I’m in remission, Life List and moving forward

So I’ve just been told that I am in remission:) My first question was, what does that mean? I always thought it meant something like being cancer free, but my oncologist said that once you have cancer, you are never cancer free.

So what does it mean for me? For now, no more drugs and tests for 3 months (that’s the second lot of 3 months now) and that in itself is a big relief. I’m still getting my head around it.

I don’t want to write about my cancer as such other than a brief update and perhaps to help others on a similar journey. My fatigue is way better than it was and I am able to stay awake longer than I was, almost normal, although I still nod off if I am in an easy chair, but I am no longer fighting to stay awake at 6:30 PM, (every night) or playing Candy Crush to force myself to stay awake.

I do still tire easily, especially on long work days or trips, but it is getting easier.

I am still not producing cortisol, which is really interesting when you are on a rollercoaster that suddenly races off at a great rate of knots and everyone around you screaming and you’re thinking “hmm this is entertaining”. Or lying upside down in an ocean kayak, in a current thinking “This is interesting, I suppose I should pull the ripcord on my sprayskirt and get out so I can breath”. But I am aware of where I am at and much more cautious when it comes to driving if I am tired, or not looking at my mobile while I walk on the footpath and especially crossing the street with so many red light runners (3 just yesterday as I was going to buy some sushi for lunch).

I meditate every night using the Headspace app, which has been very helpful, especially with sleep and the way I respond to situations. I’ve been doing a lot of work on my values and what is important to me, which leads me to my Life List.

I am listening to The Hidden Why podcast, by Leigh Martinuzzi frequently (amongst many others), which I recommend, he’s pretty good for an Aussie (sorry mate) and a prolific poster and traveller on the topic of Why, which is pretty much the key to everything, right?

Recently he interviewed Danny Dover who wrote The Minimalist Mindset, which I am currently reading. I got it for a minimalist cost on Amazon for Kindle, but I’m tempted to buy a hardcopy as well, because it is the sort of book you want to read with a real highlighter and Post-It Flags, rather than virtual ones, because they are easier to use. In fact I might buy a few copies to give away to friends.

So I’ve had a Bucket List which I revisited since I was told those three words ‘YOU HAVE CANCER’ and some of the things I wrote about were things I wanted to have, like a National resonator steel guitar, which really doesn’t matter to me, and a Corvette, which does.

But what Danny did to help himself out of severe depression was create a Life List of 150 things he wanted to complete within a 10 year period and they are values focused and I was inspired to do that. So I officially started that list today and am part way through reading his book.

I’ll blog about the Life List separately because it will be part of my process and I hope it will help other people to focus on what matters to you rather than ‘stuff’ to have or own. I’m also going to work on it with my wife, although there will be things that matter to us and things that matter just to me, so there will be overlap.

It’s a shame that it takes something like having cancer to wake us up to put more effort into life, not that I haven’t put a lot of effort in, but there are many things I could have done better, and many different paths I may have chosen. The important thing is my focus on a future based on my values and I am very clear on what they are. So today on 8 August 2017, I am starting my 150 item Life List of things I want to complete by 7 August 2027.

I have started item 1 and if you want to know what it is, watch this space. It’s pretty cool IMHO.

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Auckland Kindle Buyers at Dick Smith Beware if You Want to Read Library Books

I have a Kindle, the latest model WiFi 4GB which I bought from Amazon, cheaper than I could buy it locally, which sort of goes to the story I posted this morning about retailers who struggle to cope with change in the way people buy products, i.e. competing with online sales. My wife and I both have iPads, but for reading on long trips or after a day on the computer, I really like the Paperwhite because it isn’t back-lit, so doesn’t cause eye strain.

I am also a happy customer of Auckland Libraries, mostly downloading audio books which I listen to while driving or doing chores like mowing the lawn.

My wife decided after seeing myself and one of our children getting great value from our Kindles, that she would like one too. With the Auckland libraries also having an excellent collection of digital eBooks, I thought this would be a great opportunity for us to get real value, so I went to Dick Smith Electronics in downtown Auckland to see if it was worth buying locally.

Just inside the door is a Point of Sale unit with a Kindle Paperwhite, same model I own and an old model original Kindle Fire (which I understand was superseded quite a long time ago). I looked at the feature display sheet and it says that Kindles including the Paperwhite will allow you to read public library books. Now that isn’t strictly wrong because I know someone who reads them, but they are from Australian libraries. I wanted to confirm whether I could download eBooks from the Auckland libraries onto a Paperwhite. The salesman couldn’t tell me, he was going to check for me, but couldn’t confirm anything and ended up with another client while I went on my iPad to look it up. I asked him to check it out for me. Obviously it was confusing because their POS clearly said I could read library books. When he couldn’t give me an answer, I asked who could. He said that the merchandisers were the people who dealt with the POS so I asked if I could talk to them. That wasn’t possible, so I asked who the distributor was that they worked for. He said they are actually Dick Smith Electronics staff!

Here’s what I found on the Auckland Libraries website. So, given that I wanted to buy a Kindle for my wife, I asked the sales person, when he eventually returned to me to let me see a Kindle Fire to find out whether it would be better on the eye that the iPad, because I didn’t want to buy the Paperwhite at $179 if it couldn’t download the library eBooks.

The sales person said he was sorry, but he couldn’t show me a Kindle Fire because they didn’t have one out of the box; and he couldn’t open a new one because then it wouldn’t be new. I told him in that case he had lost a sale because I wasn’t going to buy one if I couldn’t try it out and see if it was fit for purpose. It’s hard to be a customer at Dick Smith Electronics. I left the store without a purchase. I tweeted that they had lost a sale.

In hindsight I could have bought one because under the Sale of Goods Act, if it wasn’t fit for the purpose I had described to the sales person, I could have brought it back for a full refund. He could have even suggested that, but he didn’t. I also live about 12km from the store and it would be a real hassle if I had to take it back. I hate to think what the customer service level would be for a return after that experience. So my wife still doesn’t have a Kindle.

I subsequently got a Twitter message from Dick Smith Customer Service saying that someone would give me a ring within 2 working days. As you can see, that was just over 2 weeks ago. I haven’t had a call or a message (in case I missed one) since.

So I’m probably going to buy another Paper-white Kindle from Amazon for US119 rather than NZ$179 or $199 depending on where you look, locally from Dick Smith and accept that we can’t download library books. We can buy books on one Kindle and share them with the other and Amazon also have subscription services which are pretty cool. I guess ultimately Dick Smith isn’t local anyway, they are Australian owned, I think, well listed anyway.

My real concern is, if you live in Auckland and you bought a Kindle Paperwhite because you read the POS which says you can read library books, you will find yourself disappointed. I have pointed it out to Dick Smith via Twitter, and the photo above saying you can, was taken in their store in downtown Auckland yesterday, so their in-store marketing hasn’t changed since I first brought it too their attention more than 2 weeks ago.

I did eventually talk to a librarian who confirmed that you cannot download and read library books from any Auckland libraries on a Kindle Paperwhite. It appears the reason you can ‘on some Kindle Fire’s’ is in fact because they are Android Tablets.

So what do you think. Does it help clarify why I sometimes buy things offshore instead of in local stores? Sometimes it’s actually easier.

Authors Complain About Amazon Kindle Unlimited Service

Authors are complaining that the new ‘all you can eat’ service that people can subscribe to for $9.99 a month, gaining access to over 700,000 books on your Kindle device or app according to this article in the NY Times.

I think the article is very thorough and recommend it if you are interested in ePublishing, an author or just interested in changing business models.

I’m a Kindle author myself and have also written White Papers and articles about eBooks for many years. I therefore have an interest except that I am more interested in people benefiting from my knowledge than making money out of it. My most recent book is about the use of Location Based Services in Buying a House.

There are a lot of changes in the way people are writing and publishing. Some people are churning out series of books, targeting a youth audience around SciFi, Zombies and Vampires and doing formula writing. They put a lot of energy into the first book, which is often given away for free, finishing like a TV series with a cliff hanger at the end. If you liked the story, you will possibly pay for ongoing series.

Kindle also offers the ability to make offers like Countdown Deals where you can run promotional deals. I’m running one for a week on the above book starting on 30 December when you can buy it for only $0.99, it then goes up by a dollar a day back to full price on the 6th of January 2015. You might like to grab a copy for yourself or someone you know who is thinking about buying a house in the near future. It could save them hundreds of thousands of dollars or a lot of grief.

Anyway, the reason for this blog was to get people thinking about how they market their books and themselves and how they make money. The article compared the royalties from the Kindle all you can eat service to music services like Spotify (which I also subscribe to) and the fact that the songwriters and artists get minute royalties from these services. I doubt that authors get much from libraries either. I didn’t. I listen to eBooks from my local library whenever I’m in the car alone, many are best sellers and I enjoy them for free.

Smart bands and gigging artists today use any tools they can to get their music heard, whether its downloads, radio, streaming, services like Spotify, iTunes, CD’s or whatever method so that their music gets heard. They build up a fan base. The real money comes from selling merchandise and from live performances. Look at the money even old bands like the Eagles or the Rolling Stones can make from concerts. It’s BIG money!

There are some smart writers like Scott Sigler who exemplify how this is done. He is on every social media you can think of. He does book signings, you can order autographed copies of books. He has merch including shirts, hats, artwork in an online shop. He offers his books for free in episodes as podcasts and hopes that if you enjoy them, you will buy the audio book so that you don’t have to wait a week for the next episode. He goes to conventions, networks and engages with his readers. Despite giving away product, he is a New York Times best seller. He understands that he is competing on a world market and it is not just a matter of write it and they will buy.

The article implies that writers think they can just write and sit back and watch the money roll in, give up their day jobs and if they don’t get rich, its someone else’s fault. The reality is that the business is tough and always has been, but today making good money through self publishing is possible if you are prepared to do the hard yards, but you need to innovate.

It certainly helps to be a consistently good writer and to provide the form that your audience wants to read. But even a great writer still needs to market themselves and recognise that their fans are individual people. Stephen King is another great example. He totally understands that he is writing to his ‘Dear Reader’ and constantly reinvents the way he publishes his books. He also does merchandise, if you liked his latest novel Revival, you can go to his merch store and buy a I Climbed Skytop T-Shirt. He even has an online forum on his site. He even runs competitions from his site (I wasn’t impressed that it was for US residents only though, that was pretty stingy). The point being, he is one of the great big sellers of the last 20 years, but he works as hard above the line as he does on his writing. It’s a case of the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Having just written all this, I’ve just convinced myself that the $9.99 is great value and I’m probably going to sign up once I’ve read all the Kindle books I have already bought. I paid US$15 for Revival so that’s a month and a half’s subscription on its own. Oh and don’t worry Stephen, I will buy a hardcover for my collection as well, because despite being an eBook evangelist from way back (Fictionwise on my Palm Pilot), I also collect books of particular authors that I like. I’ve given over half of my books away, but still have around 2,000 in my music room.

So if you are an author, wanting to make a living from your craft, my suggestion is to allow as much time for marketing as you do for actual writing. If you don’t know what to do, ask someone, ask everyone, look at what people like Scott Sigler and Stephen King do. Don’t just copy them though, think of other ways you can sell your books. Look at creative things that bands do. There are so many cool things you can do, I can think of dozens of merch ideas that people would buy.

Don’t complain. Do something.

209 years from now, what will be in the history books about today?

Today is the anniversary of the opening of the 1st US auto manufacturer Duryea Motor Wagon Company back in 1895.

I wonder what someone is doing today that will be in the history books in 209 years.Of course there won’t be ‘books’ as we know them other than perhaps in museums.Just like kids today ask what those black vinyl things are in the sleeves on shelves or in boxes.

Sometimes we just take things for granted all our lives and suddenly they seem to be meaningless. I took a pile of books over to a family member yesterday, one of her favorite authors and whilst she likes the author “I only read on my Kindle now. I can lie back on the bed, even in the dark and it’s just so convenient.”

I can’t imagine we’ll have cell phones in 200 years. Of course we’ll communicate, but how will it take place? I struggle to imagine. It could be a watch, or glasses, but I doubt it. Perhaps an ear-ring or something fashionable. It probably won’t be an implant for security and other reasons, but I doubt if we saw what they use, they we would recognize what it was. Imagine showing an iPhone to a family a hundred years ago.

The Near Future in Mobile and Location

When I got my first in a series of Palm’s (I still have most of them including the Handspring Flossmaster) people looked at my as if I was a geek. OK maybe I was, but I was only doing what many or most of you are doing now, mobile computing. OK, the dental floss dispenser was a bit of a gimmick, but a very cool one and it was actually done as a promotion, not as a serious concept.

Handspring Flossmaster

So back in the 90’s I was reading eBooks from Fictionwise and other sites which are amazingly still there even though Palm and Handspring are long gone. Fictionwise was already there before Amazon was launched and several years before the Kindle existed. I used to use my PDA during dead moments in-between appointments, while exercising etc. I had apps for Africa, work outs, diaries, games, even mobile email at 9.6kbps on my Ericsson mobile with its expensive Bluetooth dongle.

I helped introduce the first Symbol Palms in New Zealand with bar code readers and whilst they are now running a different OS they are fundamentally being used for the things I suggested such as warehouse inventory management, field sales automation, ticket management at events and so on.

Then my devices got audio and became phones, so I could listen to music, podcasts and started publishing my own podcasts and getting my songs on other people’s shows through to the last few years when my Smartphones got GPS. During that time we went from PDA’s that could also function as phones through to now where our mobiles are powerful computers that are as ubiquitous as I said they would become.

So here are a few thoughts on what is coming next, things that you dear reader are likely to take for granted within the next few years.

As a consequence of your use of check in functionality on your mobile using Facebook, Foursquare, Google+ or whatever software you chose, details about your interests, your friends and family and your activities will be profiled along with most of the people you know. You will get notifications based on where you are and your interests, on your mobile offering you relevant deals as well as a load of spam that will have you wondering whether you should disconnect alltogether, but you won’t.

Your mobile will be your multi-modal navigation device, not just while driving or keeping the cabbie honest, but walking, running, hiking, boating, shopping, providing navigation on the road and even inside buildings such as shopping malls, hospitals and university campuses. You will be able to see where your friends and family are and you will be offered deals based on mutual interests and be able to buy them and pay for them on your mobile.

You won’t have to carry loyalty cards any more. They will be maintained on your mobile which will give you the option of looking for deals, comparing prices and getting directions to the nearest retailer with whom you are a loyalty member. You will also have the option of having your mobile notify you of deals based on its prediction of your needs. For example on a Saturday morning when it sees you are buying garden tools at the DIY, it may offer you a promotion at the nearby garden centre which is uniquely created for you.

You will have a personalized newspaper on your mobile which carries both stories and advertising offers of specific interest to you. You will be surprised at first at how relevant they are. You won’t have to search for stories any more and you won’t be pushed information you are not interested in. You will only buy newspapers on rare occassions and within a few years printed newspapers won’t be available any more.

Music is an interesting one and the way you enjoy it will change dramatically in the near future. Within 24 months music CD’s will be out of production and you will either subscribe to a music service with a monthly subscription or possibly it will be offered as part of a mobile offer from your telecommunications provider. The question at the moment is whether the major music provider will be Apple, Nokia,  Vodafone or a service such as Spotify.

For those who want to really get into their artists, you will be able to download apps. Several years ago I wrote a piece for NetGuide, which they declined to publish. I said that CD’s would die because the record companies were not providing any added value. I suggested that they add music videos, interviews, digital photos, background stories, lyrics etc to the media. It wouldn’t have cost them anything because it was all material that they already had access to. Anyway, long story short, guess what is already available to an iPhone, Android or other device near you? All of those things. Bands and their management are using off the shelf tools to put all of these things onto mobile devices including gig calendars, social media and the ability to purchase event tickets and merchandise from within the applications. They will also allow you to communicate with other fans from within the applications and future functionality will include the ability to remix tracks and record your own cover versions to share with other fans. Competitions and special offers will also be included.

In future when you go to a concert you will be able to hold your mobile up towards the stage using facial recognition to identify the performers using augmented reality and take tagged photos showing the names of the artists and of course the location the photos or videos were taken. Of course the facial recognition will also identify your friends and associates for posting and sharing on your favorite social media pages.

I could write a book on this stuff, but I thought it was time I shared a few things with you before they start happening and you take them for granted. I like being able to say “I told you so”.

In finishing I note that Apple have just filed a patent on mobile facial recognition. They also mentioned biometrics, funny, I still have a HP iPaq with a finger scanner. Want to know more about facial recognition? Here’s a quick 2 minute primer.

Seth Godin on Kindle

It’s a shame that Seth doesn’t support direct comments on his blog, but maybe that’s because he wants us to read what he writes rather than the huge numbers of people who would want to comment on his blog.

I won’t paraphrase his blog about the Kindle because I think it’s worthy of your time to pop over to his blog and read it for yourself.

I have promoted eBooks for a number of years including writing one myself, Unleashing the Road Warrior, which you can buy from many sites including the new eBook site ReadingIt which I am involved with.

I also wrote a FREE Whitepaper which might add to the story called Are eBooks Ready to Come of Age, which has been used as readings in a number of universities.

The key things that I totally agree with Seth on are:

1. eBook prices are crazy. Why should you pay a similar price to a hardcopy book? The cost of publishing is tiny in comparison to printing on paper. It is more sustainable as trees don’t need chopping, retailers don’t need huge margins, so someone is being greedy. Readingit.com is a startup founded on the concept that the writer should enjoy the majority of the revenue from their professionally edited book.
2. The Kindle is easy to use, you don’t need to be a technology buff and with good internet access downloading new books is easy. It’s about reading not about technology.
3. The Kindle display is more like paper and therefore doesn’t give you the eye strain that I have suffered from on many longhaul flights because of the backlighting, just the same as when you are at your computer too long at a tme.
4. The Kindle doesn’t give you the same fuctionality that I wrote about in Are eBooks Ready to come of age. In Palm and Windows Mobile devices and others, you can highlight, annotate, bookmark, draw and other features which mean that you can readily access information you want to revisit and you don’t ruin the book with lots of scribbles and ear tagged pages. Like Seth I have several thousand books and it isn’t easy in a hurry to find the book you wanted and which of the many post it flagged pages you wanted.
5. While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

   Thanks so much for your support:)

   

The future of Personal Computing Part Two

This is a follow on from my blog last week about a day in my life of personal computing in 2013.

So I’ve had breakfast and I go to my PC to check email and messages. My wireless network at home now consists of a variety of devices and networks linked together. These include my Entertainment Server which links to various TV’s around the house, the Sky Dish, cable TV, media audio players and recorders, HD radio tuner as well as the Toshiba Fenininity Server which allows us to control and monitor the stove, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, climate control, breadmaker and a host of other appliances not to mention the HVS climate control.

I also have the latest Kindle which lets all of us read our personalised news. It aggregates the top stories from mother Herald as well as other papers and magazines of interest so we all get the version we want. Scared the hell out of me the other day when I opened my wife’s logon by accident and all I saw was stories about TV and filmstars and their failed marriages and getting their 23rd adopted child out of Afghanistan which is the new Darfur. But then that is the beauty of it that we all get MeNews and not what someone else wants us to read.

I’m still into social networking in a big way, but have a number of portals that manage and aggregate each of my networks. I check my Music Portal which manages all the sites where I showcase my music. Now I can load my new songs, video’s, blogs and gig calendar onto one site and it updates the 127 sites I feature on in one hit, according to each sites unique specification.

So it’s time to go. I leave the house and activate the alarm which sends a signal to my iPhone to say the system is now armed and hop in the car. I drop the iPhone onto the little tray beside my seat and as I put the key into the ignition and my seat and steering wheel adjust itself to my preferred positions, my phone announces itself to the Wireless CANBUS so that it has access to the entertainment system.

I tell my integrated GPS navigation unit to take me to ‘the office’ select the podcast I want to listen to from those that are just audio as I don’t want to get pinged by the distraction laws and get on the road. As I near the top of Chartwell Drive, my podcast pauses (I used to hate missing stuff when the old system just muted the sound) and the nav tells me that there is a serious traffic incident on High Rd that it has picked up on TMC and would I like to route around it. I say yes, and it seemlessly takes me on down Diana drive and I arrive at work right on time.

As I wait at a set of lights I check the Buddy feature on my GPS and see an image of my wife’s car crawling along Bush Rd on her way to work. Her unit beeps to alert her that I have checked her location and she sends me a smart message back by tapping on the SMS keyboard on her nav unit which uses Bluetooth to send the message via her phone. Her car and system is a bit older than mine. 2009.

When I get to work my phone opens the carpark grill and after I have parked the car, it unlocks the door into the building and then into my office. I fire up my  Touchbook which has just been upgraded to Vista (“WE” like to be cautious about our computer network and go to the machine in the kitchen for a perfectly fluffy flat white.

As I have done forever, I start my day with email. My touchscreen notebook is now running Windows Vista Touch and although Microsoft has announced their new OS I will be using this one for another couple of years until our IT Department is comfortable that it is reasonably robust, especially given that it took 3 years to get most of the kinks out of Vista and for a while they went back to offering Windows XP again as an option in the 2nd half of 2009.

One thing that we have now universally adopted is Unified Communications. All my voicemail whether it comes from my landline, mobile or email is now waiting for me in my Inbox and with my iPhone or my notebook.

My days haven’t changed much. Probably the only major difference is that I do now use video on a lot of my phone calls so I can see the person I am talking to. This has saved me a lot of wasted travel time given the disaster that is Auckland’s roads today. They have started building the Auckland Harbour Tunnel, but it will be a couple more years before it opens for buses and T3 (cars with at least 3 peple in them) let alone ordinary traffic. So many meetings have been replaced by necessity with vidphone calls. Of course I can also do this on my iPhone 6, but unless I’m doing it over the Wireless LAN (and we still don’t have one in the office) the costs are prohibitive.

At lunch time I quite often walk to the Subway for some exercise and of course their food has the Heart Tick. On my way, I check out their menu on my iPhone and wonder if the food will look as good as the picture. I specify exactly what time I will get there. On the way back I get the phone to play me some Utterz messages from friends while I’m walking.

On the way home I drive past a bar and get a Speights Mates message saying there is a Happy Hour Running and sending me an eCoupon to get 2 for one in the next half hour and prompting me to hit the forward button to send the same coupon to any of my personal Speight’s Mates who are within a 2km vicinity to come and join me for an after work beer. I love location based marketing and decide it is only right to support people who have invested in this technology given that I helped to develop it. Isn’t that called the fruits of your labour? Yes. I know hops aren’t strictly fruit.

Before dinner, I go to my home studio and record a lead track on my Gibson LP Guitar onto my 8 track TASCAM for my latest song, nothing has changed there really, call me old fashioned. I still have my music on loads of web sites and while I’ve sold some songs, I haven’t scored a number one hit yet.

I bought the new Internet TV Aggregation Server last year and replaced my MySky. Now that I have cable for internet as well as TV, I can cherry pick and watch exactly what I want when I want and am no longer subject to the whims of SKy TV. Yes, I still subscribe to Sky Sports Channel because they have exclusive rights for many events that NZ teams compete in such as All Blacks Rugby and do support NZ sport better than anything else, especially the biased commentators, although I wuldn’t have a problem if Murray Mexted got some new material, but the rest is pretty much free. I don’t have to watch ads although many programs have very overt displays of product i the story.

I finally got an 80″ TV, the largest my wife would let me buy, and that wasn’t easy. Sometimes we have multple screens running so that we can watch different things at once and have adapted to that. We tried the VR glasses from the new Nintendo, but they are very antisocial. Awesome for 3D movies tough! Home entertainment is now awesome. No more channels full of reruns of programs we have already seen umpteen times, I never have to sit through another show of Friends again! Now I can see exactly what I want when I want, subject to agreement in the house of course and we all have to compromise sometimes,

Along with cable came free international calling to anywhere in the world for a modest flat fee, so I don’t use Skype much anymore. Finally a little music from iLike at the end of the day. I kept my CD’s and vinyl as souvenirs, but for a flat fee of $10 a month to our ISP, the house can access and download unlimited music from almost all record companies in MPEG 9 which is great quality at 960kbit/s.

Not a lot has changed in 5 years, but life is certtainly a little easier than it used to be.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)