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A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog
 Thursday, October 17, 2002
Books for the Asking: "After spending a year trying to sell her book to publishers and receiving 70 rejection letters as a reward, Laurie Notaro, a newspaper columnist in Phoenix, decided to do it herself. Working with iUniverse, one of many companies that offer "print on demand" services, Ms. Notaro paid $99 to have her book designed, laid out, stored as a digital file and printed and bound only as copies were ordered. Several months later she sold the rights to her book, plus the concept for a new one, to a major publisher for a six-figure sum." [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson]
A nice and novel way to get published. Similar approaches may be the way to go. Print on demand, coupled with a trusted blogging source...humm. And I even have a title for my book. 11:14:13 PM 
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Blogs for developing language skills. One of my friends has commented on my not perfect English and suggested her help for improving it. She is going to start Radio blog, so I think about the following:
- She makes a special category, which is not visible in her blog, but has an RSS feed.
- Then she uses this category to comment on my posts pointing to errors and suggesting improvements.
- I subscribe to this RSS, get my personal feedback and correct posts.
Implications:
For me it should be more effective than any course or private lesson: no stupid exercises, but just-in-time feedback to improve my writing.
This could be a service that someone can provide for bloggers. Personally, I wouldn[base ']t mind to pay a bit for it.
For multinational companies this could be a solution to help their employees developing language skills and overcoming fears of writing in foreign language. [Mathemagenic]
A neat idea. The good editors out there could easily help correct the writing of bloggers in a way that is effective without being too embarrassing or public. 11:11:04 PM
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Tuesday, October 15, 2002
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Well, I have been upgrading my software in preparation to moving to OSX. Even though I love the Mac, it is always a little traumatic upgrading the OS. Now the Mac is really easy. I am keeping an old G3 around for legacy stuff so I moved it up to 9.2, and just did a clean install. This is so much easier than on the PC side. It creates a clean system folder, renaming the old system and getting rid of the old system file. I all really need to do is copy over any control panels and extensions, along with preferences, etc. This move was the easiest I have ever had, with no conflict problems at all. Sweet. Now I just need to get ready for a new Mac (I've got Office, Photoshop and Golive, so I'm pretty much there software wise). I thought about Dreamweaver. I generally like Macromedia more than Adobe but I have been a Golive user since version 1 so I'll stick a while longer (plus the upgrade price is substantially cheaper) When you don't have a job, every penny counts. 12:13:02 PM
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Sunday, October 13, 2002
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