Physical book will probably be through Amazon at CreateSpace, which will be fine. I think that will take another week or so to get completely together. So, that’s the whole publishing thing. Honestly? If I’d had my act more together I would have had this done six months ago. Ah well.

And I don’t even like Dylan that much. But, that’s one of his better songs. It’s hard to accomplish things - and somehow it’s hard to do so when you get older. I mean, it’s Memorial Day, I worked for three hours after being in a car for nearly four, made dinner, did some other work, and now it’s ten o’clock and I’m wondering if it’s possible to do more stuff. Well, it’s possible, but…I probably actually won’t.

This is what we call a Navel Gazing Nothing Blog Post, and I suppose I could point out that stereotypes, when broken, are kinda fun. I was sitting by the pool yesterday at the Inn at Paso Robles, and my friend was chatting away with a big, burly, goateed guy. He (my friend) mentioned that the bearded fellow and his wife were just coming off of an 80 mile ride. I assumed, based on the guy’s looks, that they (he and his wife) had been doing a motorcycle rally thing.

Nope - they were doing a metric century on bicycles, and had gotten a bit lost. 80 miles on bikes on a 92 degree day. I felt a bit guilty, especially when we started talking about the relative merits of several different farm-to-table restaurants in Paso.

But they looked like bikers. I swear.

And then…Smash Words. They do it all, and the files are, as far as I can tell, mine to keep. That’s kind of cool. So, on Monday, when everyone in the world is doing barbecues, I’m going to be formatting text to the directions in their handy style guide. I’m excited - another two weeks or so and I’ll be e-publishing!

Well, in order to get a set of text to the point where it fits in the dimensions (5.25″ x 9″) of a standard trade paperback, you have to take it out of its normal, Word-ey dimensions.

Word formats text into 8.5″ by 11″, with margins of one inch and 0.75 inches. Books require different margins, and are most likely mirrored. that means that the margins of pages that face each other are the same - the right margin of the left page is the same as the left margin of the right page. And, you have to change the paragraphs. Word ordinarily indents at 0.5″, which is far too much for text that’s fitting into the 3.75″ or so you get with a trade. So you have to reset your margins.

The joy of this? Since Word is infested with Azazel-like demons, you have to go through manually and reset the margins on every paragraph. If you publish with a Big Important Publisher, they have (assume) small industrious people who do this for you. Since I’m going to be doing the DIY Punk Rock Publishing Thing, I do it myself. And so, when I am finished with what I am working on here (oddly, more document formatting), that’s what I’ll be doing.

I think he’s right about a lot about this city (the public transportation is a snarled disaster, and the city certainly could be cleaner), but I think he’s going to be severely disappointed in Portland. The money quote for me, was this: “There is, I’ve found, precious little to do here, particularly if you’re not inclined towards sports or the outdoors.”

I scratched my head at that - what is he doing? Looking at the post again, it seems as if his entire social circle is through the work/tech/geek scene, a scene that I am only tangentially aware of, even though I’m a fairly geek-fluent. Portland is a smaller city with a much more active sports/outdoors scene, especially given the weather. Finding someone in Portland who’s not a rock climber/mountain biker/through hiker/Ultimate player would be, I think, something of an exercise. And in that city, there is no geek/tech/wonk scene beyond what it would be in any other American small city.

And another point: “As above, it’s easy to meet people through work or a common interest, but harder to meet random friendly strangers.” I’ve never been anywhere as a non-foreign traveler where that was easy. You make friends by doing thins with people who have common interests - I play Ultimate and went to grad school and ran some fun events for a while. Then I met their friends, and I could probably call on thirty people to help me move, should I so ask. I hate to say it, but it sounds like he didn’t try that hard to meet people outside of the tech scene. I could be wrong, but that’s the way it sounds in the piece.

Now, I love Portland. It’s an awesome place, and if I didn’t have roots here, I would probably have ended up there at some point. Al3x’s perspective is interesting, and I can’t disagree with his conclusion: “. I feel like I’ve given San Francisco a fair go of it, but found in the end that it’s just not for me.” I don’t think that Portland’s going to work for him, either, but I hope he finds happiness.

Sad, spare, just like the song.

By the time I got here, the rain was gone, and now it’s sunny, bright, and cool; is there any way to explain that other than that the world didn’t want me to ride my bike to the office today?

The greater meta-question is…is this still a blog if I only write it once per month - my average over the past few months? I think so, and I still have the Big Writing Project to promote (hint - you can get a sneak preview with absolutely no design or anything here. Words and pictures to come for this soonish