Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

Another year is gone and another year is starting. Can you look back over the last year and conclude that you spent your time in a worthwhile manner? If you can’t, now is the time to plan your new year. I will be so bold as to offer suggestions: TELL the people you love that you love them. You think they know but make sure they know. Take the time to explain something to a child. The key here is take the time, we are all busy but childhood is short. Don’t miss it. Do something that may help someone else. Do it without looking for a reward of any type. Just do it! Make family your top priority! If we all take care of our own, then they won’t be dependent on the charity of others which may not exist. Practice tolerance, whether you recognize your own prejudices or not, be tolerant of others. Instead of emulating the demagogues who rant and rave on TV and radio, have pity on them for their narrow point of view. Have enough sense to know that advice unask...

As mentioned in a previous post, I would love to have a Droid but can’t quite justify going with the $30/month charge for connection. I have to admit that I am impressed with what I have seen. I sat in my grandson’s Christmas pageant and saw the little dot on the map to show where I was. BTW this was before it started, I am geeky but I wouldn’t be phone playing while my grandson was singing. Anyway, I am weakening. I really liked the real time map feature and the screen is very bright and legible. I have avoided looking at available aps since I don’t want to increase my envy depression. The ability to scan bar codes while in a store and compare brick and mortar prices would drive me stark raving mad as a retailer but as a consumer, wow! What a nice feature. Only 18% of the cell phone population currently has a smart phone. What an open market for the vendors. I am going to try and hold off to see what the Google Phone will do. It is reputed to out do their own pr...

I’m detecting a pattern in some of my posts. A certain disgruntlement seems to permeate my normally cheerful demeanor. It may be the holiday season and it may be age. I do my best to say what I mean, do what I say I will do and to honor my word. I tried to do that the entire time I owned my businesses. Sometimes it appears that is not the case nor the interest of many current businesses. When I discover that is the case, I try and write about it so that someone else doesn’t repeat my mistakes. I admit, sometimes I would like to see people make the same mistakes as I do so I won’t feel like the only village idiot. I try not to be that person. I still feel most people are decent human beings. I have noted that the customer service people in the recent “rants” were pleasant and courteous and powerless. I don’t feel everyone is out to get me(thank you Frank Burns of Mash). I don’t think the nation of Italy is morally bankrupt due to the ludicrous conviction, with...

I don’t know if referring to someone else’s blog is still blogging or just being a traffic cop. I read an interesting article on the impending demise of optical storage. It is on zdnet and by Robin Harris. His article pointed out that hard drive storage capacity is growing and is still considerably faster than optical storage as well as cheaper. He cites the historic precedents of punch cards, tape, small capacity floppy drives and escalating changes. He ends by asking hard drive manufactures to come up with archive quality hard drives. I enjoyed the article and agreed with much of what he said. I do heartily agree that there is a need for archive quality hard drives. Until a hard drive exists of that quality, I will continue archiving on optical disks, both CD and DVD. I haven’t moved into blu-ray and don’t anticipate doing so. By the time I finish burning the major stack of optical media I have, there will be some better alternative.

I have Verizon for my cellular carrier. I was going to upgrade my phone to the new LG enV Touch. I have the LG Dare which I really like but I liked the idea that I could load documents into the enV and read them. Thusly I would be able to stick a couple of books into my phone for those long Drs office waits, traffic jams etc. where you wish you had a book. I went into the Verizon site to upgrade, added in the stuff I wanted and got to the review portion of the order. It showed a $9.99 per month data package. I didn’t want a data package. If I was going with a data package, I would go with the new Droid. So I hit edit and tried to take the data package off. After many frustrating minutes, I called customer service. It turns out that you can’t get that phone unless you get the data package. It is interesting that the only time you clearly see that requirement is when you are ready to finalize the upgrade. If you aren’t careful and don’t thoroughly read the upgrade...

Toys-R-Us was advertising Lego bargains. Buy one at regular price and get the second one at 50% off. Anyone who has purchased Lego knows that they seldom are on sale. I was pumped to nail down my Christmas shopping in one fell swoop. Ha! Even when the item said it was in stock, it was lying. You added the item to the cart and a message would come up stating that the below number was how many they really had and there was no number shown below. After trying all the combinations of items that I could conceivably guess might be acceptable as gifts for my grandchildren I realized that there was no inventory of Lego. I called and got a delightful young lass who told me the web site often wasn’t up to date on inventory. She checked a few of the items I had hoped to purchase and confirmed they were not in stock. I asked if there was any possibility they would be back in stock prior to Christmas. She had no idea but I should keep coming back to the website and try to bu...

I sit here listening to Christmas music and printing out photos for my Christmas tree photo ornaments. I enjoy using the photo ornaments for stuffing stuffers. Of course I enjoy giving the grandkids ones of me in Santa hats or other silly poses. Sure it is cheesy, but the kids laugh and give me a hard time and we all enjoy it. Yesterday my granddaughter and I found a great Disney site that allowed her to dress Cinderella and then print out the finished product. We also had to print out new princess photos for her “house” decorations. Being the ever doting grandparent, I use photo paper and quality setting. Needless to say, those full 8.5x11” printouts go through ink like there is no tomorrow. I use dramatically more ink on the days I baby sit and the holiday season seems to just suck the life right out of the ink cartridges. If you go through as much ink as I do and you are in the UK, you may want to consider checking out Cartridge Save . They have printer cartridg...

Christmas comes once a year at least the last time I checked. I have gotten my annual calendar printed at Staples for years. Last year I used their on-line creator and it worked well. This year on December 4th I tried to use their on-line service and it was dismal. It wouldn’t upload my photos so I tried to call customer support. That was a waste to time and finally I hung up on the elevator music and looked for other vendors. I ended up at VistaPrint. I find their site annoying due to the constant badgering to add more to your cart. However their calendar creating software worked smoothly and all 13 of my images uploaded in substantially less time than I had been able to get on photo up on the Staples site. I have not seen the end product but I have ordered from VistaPrint in the past and the products have been acceptable. So if you plan on doing a calendar as a gift, I recommend looking at VistaPrint. I received no remunerations whatsoever for this recommendat...

My last post posed hypothetically that anti-Americanism may have played a part in Amanda Knox’s ludicrous conviction. After doing a web search, it appears that I am not the only one that questions the basis of the conviction. It appears that this young woman is being a scapegoat to the rabid anti-American feelings in a very conservative Italian community. The more I read, the more I am outraged. Here is a link to a site that summarizes the case. Don’t just read this article look at others and make up your mind. If you are as outraged as I am, email or call your congressman and senator, perhaps official pressure may help. I have found a website that claims to be the Amanda Knox defense fund. I have emailed the Associated Press and asked if their reporter, Gene Johnson who has done many stories on the Amanda Knox case, can verify if the website is legitimate. If it is legitimate, I am going to donate, that family is taking an emotional and financial beating.

If you don’t know who Amanda Knox is, you are probably living in a cave. I am sure I don’t know enough to rant about the jury’s verdict but I do have to question how it was reached. If the news reports are accurate, there was no, repeat NO forensic evidence to show that Miss Knox was ever in the room where the murder took place. Somehow that seems to indicate reasonable doubt. Of course reasonable doubt is part of the judicial process in the good old US of A. It doesn’t appear that is the case for the Italian judicial process. One hesitates to suggest that the seeming mindless pursuit of a guilty plea regardless of evidence may be indicative of the European dislike of Americans in general. It would truly be a tragic miscarriage of justice if a young woman is sentenced to 26 years in prison primarily due to her nationality.

I’m a novice author. I am self published because at my age I don’t want to grow old and die waiting on a publisher to “discover” me. If my books sell then I did something write (I know, cute!). Since my first book is selling I am going to rashly suggest I am an author. One of the things I have discovered is that the on-demand printers who cater to the self publishing world still have the mind set of corporate publishing. LightningSource who I suspect I will use at some point seems to be a reasonably priced, full service print house. Now I am getting to the part about software compatibility. LightningSource will only accept my books if they are formatted under specific software. Oddly enough I have older versions of the software but they only support more recent versions. I am supposed to fork out $500.00 for the latest version of Adobe or Quark so I can submit my manuscript to LightningSource. Now I am not beating up on LightningSource, as I said, I plan on using th...