent grown-ups who seemed to believe that their mommies would pick up after them left piles of random books and magazines everywhere, frequently with half-empty cups of coffee balanced precariously on top of the files or at the edges of nearby narrow bookshelves.

It didn’t help that the power to the store (and, I later learned, the whole region) was flickering in and out. I had to recover several aborted transactions after the cash registers lost power in processing them. Apparently, in the current beastly heat and humidity (tolerable by, say, Houston standards, but considered outrageous here), everyone was using their air conditioners at once, and the power stations were having hissy fits.

When I left the store at 4 PM, things were still crazy and undefined.

I walked across the street to Legacy Village, thinking that I would ask both the AT&T store and the Apple Store about some problems with my iPhone. When I got there, I found that several stores had shut down completely due to the power outages. The AT&T store was up and running, but couldn’t answer my questions. At the Apple Store, the Point of Sale and security systems had failed, so their always-chipper workers were standing outside, answering questions but unable to do any transactions.

The heat was particularly bugging me since I’d returned from San Francisco, home of the chilly summer, a few days ago. There, the temperature stayed in the 50s and 60s (Fahrenheit: the city is enlightened, but not yet metric), with a fine mist over most neighborhoods. Here, we’ve been hovering in the humid 90s, and seem destined to stay there for a long time — perhaps until things abruptly start freezing over again.

The people in San Francisco were as warm as the weather was chilly. My book release presentation for 19th Nervous Breakdown went extremely well. As several people noted, it resembled the finale of Lost. My former coworkers and customers from my old store (now closed), who had shared experiences over many years, came together in one evening for a moment of catharsis and reconciliation. My stories and reminiscences garnered laughs and some intense silences. My publisher noted, upon watching the video, that it seemed more like a class reunion than a conventional author event. Still, it was, I think, the right presentation for the occasion.

I thought back on this as I sat at a smoothie bar (blessedly air-conditioned, with chilly drinks) killing time waiting for my bus. But my mind kept being dragged back to wondering what was happening to the store. So for the dozenth (is that a word?) time or so, I pointed my phone at Twitter and scanned for the store name.

And starting a few minutes before, I saw a barrage of tweets announcing that we were liquidating. I’d seen this before, and never believed them until I followed the links.

But this time the links were there, and pointed to the Wall Street Journal, which has, in the course, of this, been right just about all the time.

This is it. We’re liquidating. We were to have an auction on Tuesday, but no one other than the liquidators submitted bids. So we’re skipping the auction and submitting the fait accompli to the judge on Thursday.

Liquidation sales will start at some stores as soon as this Friday. We don’t yet know for sure when ours will. The stores will all be closed by the end of September. Again, I don’t know when ours will.

I called back to the store and told our Sales Manager, who hadn’t heard. I figured that it was better that he get the news, and a pointer to the article, than from a customer. I also sent a text message to our General Manager, who was off today. Then I proceeded to wander around (home, then out again and home again) and write this, trying to let the news sink in.

This is a dramatic moment, and things are inevitably going to get more dramatic and crazier.

I intend to blog a lot during this process, hoping to document what happens in the trenches as the weasels rip our flesh.

I also will need to consider what to do next with my career, though there may be a lag as the shock sets in and then fades. I do know that I desperately want to return to San Francisco, though I have no idea how this might be possible.

Stay tuned.

As I did on the way here, I have to transfer at Pittsburgh. The flight has been delayed for at least an hour due to lousy weather here and rotten weather there. If we’re going to be on the same kind of plane heading back that we were coming in, I don’t mind their being careful: the flight was relatively full with 39 passengers, some of whom had to move from the front of the plane to the back to balance it. It was like flying in a tin can with wings. (I can just hear some senator going off on the airline industry: “It’s just a bunch of tubes!”)

And I’ve had to unplug and walk halfway down the hall several times to check the status of my flight, since there are no monitors within view and the announcements are a bare murmur. Hmm… looks like we’ll have another half hour relaxation time now…

More later, I hope… but this crosslegged blogging is annoying my back. I look forward to some gentle, relaxing turbulence…

Later: well, it’s about 6:30 here. They’ve given up on trying to route me through Pittsburgh. I’m now scheduled for a flight that stops in Las Vegas on its way to San Francisco. It was scheduled to leave at about 8:30, but is now scheduled at 10:30. Had I known about this sooner, I could have hopped an Amtrak to NYC, wandered about, maybe gotten together with folks, and been back in plenty of time for the flight. But the time would be too tight now. Grr.

And the US Airways terminal is devoid of anything interesting, contrasting greatly with the Continental terminal in Newark where I’ve been before. There’s a coffee stand, a bar with burgers, a magazine shop, and that’s about it. The other terminal had a Borders Express, a wide-ranging food court, and other stuff to make for better time-killing.

I’m hoping that I actually get back to San Francisco before the BART stops running. *sigh*

I’m using the Rosegarden sequencer to compose the piece. I know how it works (pretty much). It effectively plays back what I write, and it generates beautiful printed scores, for both the conductor and the players.

Rosegarden only works under Linux, which means that I really should keep my laptop booted into Linux rather than Windows while cramming on this project. Fortunately, I found a very good article at the Linux Journal site that showed me how to be able to get at my mail and Firefox bookmarks from either Linux or Windows on the same box.

In trying to get there, however, I hit the usual bunch of obstacles that set me back a week. I first had troubles on the Windows side, then ran into trouble clearing space out for things (having not only lots of large MP3s but half-gigabyte downloaded episodes of Battlestar Galactica makes defragmenting difficult).

Once I got that done, I went over to the Linux side and upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu — which completely killed my graphical interface, meaning that I only had a command line. With the help of some folks on the Freenode #ubuntu IRC channel, I was able to conquer that, discovering that the problem stemmed from an easily removed smudge on the installation DVD.

The one killer app for Windows that isn’t available yet on Linux is any recent release of iTunes that will handle video. So I’ve have to pop over to Windows to sync my iPod with new podcasts and to download new episodes of Galactica when they resume this Sunday. But that shouldn’t be too big of a deal.
So here I am, working relatively happily in Linux on the laptop.

Composing this is going to be a mad dash. Agreeing to have it ready in time to perform it on April 1 is insane, but I had some good reasons to do it (some perhaps to be revealed here later).

I’ve worked out the timings of the text, so I can tell where the bar lines fall. The reading will be freer than the playing, but it will still have to be in sync with the orchestra, and I may not have much of a chance to rehearse with them. (I’m using Robert Ashley’s scores as a model.)

The melodic material is derived from the song “Go Down Moses“, with repeating phrases from it running alongside and against each other and contrasting material. I’m keeping in mind that it will have to be easy for this community orchestra to rehearse and play, and not so repetitive that the players get lost. This means having frequent obvious points where things very clearly sync up and shift.

For example, early in the piece there’s a twelve-bar section where a measure-long phrase taken from “Go Down Moses” (roughly the four-notes corresponding to “Israel was in” in the first line — an eighth note and a dotted quarter on one pitch followed by a dotted quarter and an eighth a half-step down, in parallel with another voice a minor third below) repeats against what turns out to be a slow twelve-tone row in the cellos and basses. The most dissonant point is at the end, where the voice for the first time says “MOSES.” Everything stops for a few beats and restarts. (This stuff is much harder to describe in words than to notate.) The effect should be of increasing tension.

(And nobody may notice that it’s a twelve-tone row, and it isn’t being used rigorously. It just struck me that using all twelve notes as I went along was a good way of organizing things. The row may or may not turn up again. You can unbutton your collars now.)

Now that I’m able to get started with the actual notation, I’ll be starting by notating the vocal part. Since I’m not assigning pitches to the speaking voice, it will probably make sense to use a single line of percussion notation to track it.

But I should probably get to bed sometime, so I can be awake at some point tomorrow. Come to think of it, I may not get to do much, since I’m planning to catch the movie Absolute Wilson at 2 PM (the only time in its one-week run that will fit my crazy schedule), have a rehearsal in the evening for next Wednesday’s concert, and may try to squeeze in the late show of Pan’s Labyrinth at the same theater afterward. Then, I’ll do my rounds and work on the composing some. I’ll probably also cram on it on Thursday, then fit it in around my work week, rehearsing, and performing from Friday on.

I don’t know if this means that I need to get a life or that I have too much of one. If I ever slow down, I’ve have to schedule a time to figure that out.

Ron’s comment explained what I needed to do to get things working.

It turns out that I didn’t need a pre-existing passcode at either end–the passcode can be anything, as long as it is the same at both ends. Once I got that happening, I was able to transfer pictures from the phone to the PC, clearing out the old pictures from the phone.

This was important because I need to do some shooting with the phone over the next couple of days. As I’d mentioned (I think), I’m doing a quick book of my old blog posts about the church where I have my secondary job and the neighborhood we are in. Chelsey will be doing the photography for the book, and had asked me for a sense of what I’d like her to shoot for it. Since I’m kind of aural and verbal in my communications and she’s mostly visual, my attempts to describe locations haven’t come over well. So I’ll be going around the exterior of the church and taking snapshots of places that I would like to see pictured. Chelsey’s already done some photography inside the sanctuary, so she has an idea of the place, but these will help us capturing the views outside.

I’ve finished an alpha version of the book (in the “beta test” sense, not the “alpha male” sense) and one person will be giving it an edit. But if others would like to take a look and comment, let me know and I’ll let you know where you can download it in PDF or LaTeX formats. I hope to get the thing completed and off to the printer by the end of the month or so, so I may be moving faster than humanly possible on it.

My renewed activity in blogging has come about partially due to the work on the book. I did a new prologue and epilogue for it, but can tell that my writing had become rusty. msmas has been nudging me to blog daily, and so I’m trying to do so. I’m hoping to not go on a tear of verbosity like before, so we’ll see what happens. I also have ideas queued up to write for days on which nothing interesting happens.

And now to try to upload a picture to WordPress, which an FAQ suggests is easier than what I had done before. If you hear howls of rage from over here in the next few minutes, it will be me falling into another chasm between documentation and functionality…

Well, nope, looks like that’s broken too. It turns out that they’ve snuck in an upgrade to WordPress, which has now gone to version 2.0. I’m running something from the dark ages of a couple of months ago, so it no longer corresponds to the documentation. And I’m loath to try to upgrade, since that looks like a complex procedure that, with my current track record of causing software to break, seems to have a high probability of destroying things entirely.
I’m trying to upload images the old way, through FTP, but that’s not doing the right stuff. I’ve tried several different tools, including uploading the images to my Linux box and sending them from there. I usually (though not always) can connect to my site, log in, and move among directories, but any attempt to send a file or even get a directory listing, each of which uses an FTP PORT command, tells me “425 Unable to build data connection: Connection timed out.” I was able to do these things earlier tonight, but the FTP gods seem to be on a coffee break. Or something.

I think I’ve hacked around the problem, though not as I’d wanted, and with a smaller thumbnail of the photo at the beginning of the post than I’d intended. But if you click on it, it should show the larger image. Or not. Whichever it does, I’m going to bed.

I just got a Bluetooth USB dongle for my laptop, so I can send photos to it from my phone more easily. Setting up Bluetooth on both the phone and the laptop seem quite easy–until I get to the point where each is asking for some sort of passcode.

From the documentation of both the phone and the laptop Bluetooth software (each of which seems to have been written from the assumption that the user already understands everything that it might try to explain), this seems quite simple. All I have to do is enter into each device the passcode that I had already somehow entered into the other one first. And each blissfully directs me to the documentation for the other to find out what that is.

I have, as usual, no frakkin’ clue whatsoever what they are assuming that I know how to do.

So right now, I’m stuck in a classic deadly embrace, with a phone and a computer that are each saying “After you, sir,” to the other.

It’s a Nokia 6102i phone and a Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter 2.0 under Windows XP. Is there a way to get this crap to work, or do I have to wait to reincarnate so that, like just about everyone under 40 seems to be, I will be born knowing how all these cryptic toys work?

By the way, it’s incredibly maddening that there are two different standards for numeric keypads out there. The one for my phone has “1 2 3″ on the top row, while computer keypads have “7 8 9″ there. Since I often remember PINs and passcodes more by the muscle memory of how I type them than by what they are written out, it makes entering the same passcode on the computer and the phone quite difficult. I suspect that this is an accident of history, from when people were designing adding machines and telephones without a thought of interoperability (though didn’t telephone keypads happen long after adding machines were around?).

I suspect that that’s just one of those things that almost nobody notices or cares about. But I find that it makes switching gears from using the keypads on, for example, the telephones to the cash registers at work (as well as, of course, the brain-dead design of this Bluetooth setup) really maddening.

Following yesterday’s post about WordPress deciding on its own to start ignoring its configuration, a reader helpfully suggested a tool called WordPress Tune-up. I googled for the tool, found it, and went to the site.

Unfortunately, getting the tool to work is proving impossible so far. The first problem was getting at the code in the first place. The instructions on the site didn’t correspond, in a way that I could understand, at least, to how it was actually put together (though after only a couple ofl decades as a tech writer, maybe I’m too much of a newbie to get what the writer meant).

Getting toward the code meant finding a Download button hidden on another page. That page is encrusted with frames (one of the great historical disasters of early Web design, now mostly forgotten as a bad idea). Those frames led not to the code, but to a page that sent the code.

While I was finally able to get the code to my home machine, the Web server isn’t running on it, but on another machine off at the Web hosting site (wherever in physical space that may be). The obvious thing was to log on to that site and use the curl program which would grab the code from the website that provided it. That didn’t work, since, due to the hideous crap (frames, redirections, programs that complicate what a simple page of code should do) between the request and the code, what I got was irrelevant HTML.

I then wiped out the contents of the file on my server that had the right name but contained the useless crap, went to the code site, cut and pasted the code into the file (using the vi editor), and saved it.

Following the instructions, I then activated it as a WordPress plugin. Doing so, however, generated several lines of PHP error messages, rather than a useful result.

I then looked at the code itself, and discovered that it apparently was a front-end to something else entirely, which redirected something somewhere to somehow do something else. In other words, yet another layer of crap between me and getting things done.

And when I tried to save this post when I finished the first draft, I discovered that any attempt to do anything on the sire resulted in that same damned page of errors. I then logged back into my site and renamed the plugin file to something harmless, which is something less experienced users might not have known, or known how, to do.

So that’s where it stands now. I have no idea what the hell is wrong, and I’ve wasted over an hour doing something that is advertised as being simple. Perhaps the author of the plugin is doing something laudable, and perhaps the wizards of WordPress were doing something supposedly smart in doing whatever screwed up the blog formatting. But the benefits are proving hard for this user to see. And I’m in little mood to deal with the arrogant posturing that is so common when one asks for tech support in the open-source world.

Grr.

I’ve been getting messages for the past few days about the new format of this blog. Since I hadn’t looked at the blog in several days, I wasn’t sure what people meant. When I went to the page, I found, to my dismay, that the formatting that I had carefully created was gone. The large, very readable serif font was gone, replaced by the current tiny sans serif font, and the margins were wrong. (If you look at the pages with full posts, you’ll see my picture overlapping and obscuring several character from the left end of the paragraph next to it.)

The maddening thing is that I haven’t changed anything–I hadn’t even logged on to the site at the point that it changed. Something has changed out from under me. I don’t know if it’s the WordPress software or the template that I use, but I hadn’t touched either of them. And it’s not a browser or platform issue: I’ve checked it under Windows and Linux, and in Firefox and Opera, and it’s all broken the same way. I don’t think the hosting company could have changed anything that affected this, since I installed WordPress from scratch on my site, specifically so I could modify things to a more readable form.

So it looks like I’m going to have to spend some time in the next few days digging through configuration files and trying to see if I can fix things.

Things like this threaten to unleash my inner luddite. I have a fairly regular routine (is that redundant?) of things that I do in the morning (well, relative morning, between when I wake up and when I head to work), all of which should be quite automatic. But delays keep introducing themselves, by an email program either deciding to upgrade itself rather than immediately give me my messages, by the program completely tossing its cookies and forcing me to delete its index files before I can read my mail, or, even more frequently, by iTunes having grabbed unexpectedly large podcasts overnight and forcing me to move stuff around so it will fit on my iPod. (And, no, having iTunes decide what it wants to put on my iPod rather than letting me choose isn’t an option, since I use the iPod for work and most of my listening, and would hate to discover that it didn’t have something I needed.)

So here I am, about to rush off to work, and having spent too much time trying to figure out what tasks my software has imposed on me (and taking about fifteen minutes to write this post). I have other stuff I gotta do, but that’s going to have to wait until tonight, if I I’m awake enough, or the next few days.

Remember that someone once said that insanity consists of expecting different results to identical processes? In the days of current software, insanity consists of the delusion that you have enough control over all the variables in your life that you can expect anything to go according to plan.

Grr.

I’m putting it together using the LaTeX document preparation system, which is wonderful in almost all ways, especially for a command line and markup language geek like me. However, as an otherwise unrelated poem goes, when it is bad, it is horrid.

The problem I’m hitting has to do with paragraph formatting. LaTeX does great work with spacing, hyphenation, and the like, making beautiful paragraphs when it can. However, when it hits stuff that it can’t handle, it just leaves words sticking way the hell out into the margins. This just won’t work.

I’ve dug through various documentation and FAQs. Some present a few tweaks that don’t help much, then suggest that you rewrite the paragraph. That’s not a good enough solution, and in some circumstances other than this (such as when one might be including a paragraph from an existing text, or republishing a historical text) wouldn’t be acceptable.

So I need a way to tell LaTex “Do the best you can with this, even if it isn’t perfect, but don’t stick stuff in the margins”?

Does anyone here (John? Ron? Claudia? Shosh? Brad?) have any insights?

Thanks for any enlightenment…

Update: It turns out that LaTeX has several commands to deal with this, such as \sloppy, \sloppypar, and \tolerance, as documented here. I’ll play with them to see what they do. Though simply knowing that they exist and work in the few small tests that I’ve done make me more confident in moving ahead with the first edit and not worrying too much about the formatting until later.

It’s been a process that’s taken over twenty years, counting from the conversation that I had with him that sparked the book, as we sat in a plaza in Tel Aviv in the summer of 1986. While the first draft of the book was complete about ten years later, a wide variety of delays had led it to only being published now.

The official publication date was November 7, the one-year anniversary (according to the Jewish calendar) of my father’s passing. I had let the family know, but held off on a public announcement until I had received a copy of the finished book from the printers. (Fortunately, my father got to see and hold a proof copy in his last days, though he was too tired to look at it for long.)

It’s a spy novel, concerning a coalition of American, Russian, and Israeli agents working together to combat a complex web of nuclear terrorists. It’s a good read, if eccentric in its worldview. But (to paraphrase what my mother said of one of my own books) anyone reading it will get a clear idea of who he was.

We’ve put out the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The entire text can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive, where they promise to keep it available forever.

You can also purchase printed copies from Lulu.com. All proceeds, such as they are, will be donated to a Holocaust archive (as yet undetermined, but probably Yad Vashem).

On a tech/business/whatever note: it doesn’t have an ISBN number, and won’t be available in stores. Lulu.com has an unfortunate limitation (apparently imposed by someone upstream from them and out of their control) that books getting wider distribution and getting ISBNs may only come from PDF files created by Adobe Acrobat. We created this book in Adobe Framemaker, and I unfortunately have an old version (and couldn’t afford an upgrade) that generates buggy PDF files. To get the file into a format that Lulu would accept, I had to process it further using outside, open-source tools. Ironically, the very last stage of the production (done by my niece after I complained about it in a blog post) was done in Acrobat — but by this time, everyone had agreed to do it without the ISBN.

(Bill Bowman has pointed out in a blog comment today that he has successfully published his book via Lulu, ISBN and all. It looks intriguing, and I hope to read it. But I’m also guessing that it will have a much larger audience that we might expect for Troika.)

This project has been somewhat of an albatross for all concerned, and I regret that it’s taken so long. But it’s out now. Take a look — you might enjoy it. And the thought of people reading and enjoying his writing was my father’s dream.

Update: John Cowan asks in a comment about typos and punctuation errors in the book. At this point, I think I’ll consider the text to be immutable. We (my father, another editor, and I) spent much of the past decade shooting down typos and restraining his tendency to put commas after just, about, every, word. I think we’ll, at the very least, take an extended break before thinking about Troika 2.0.

As it is, I’ve found a problem with the text version up on the Internet Archive. When Framemaker exported the supposed ASCII of the book, it used those @#$%^)(* “smart quotes”, which turn into question marks when viewed in Firefox and were shown as octal codes when I looked at it late last night in Emacs. I’m not clear if (or how) one can submit an updated version of a text to the Internet Archive. And the process of getting the file from my version of Framemaker to a usable PDF was insane (figuring it out was one of the things that slowed the project by several months), and I’m loath to try it again.

Maybe I should open a Bugzilla project on the text, so we can collect typos and punctuation errors for a second edition.

(And now, having followed a stream of consciousness in pursuit of a gag that I ended up not using in this post, I’m off to Wikipedia to fix a glitch in their mention of John Cage in their entry about Finnegans Wake. )

My mailing list posts haven’t shown up yet, but there’s probably quite a backlog.

By the way, I heard about this on one of my favorite podcasts, Slashdot Review, which is now one of my main sources of information about tech stuff.