Cubeland released!

Cubeland is out! Mark makes the journey from the lavish marble offices of Banker's Hall to the neo-plastic cube farm in the Scotia building. Adjusting to the cubicle and a life without walls is not the only challenge awaiting our young software developer: No monitors for you!

The Nth Reorg

I think this story is one of the most engaging so far and is definitely the most "transitional." I remember at school learning about how in Homer's The Odyssey the "descent into hell" is a technique successfully employed by many good authors.  (I particularly like Poe's story A Cask of Amontillado in this regard.)  This story is definitely an escalator trip down... nothing like going to a meeting to discover you don't do what you did anymore.

Please snag the story from Amazon, Google, or Indigo and let me know what you think! If you like it, post a review on where you got it, and if you really like it, head on over to GoodReads.com and like or review it. Thanks in advance.

Downturn and Play Nice published!

It took a little bit but "Play Nice Now" is edited and enhanced to be "Downturn" and "Play Nice." Both are published on the usual three eReaders. When I get to episode 10, I will publish the chunk of five on iTunes. The next episode, "The Nth Reorg" is almost done. Might be the most exciting yet. (Thanks for your support! Spread the word.)

Amazon's Author Central

I've added myself to Author Central (a profile of sorts.) Click here to see.

Trying GoodReads!

Hi folks! I'm trying to see if goodreads can increase my reader base! Please help out by visiting and rating the stories! Click to visit GoodReads.com

Vote on a cover!

Wow.  All I can say is wow.  There are some very talented artists around the globe.  I put out a call on Fiverr for a cover given a concept illustration and some themes for the story.  I had about 40 responses.  I narrowed it down to 5, and ended up commissioning three.  Feel free to vote on which is your favorite.

Cover #1

Cover #2

Cover #3

What is your favourite cover?

Old T-Shirts

I recently retired a beloved T-shirt from the mid-90s.  You know the type - so comfortable its like a second skin.  It was swag from a storage company; I had helped test some disk drivers and so got some swag - it was an "internal" project shirt (likely not for public consumption.) It brought back a few memories, including a few years ago when I was in line at a supermarket... the lady behind me at the checkout was staring at me and I wasn't sure why.  I smiled and got no smile in response.  As the line was long enough for me to start feeling "uncomfortable", I turned around and asked "Excuse me, is there a problem?"  She didn't answer me.  It took me a few moments to realize that she was horrified by my T-shirt...  here are the pictures.

But how will I warm my soup?

Replacing a monitor a few years back; the client had a huge 17" CRT.  The thing weighed about 60 lbs and could likely survive a nuclear blast.  Heck, it was probably irradiated itself and it was giving off tons of heat.  It was about 22" long and pretty much a big crate. I was replacing it with a newer flat-screen monitor, also 17", nice, slim, and cool.  The client at first was "Oh this is great, I have so much more room on my desk," but after a few moments, she said (surprised) "Wait!  You can't take my monitor."  "Why?" I asked puzzled.  "Because the new one doesn't have anywhere to warm my soup."

Starting with an idea

This is a draft posting of a possible cover page design.  To be updated.

"Leo the Cat" fan page is no more.

In the world of head scratching (cat pun), the "Leo the Cat" fan page is no more. I have a few reasons for this, but I apologise if you came here looking for pictures of himself.

Play Nice Now (draft)

The podcast/audio of the draft of Play Nice Now is up. Now, I get to split the story into two parts!

Happy Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day

Arrr matey!  Keep a weather eye open for these bilge-rats!

Play Nice Now

The latest episode is in edit. "Play Nice Now" sees a downturn in the energy economy and some interesting organizational changes for Mark. I had a lot of fun writing this one because it's based on eight life events.

On Bondolo's urging, I added a "Buy Now" button in an obvious spot. I hope I get some conversions. I am glad blogspot has a generic HTML widget that let me cut and paste some CSS/ Javascript/ HTML. Getting the button image served up through blogspot was a bit of a kludge. I hope it doesn't break.

I uploaded the last two stories to Kobo, so they're now available. (I have no Kobo sales to date.)

Here is a snippet from the draft (that will find its way onto Reddit - I got gilded today - I am not sure what that is but I was happy.)

Mark calls a meeting of his development team. Todd starts with his complaint...

“I would like to mention that my part, the transaction subsystem, was working when I checked it in two weeks ago – but when I got the notice that the data validation tests were failing I updated my repository only to find out that Kenneth had gone in and rewritten parts of my code, and it is those changes that are failing. Mark, would you please ask Kenneth why he would be in the transaction code when his current task is reporting and printing?”

Kenneth piped up before I could be diplomatic.

“In an agile project every developer can modify the code base,” Kenneth said.

“This isn’t an Agile project, Kenneth,” Todd said emphatically. “Why are you touching my code?”

“Don’t be such a baby. Agile is the best way we can do this project,” Kenneth replied.

“Baby?! It took me a month to write that code and you arbitrarily go and change it? Even if we we’re following Agile, that we are not, you should have run the test cases to prove your changes didn’t fundamentally change the functionality! Agile is test driven development! You didn’t run the tests, and you didn’t bother to go back fix the god damn tests.”

“Agile is iterative and adaptive through cross functional teams,” Kenneth said even louder. “Your code was breaking my build so I fixed it.”

“You bloody well rewrote it!” Todd yelled.

“I had to fix my build and your code was broken,” Kenneth snarled.

“That’s because you didn’t do a full update from version control, Kenneth,” Todd fired back. “The code went through a full build and test. All you had to do was refresh-all and run the tests.”

“I shouldn’t have to waste my time on that,” Kenneth said even louder.

“Oh my god you are such an asshole!” Todd yelled. “Just because you talk louder and more often than anyone else doesn’t mean that you are right!”

“What do you even know about programming? My dog is a better programmer than you,” Kenneth shouted.

It was at that point that Todd stood up, grabbed his chair, and threw it across the table in Kenneth’s direction. Kenneth jumped up, but the chair slid by him, off the table, and into the wall taking out a fine chunk of alabaster.

Stop Confusing Me With The Facts

I need to add something about email to the story line... Folks that don't read it. Folks that response without reading it. Folks that receive hundreds of email a day and spend all of their time reading it. Executives that delegate the reading of it to their secretaries. Folks that send too many emails and/or put in too much information. (I am guilty!) A previous boss suggested I add the [must read] tag to email subject if I wanted him to read it. I asked, "Why would I send you email if I didn't want you to read it?" He was unimpressed. Another complained that I sent too many emails or that they were too detailed and I needed to limit their content to one sentence. Another line boss, after telling me in person I could talk to him about anything and skip my supervisor, subsequently told my supervisor that all communication from me needs to come through said supervisor (after one message.) Yes, there is dark humor in email.

Legacy Published

Legacy is now published and I'm working on a podcast of it next (mp3.)  Fun.

*** updated ***

Podcasts are cool; just an XML header pointing at an image (cover) and MP3 audio file.

*** updated ***

Until I get the XML wrapper done, I've uploaded Legacy audio to two places:

• octavianit.com/legacy.mp3 (sometimes flaky)
• SoundCloud

Legacy Revisited

I have some positive responses to the draft, but also some negative ones.  The beginning is "way too technical" and "not related to the story."  I agree, to a point.  I was trying to bring some enlightening verbiage and set Mark up as proud of his work.  But I gather too much tech will turn off non-technical readers.  In re-reading this, it is a bit soap-boxy, and the more I read it the more I dislike it.  So here is the old beginning...

We missed Dean in the meetings.  His cutting wit had a way of getting to the heart of issues. He had moved on to be an IT Solutions Architect at a competitor. Dean only had a six month programming course from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, but he did have a good grasp of how software fit together and was knowledgeable about tech du jour.

IT Architects are supposed to plan, design, and oversee the implementation of technology in a company, but unlike real architects that make buildings, there is no requirement for license for safety purposes.  Though there are bodies that do offer some accreditation, like most disciplines in IT that grant certificates, there isn’t much validity to any of them.  I felt no need to certify in anything IT-flavored after getting my degree.  The paper didn’t make me an expert, my passion did and you could see it in my craft. People get accredited to get jobs.  This doesn’t always mean they have experience or can do the job - that is usually the point of getting a certificate.

Snip!  As for the rest of the techy speak in the story, I am not sure what to change yet.

Mission: iBooks

It is done.  It isn't painful, but it isn't trivial either.  I was unable to publish the stories individually - I could have fought with iBooks Author to try and get it to like my format - but ultimately I gave up and used its format.  You have a choice of writing a chapter book or a text book.  So I took the five published stories and made a short chapter book.  The import from Word per chapter was easy enough.  It even kept additional formatting (the list and font in Smackdown.)  But I could not use my stock book cover that I have on Play or Kindle.  There probably is a way but it was not obvious - I didn't see any over "default" covers so it is possible.  There are some quirks in the text edit for titles - it doesn't provide a mechanism to insert a newline, and if you split it, it looses the multi-line information when it gets pumped into iTunes Producer.  It was funky again when picking the device to publish to: one choice - iMac. One unfortunate thing about the BISAC codes - you can only pick one subject. iTunes Producer was trivial to use - but the publishing region is funky - if you select "world" it will not add it as a region (bad HCI Apple?  No interaction feedback? No!?) So, to select all regions, you have to select all regions!  The previewing tool was decent but the tab chapter view wasn't obvious (use the left and right arrow keys, don't click.)  It looks like it was designed for gestures.  Anyway, I'm going to splurge and see how it really looks on my iPad.

My brief summary: if you are starting from scratch iBooks Author is a cool studio.  But if you are just importing existing books, its not great.

Legacy

First draft of Legacy is done.  In this episode Mark finds out that perception is everything.

Here is a snippet I posted to Reddit (Click here to up-vote.)

....

GASMAN was originally written by a fellow named Dmitri Isayev.  I never met Dmitri but I had heard about him through our client Bob in Gas Marketing.  Bob, the group lead, spoke glowingly about Dmitri and according to him Dmitri was the smartest IT guy around.  He had a PhD in mathematics and was brilliant.  He understood every requirement Bob gave him in the three years Dmitri wrote GASMAN, including some of the complex calculations (that I never got to see how complex they actually were.) I had the feeling Dmitri could walk on water. Dmitri had left Banana almost a year before I got there to go work in IT finance in Toronto.  Alan inherited Dmitri’s legacy and everything was going well, at least Alan never heard from Bob or any of the other traders.

 It waited for my shift before Bob called with an unusual dilemma.  Dmitri had implemented a brilliant, granular security on the transactions.  Only certain individuals or roles were allowed to certain data within a transaction and Dmitri had implemented this mathematically inspired security infrastructure.  Bob complained that one of the junior traders was seeing information he shouldn’t of so I set about trying to figure out why.  I anticipated my call to Alan would be unproductive.  It worked per specification according to him. So I jumped into the code with my handy-dandy debugger tool.  I found the security module.  I put in my break points and watch variables.  To my surprise, the program whizzed on by without triggering them.

My first thought was that I hadn’t done something right in configuring my debugger so I fiddled a bit with no change. Then I looked closer look at the code through my integrated development environment.  I tried to discover where the security code was called.  I found it was never called from anywhere.  I did a deeper dive only to discover that a lot of it was never fully implemented, and what was implemented would never work.   There were recursive calls and other strange instruments. For all intents and purposes there was no data security in GASMAN.

I tried to find out if GASMAN was ever code reviewed.  No one knew, and there were no documents to artifact that anyone aside from Dmitri looked at it.  It didn’t even seem to have user acceptance testing or client sign off.  When I asked Anne what I should do, she told me to talk to Bob.  I scheduled a meeting.

“Hey Bob, I wanted to talk to you about the security issue in GASMAN,” I said.  Bob was a portly fellow and outwardly quite jovial.

“You found it?” he said somewhat excited.

“Well, yes.  The security portion of GASMAN was never completed,” I replied.

“Sure it was.  I saw it working,” Bob replied. “Dmitri showed me the test cases.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.  Maybe it had worked at some point but Dmitri forgot to check in the code under version control?  “I went through the code Bob and traced it.  There really is no security code.”

“That’s simply not possible,” Bob said with apparent frustration. “You must be wrong.”

“Trust me Bob,” I said, “I spent a lot of time going over it and it looks like it was never completed.  It’s not called by any other part of GASMAN.”

“Dmitri wouldn’t do that,” Bob stated flatly. “I saw it working.  I want someone else to look at it.”

I was stunned into silence for a moment but then I just blurted out, “Listen Bob, believe what you like, but why don’t you try it yourself?  Any user can see anything, and it’s not a bug.  If Dmitri did have it working, he didn’t leave the code behind, and it’s not what is running in production.”

“I will,” Bob said gnashing his teeth.  Our meeting was over.

The next day I arrived to see a meeting request in my inbox from Anne concerning GASMAN.  When I met her in her office she told me that Bob had complained about my unprofessional demeanor: Why don’t I like Dmitri? Why would I lie about Dmitri? I recalled and recited my meeting with Bob in great detail.

“So you see - one way or another - it doesn’t work, and it looks like it never worked.  It’s dead code,” I said. “I don’t know how else I could have explained it to Bob.”

“I know, I trust you,” Anne said.  “The client really holds Dmitri in high regard.  To make things easier, and reduce the heat a little, I’m going to assign this to Kenneth.”

You are going to pour gasoline on a freaking fire? I thought.  The guy has no people skills whatsoever. “That’s fine with me,” I said.  I didn’t know I could feel so relieved and pissed off at the same time.

....

Back-Story
The GASMAN story line happened to me when I was working for a financial systems company.  I was hired to come in and finish a complex role based data security feature that was left in an unknown state.  The developer before me had spent two years on the problem, and I was told to get it working, but not change it substantially.  Sure enough as I started to analyze the code I found recursive sections and major chunks that would not/could not work.  It all became moot when I started to trace back to who actually called the code - only to discover it was never called anywhere.  There were tests that didn't test the functionality, but management believed because tests existed, it must actually work.

I blended this into another experience where I had to maintain an application by a developer who was very popular with the client.  The client was resentful that the developer was off-boarded during a reorg and didn't want to give me a chance to provide service.  This problem will be explored in a future story - where you build personal relationships with clients that get obliterated by lack of organizational change management and impact assessment.

The SNUPEA story line happened to me several times in my career.  Rewriting a large chunk of code or an entire, working application - just to understand it - when you could just ask the right people the right questions or read the documentation (when it exists of course) - is just mind boggling.  I had one fellow rebuild something in six months that I built in one - not that I'm saying I did it quicker - but it is a total waste of time and effort to rebuild working, tested code or fix things that aren't broken.  These mistakes usually get caught if you have periodic peer review or effective project/program management.  This theme will reappear in later stories... around the "I just replaced a whole thwack of working code that I didn't understand why it was there with some OpenSource libraries that were totally busted and subsequently derailed the project 6 weeks."

Prima Donna

First draft of Prima Donna is done.  In this episode we see how easy it is to make very public mistakes with technology and how none of us are immune!

*** updated ***

Here is what I posted to reddit.  (Click here to up-vote.)

Hey folks; I'm writing a bunch of short stories based on my experiences over 25 years in IT.  Here is an excerpt from draft of my latest story...

….

I tried to log in to my email but the server was down.  “Your email working?” I asked Todd.

“It was but a summer student managed to take out the server,” Todd replied.  “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.  I can’t do much on my current project because I need the email servers and the messaging team has locked them all up.”

“Wow, what happened?” I asked.

Todd settled back a bit in his chair to tell the story.  “Well this girl sent a fund raising request to one of the corporate address lists by mistake yesterday.  This address list contained most of the people in the company.  So then everyone started replying to all saying don’t contact me, but they carbon-copied her boss, their boss, and now everyone in the company is cc’ing everyone else saying stop replying-to-all and whatnot.  This poor girl started an exponential, internal, accidental, denial-of-service attack.  The email guys can’t delete the messages fast enough and every time they bring the system back up it reignites like a forest fire in a drought.”

“I saw that and ignored it.  But that’s a great start to a career!” I chuckled.  “Does she still work here?”

“I don’t know, but if I were her, I’d be hiding,” Todd responded.   He paused and had a somewhat serious look on his face.  “We need to coordinate the fair dissemination of Dean’s office supplies.”

….

 “Hey email is back!” Jeff exclaimed.

I was feeling a bit anxious about getting back to work, but I wanted to keep talking with the dudes via messaging.  Banana Corp didn’t approve of instant messaging, so I had an idea to use old-school Microsoft network messaging.  “Hey do you guys know if the desktop messaging service is enabled?”

“By default no,” Todd said, “but it’s not like the desktop guys can get rid of it.  It’s a standard part of Windows.”

“Cool,” I said, “Turn it on and we can send each other messages.”  I got the okay from the dudes and I went back to my office.  To this day why I couldn’t use a phone I do not know.


Later that afternoon I got a message on my computer from Dean.  It was preceded by an annoying beep and a pop-up window.  Message from Computer01435: I just met with Anne and I’m clearing out.  Keep in touch bro.  It had been a while since I used the network message command.  I typed, net send /banana deano “Come to my office before you go.”  Then I heard a chorus of annoying beeps echoing up and down the hall.  Even though I was pretty far from the corner office I heard a burst of laughter.  Oh – my – god, I thought as I quickly walked down the hall.  On the way I noticed a few people sitting at their desks with puzzled looks.

When I got to the corner the dudes were still laughing.  On Todd’s screen I could see a pop-up window that read, Message from Computer01541: deano come to my office before you go.

“Forget a colon?” Jeff asked.

“It’s domain, colon, user – no space,” Todd said.

“I just sent this to everyone in the company, didn’t I?” I asked defeated.

“Yep, you spammed everyone online,” Dean chuckled.  “Let me know how many Deans show up.”

“Todd, you said it was off by default?” I said angrily.

“It’s supposed to be,” Todd said shaking his head.  “I guess the desktop guys changed the default to off recently and it wasn’t a retroactive desktop update.  So it would be more correct to say you sent a message to anyone who wasn’t recently provisioned with a computer.”

….

Smackdown done...

Six major edits and its published.  Toughest yet.  Trying to keep it interesting without getting too technical or distracted.

And the kickstarter ended yesterday.  Thank you to all those that pledged.  I raised about 15% of my goal - and mostly from people I know.  The various $0 marketing campaigns failed.  Not one reader from outside my circle.  But I am optimistic that some day someone I don't know will read my stories...

Stay tuned.  Next one will be really funny!

Smackdown!

Smackdown has finished its third edit.  And it is not done.  Though I am happier with this version over previous versions, my supporting wife tells me there is too much going on and it is still too technical.  She suggested I put more comedic examples in of how Alan is inept, and maybe use it as an opportunity to explain some of the technical jargon.

She also finds the references to the MMORPG not well aligned with the story line.  Chris too thought this was dangling (and wanted more, so that would mean a dedicated story, or more inline references.  Its hard enough to explain what an Epic is let alone a game like EQ or WoW.)  And my editor also had some comments here...  So this aspect of the Mark's character is going away.  Leave that humor to The Guild.  Goodbye to the following verbiage.

... was home in time to attend the Epic Raid my guild-mates had planned for the day.  The game was a classic “Skinner Box.”  A friend had bought me this massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) just after graduation and I was quickly addicted.  Players organized into groups called guilds. Several of the folks in my guild were in the United States military.  They didn’t seem to sleep so there was always someone online to play with or talk to.  Accomplishing things in the game seemed to go better than in real life (IRL).   An Epic Raid is one of those events in the game that literally takes months to jump through all the hoops required, and all of your guild-mates help, to get bits and pieces for super rare weapons and armor that only your character can use.  The game took more time and effort than the job; I was over forty hours a week in game time.

.... In passing conversation I discovered Paul played the game too and had a character far superior to my own.  He’d even completed his epic.

.... Losing myself in my Epic Raid game when I got home was much simpler than what I was doing at work. There was no client to keep happy. The team in-game works because they want to play together to achieve common objectives. And you can never work outside the rules.

Musings

I've been slowly working on "Prima Donna" and realized that I'm actually writing the "Smack Down" episode.  First draft comment was "try avoid being too technical" and that will be a struggle for a few stories.

I'm also avoiding marketing for almost a week.  The whole reddit thing put me off but I need to get back to it.  I checked the readership figure - 9 Kindle, 2 Play, 0 Kobo.  Insanely curious to know if someone I don't know personally reads and/or likes the stories.

Today reading Forbes I saw a quote attributed to Plato, "Those that tell stories rule the world."  I'd love to know what work this was attributed to so I can go figure out the context.

Toodles!


*** UPDATE ***

Apparently Plato never wrote "Storytellers rule society", it is a quote from Clinton summarizing The Republic.  However in Phaedrus there is "There is truth in wine and children" that is true in so many ways and at so many levels.

The Master Plan

Someone asked if I have a plan or order to the stories I'm writing.  Yes.  For the most part it is chronological based on my experience.  But the topics and themes will change.  I've already rolled a couple ideas into one story.  But here is my "second" outline.  I lost the first.  If you see it, let me know.  Possible titles of stories:

• Graduation/First Job (became "The Beginning")
• Smack Down
• The Mexican
• Executives (became "Talking to Executives")
• Prima Donna
• You Must Learn Control (became "Legacy")
• Playing Nicely with Others
• The Nth Reorg
• Project Managers from Hell
• Cube-land
• The Christmas Party
• Hall Monitors
• The Impressive Clergyman
• Switching Teams
• Assassination
• When Dunning Met Kruger
• Shadow IT
• Last Man Standing
• Up, Over and Down
• Transformation
• Start-up 101

There may be others as I dredge up suppressed memories.

Google Books

Publishing to Google Books was painful.  First, the mixture of my managed domains and personal email confused Google to not let me create a publishing account.  I could not figure out what services to turn on in the managed domain to fix it.  So I did get it going via my gmail account.  However, the new vendor registration does not work with Chrome!  Fortunately for me Internet Explorer understood the HTML/Javascript under the hood, and I was able to set up an account.  But Google wants you to fill in a lot of extra information for the book, including the BISAC code (found via the internet.)  I was not able to fill in the Vendor information without saying I was a company with a personal benefactor, at which point it let me enter my ITIN.  There is other weirdness; the currency conversion.

Wow.  About 1.5 hours to figure it all out for one story.  And now I wait to see if it makes the Play store.

I am now starting to worry about accounting.  I take it if I ever make money on this, I will need to tell Revenue Canada, but that is a problem I'd like to have.

Books via Google are PDF.  That's a good thing.  Not sure how DRM works here though.

*** UPDATE ***

Supposedly the first story is now live on Google Books and Play.  However, it does not appear in the search.  That is not helpful.

*** UPDATE ***

Google told me today it can take weeks to appear on the store.  But my new problem is my last two stories are being rejected due to low quality PDF.  PDF output is the same as my first book; publish, high quality, standard font.  Not much information as to what the issue is but Bianca ,the nice lady on the other end, said she would put them through manually.

NOOK nope.

I tried to expand to Barnes and Noble today and NOOK books.  Everything went okay (well mostly okay, it doesn't like docx too much though it says it supports the format) until I went to create a vendor account.  Canada is not an option - so I cannot sell via that platform (yet.)

*** Update ***

NOOK support got back to my question of "When will you support Canadian authors?" with an answer of "We support US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and Belgium.  Check us out often for updates!"  I didn't reply that where and when are not the same kind of question.  I love service organizations that don't answer questions directly.

Talking to Executives

Talking to Executives is now live on Amazon.  This story sees Mark meet the big bosses to share his ideas...  telling the bosses how to do their jobs better is a great idea, right?

Remember it only takes an additional $1 to fund the kickstarter campaign!  And please tell your friends.

Editors and Spelling

My sister-in-law Becky is a professional editor.  She was generous to offer her services to me so I didn't look silly.  This is one of the main points Kindle makes on their KDP website: use a professional editor.

One of the first things Becky pointed out is my title is wrong.  "Memoires" is a spelling mistake.  This escaped me because my copy of Word and its dictionary says its spelled correctly.  But sure enough, unless I'm speaking french (and missing an accent), it is not the Canadian spelling.  I googled "Memoirs" is correct.

So at first I thought "Well, that's fine.  Nobody has caught it yet, and I'm self publishing."  Then I tried to justify using it, maybe making a story out of it (because who hasn't been thrown under the bus by a spell checker or auto-correct.)  Heck even Google misspelt Google from Googol.  Now Google is a word; a verb and a noun!

Finally I gave in.  So I updated by source documents and cover pages and all the other places I had it spelled wrong.  KDP, Kobo, Kickstarter, Blogger, and Facebook were all very forgiving in letting me change the titles and descriptions.

Now let's see if it makes any difference what-so-ever.

More motivation please: Crowd Funding

I was thinking to myself today "Self, what else can I do to motivate?"

I am skeptical of crowd funding but the brain said "What the heck, give it a shot, maybe someone out there wants to pay you to write?"  So you undiscovered angels; spread the word.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/217827251/memoires-of-a-self-loathing-it-professional

Behind "Talking to Executives"

Some backstory for story three.  After trying to set up the context for "Talking to Executives", I've gone a bit too deep into the justification of why - without actually saying much interesting at all.

When I was at university I did the software engineering program.  It was a cool program because it taught me how to organize my work into a bigger picture and then break down the big job into smaller achievable chunks.  It added all sorts of other goodies like appropriate human-computer interface design, testing throughout the development process, and how to write documentation that average people could understand.  I did very well.  Originally I started in the hardware program, microchip design and asynchronous circuits, but after a year I realized there was no way I would ever get a job here in Calgary in this field.  To get our chips made we had to send our designs off to Edmonton, a city five hours drive north of here.

 It’s strange in hindsight changing from something I loved to something that would provide a better career.  I loved building physical things.  When I was in senior high school I won a national science competition building a robot.  I cobbled it together from TTL chips from a local electronics store, some toy car variable speed motors, and some old fashioned keyboard keys for pressure sensors.  The thing would roam about a room until it hit an obstacle and then change course.  The cool thing is that it had a basic memory and logic to remember where it had been to pick a new route to get unblocked.  It could figure its way out of simple mazes.  It never occurred to me to attach a dust-buster and make millions of dollars as a household aid.

But my love of building complicated hardware did translate into software.  It also started to translate into the real world.  Organizations are big complex things with swarms of moving parts.  Software is the end of the journey, not the beginning.  A company needs to figure out its business processes first in order to build functional system requirements.  Though many of my classmates didn’t care about end users, I felt that to build better solutions I needed to have their knowledge.  I couldn’t do that without building relationships.  And I was a specialist in building software, like the client was an expert in their business.  There needed to be some way we could all play nicely together so that I could enable them, b building things they actually wanted.

A well-defined business process leads to a well-defined software solution.   Effectiveness comes from seeing how well the solution maps to the process.  Efficiency comes from how aligned, integrated and streamlined they are.  To get maturity, processes need to be repeatable.  That means you need to have consistent guidance on how to do things, and people need to cooperate to follow the guidance.  Most important; people need to communicate.  And so I was introduced to continuous improvement philosophies and performance excellence. 

It doesn’t matter at all if the environment in which these things exist isn’t nurturing or condusive to success.  Sure as a skyscraper needs blueprints and is built from the bottom up, a ship needs a captain and is led from the top down.

Apple is not so simple...

Publishing to Apple for iBooks is not so easy.  You need to mail in a GST form to Apple that they file to say its okay to collect on your behalf.  Then you need to go and buy a Mac (if you don't have one already) to run two "free" software called "iBook Publisher" and "iTunes Producer."  The first lets you make an iBook format book.  The second lets you package it for iTunes.  At least this is what I've read on the surface.  I intend to borrow a Mac to try this out.  It is unfortunate I can't just upload a cover page and content.  But then, Apple still uses WebObjects for all their stuff.  Wow.  That attempt at a stateful web technology really should have died ten years ago.

Kobo is good too!

Kobo.  I saw Kobo eReaders in Chapters.  Apparently they own a healthy portion of the market in Canada.  Signing up for self publishing was easier than Kindle (that was really easy.)  Kobo calls the service "Writing Life."  The royalties are better than Amazon for small amounts (45% compared to 30% for Amazon.)

The document to eBook import isn't as snazzy as Kindle.  It ignored spacing formats from my source word document (so I need to go back and add white space.)  The web javascript editor seems totally broken (under Chrome.)  Also, the cover creator isn't as nice.  I went through my picture library to find something interesting and added a title with photoshop.  Guess what the picture is of?  My first fax machine - that exploded when my cat (whom loved to sit on the warm printer beside the fax) coughed up a hairball on said fax machine.  Neat huh?

Click here to download the Kobo version of "The Beginning."

Amazing Kindle Direct Publishing

This was very easy to set up.  I published in an hour.  It helped that the IRS had already been kind enough to grant me an ITIN (when I signed up to sell apps on the Windows store.)

Click me to see "The Beginning" - the first story on Amazon.

Or click me to see "The Mexican" - the second story (also on Amazon.)

The cover page creator from Amazon is very nice, but I wonder about the (C) on the images.  I am too lazy to make a picture but I really liked this one.  Unfortunately I won't use this cover on other services...  CMA.

As of today, I've sold 2 copies of story one, and 1 copy of story 2.  I'm beating expectations!

Linking via Twitter and Google+ has generated no interest, well, I got a few followers of 16yr old girls wanting to be aspiring singer/actresses.

Memoirs of a Self-Loathing IT Professional goes on-line!

Here we go!  I've been threatening my friends for years, supported and inspired by them, to write down all the insanity we've experienced together for the last 25 years.  And its longer too, as some of them go back with me to the Apple ][+ days.

This is an experiment.  I want to see if the short story is truly dead.  I want to see if people would pay $1 for a short story.  I want to see how many of my friends that promised to pay me $1 for a story actually do.  Self publishing is awesome.   But does it work?  I will post my experiences on it here too, and answer any questions anyone might have.

But I often tell myself "Writing a book is one things, but what good is it if no one reads it?"  Well, its therapy.  Really.  I have 25 years of poison to get out of my system.  And who knows - I might actually touch a few people (in a positive, figurative way.)

Thanks for joining me on the journey!