This Makes No Sense At All

About a two years ago I posted on the process of putting our first two books on Kindle - converting-our-books-to-kindle-work-in.html . That involved getting a text file from the original page making software (Pagemaker and Indesign), and putting that text into a Word file just to get Word's ability to put out an html file. Getting the initial text was messy as I had the original Indesign CS. The easiest way to get text out of it was open it in Story Editor and cut and paste that text into Word. Then I would save as filtered web page to get html. The resulting html was run into Mobipocket Creator, and the file out of Mobipocket Creator was one I could load directly onto my Kindle, and when satisfied, send to Amazon. Once the initial html file was created, I never went back to Word. Corrections were made by editing the html file with Notepad++. Mobipocket Creator also built the initial versions of the toc.ncx file and the contents.opf file. The toc file creates the little tab bar a...

Our hiking has suffered the last few months, as we first cautiously watched for success of Susan's new medication, and then focused every waking minute on getting Patagonia Chronicle: Walking to Torres del Paine out the door. It finally got up on Amazon a week or so ago, and we have fifty-some on hand. Much nicer than the earlier books where we would have about 3500 books arrive at the door and need to find a place to stash them in our tiny house. I'm very proud of Susan and of what she has produced: The book is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It can be ordered from your local bookseller from Ingram. ISBN 978-0-936034-04-1 The description as it appears in various book catalogs: Patagonia Chronicle: On Foot in Torres del Paine enables readers to gain a sense of the rewards and challenges of travel south of the 40 th parallel in Chile and Argentina — Patagonia. Through journal entries, interviews, historic documents, and essays on subjects unique to t...

Plan A was Geneva to Le Puy - 19 walking days, a fairly leisurely schedule we thought. We flew into Geneva via London. Barely squeaked by on transfer time in London. Heathrow ran us out of our international flight, through immigration, out to the main area, and back through full security. At least the bag with our hiking poles was checked through to the final destination. Geneva airport has a free ticket good for 80 minutes of public transport, bus or train, so we got the train, got off at station Cornavin and walked about six blocks north east to Geneva City Hostel. Spartan but clean 2 person room, and pastry and coffee available on the corner the next morning by 7am. I'd carefully traced the GR65 route through Geneva on my gps map software before leaving home, as well as loading someone's gps track of the entire route to Le Puy, so wasn't concerned about navigating through Geneva. Fired up the gps, saw the city and streets with no problem, but absolutely no trace ...

Standing Desk I was doing some mundane household task the other day, stomping, bending over, repeating the process. Suddenly this acute pain at the base of my spine told me that I shouldn't have done that. Multidays with vitamin I (ibuprofen) have vastly improved the situation. Fortunately, walking only makes things better so my hiking days are not a problem. What does not help is sitting at the computer all day. I've sometimes thought about the health aspects of a desk where I stood, rather than sat, but never acted on it. Once more those thoughts came up. This time I decided I had materials on hand that would allow me to do a test. Boxes of books got the monitor and keyboard up to standing height, and a multi level in-out basket got the mouse up. I was good to go.  After a couple of days of use, my back was normal enough to resume sitting, and I had learned a couple of things about using a standing desk. 1. You need more than just the monitor, keyboard, etc. r...

We realize our Geneva to Le Puy walk is soon going to be upon us, but the planned training program keeps going awry. Life interferes. It may be that as usual, we defer training till on the trail. However, months ago, Susan booked a campsite at Pinnacles National Monument . This place has had a particular attraction for me, ever since I heard that the California Condor Recovery Program was releasing birds at Pinnacles . As is usual, when the reserved date comes up, we have other pressing tasks, but we ignore them, throw sleeping bags and backpack cooking supplies in the car and take off. Three hours later, and almost due south, we arrive. Thirty miles away the temperature was moderate - 74F. As we wind up the road to the east side entrance, the temperature is creeping up, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84... We endure. Arriving, we find our site, location 68. Very nice. Private, Quail running around, a few lizards. It is still early, so we leave a few objects to show that the site is occupi...

For years, our house has been characterized by piles of boxed books. One row of such boxes piled five high provides a shelf for Susan's office. Another such row serves as a quasi room divider for the little office space I have carved out of our living room. Each time we sell out a printing, there is a rush to incorporate any corrections or minor updates to the prior printing and get another load of boxes in to be stored. Well, no more. There is this concept that I love. Someone wants a book, or boxes of books and they are printed to order, and shipped out directly from the printer, never touching our hands. All we have to do is send off a pdf file to the printer - actually two files, one for the interior and one for the cover. Print on Demand or POD. So our plan was to move the Mountains book to POD the next time it sold out, which we expected in Feb or March. That was a good plan, but it sold out in Nov, so I learned POD by doing. In the US there are two main POD printers, Cr...