You've Got (very little) Mail

Did Gmail's spam filter just improve? I've seen nothing but legitimate email in my inbox all weekend - the typical E-Book sales notifications, a note from my sister, and not much else. Wow!

The E-books have been keeping me busy. I've been revising, reformatting, adding new chapters and reorganizing. It's worth it though; sales are good. I'm starting a fourth book now. Unlike the otheers, this one will be a free download and will be what I've learned about creating E-books with Open Office.

That's been quite an experience and has had its share of near panic moments, some caused by my own mistakes and others by Open Office flakiness. OO crashes a lot more than it should but - knock on wood - it has never lost any of my work yet. I have myself screwed things up badly enough to have to go pull from Time Machine backups (wonderful stuff, that Time Machine!) but OO has recovered itself every time. Still, I don't like crashes.

Actually, the OO problems are freezes and at that only appear to be keyboard lockups. OO itself seems to remain running - if I've recently made changes and it locks up, I can just patiently wait for it to do its background save and then Force Quit. When it comes back up and recovers, my work has always been there.

Why don't I use Word? I have it on this Mac and I do use it when someone sends me something that OO can't open (that's rare). I just don't want to use Microsoft products if I don't have to. OO will get better. I'll be patient.

I've also been busy cleaning up and adjusting my rates. That had gotten completely out of hand over the years with too many options for this, that and the other. Very confusing and overlapping so I wiped it all out and started over.

A couple of new books came yesterday. Bjarne Stroustrup has a new "Programming Principles and Practice Using C++" written specifically for people who have never programmed before. It's a monstrous 1200 pound book but I'm looking forward to reading it.

Did I say "pound"? I meant pages, but the darn thing is pretty heavy. The other book is "Xcode 3 Unleashed" by Fritz Anderson. I don't like anything "Unleashed" but I'll ignore the title and give it a look. I've never been able to get into Xcode - maybe this will do it for me.

I was reading this morning that Twitter is looking for ways to monetize itself. Good luck with that: I can't see much hope for it and would expect Twitter to either fold up or be bought by someone who can run it at a loss.

Speaking of Google :-), I've been disappointed by FriendConnect. They haven't done much with this - still the same lousy apps. There is a new gadget to play music - gee, I'm sure that will catch on! Other than that, nothing. Don't be surprised if you see it disappear from here soon.

And that's about it - I'm out of here!