I'm back

It's been, what?  Four months since I've done a personal entry on this blog?  Oh, dear.

For those of you who are new to Ephemeral Isle and think that it's just a feeder for Gizmag, welcome.  I am David Szondy, your host.  Up until July of this year, I spent a lot of time posting rants on this and three other blogs in hopes of building traffic for my freelance writing business.  That didn't work as planned and I had to do some retrenching as I went back to journalism.  Just call me the Carl Kolchak of the Internet.

Anyway, what's up?  As you can see from the webcam shot, this is not the office at Chez Szondy.  This isn't even Chez Szondy.  That's gone, I'm afraid.  This is the living room/office in my new flat some fifty miles north of where Chez Szondy was.  It's "efficient", which means that it's small.  I've had to give away a ridiculous amount of stuff and my two acres of wood and garden have been reduced to a strawberry pot on the patio.  The good news is that I live on the edge of town, so the view is still suitably rustic.

I still have the dogs, which is good because I can do with the company.  Why?  Good question.  Fact is, the wife left me and I lost Chez Szondy because I couldn't manage it on my own.  Now I live in a small town in northern Washington where my wife moved to and I have followed so that I can be near my daughter and preserve some sort of family life.

It's not bad.  The money situation is good, the work is steady and interesting, I have a new town to explore and I get a lot of exercise walking the dogs.  It's a new start and Lord knows I've started over enough times in my life.  Another one won't be that hard.

I won't be going back to the old posting schedule.  There's too much work to do and writing to relax from writing is too much of a bus man's holiday, but as the man said, I rant, therefore I am.  So, I'll rant occasionally.

Probably about bread or something.

Fundraiser for a man facing divorce

I'm not generally one for fund raisers, but circumstances being what they are, it's time to lay the cards on the table.  I've been putting my Gizmag posts on EI since I stopped doing regular posts and I've explained some of the reasons when I did the switch, but the fact is, that wasn't the whole story.  I'll put this as bluntly as I got it.  My wife is leaving me and I'm losing Chez Szondy. Now, I'm trying to salvage some bits of my life.

Now, I'm not asking for morale support or anything like that.  I'm through the worst and now I'm on to practical matters. Fact is, I'm facing a cash flow crisis when I hit September and anything that you guys can do will help immensely.  I dislike fundraisers, as I've said, but if you could hit the tip jar, that would be great. If you're not comfortable with that, then go to Gizmag and "like" my stories on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or whatever.  Traffic turns into dollars for me and every penny counts.

Meanwhile, I plan to come back on EI because I need a place to vent.  I'm still working on the format, but I suspect that it will be a combination of Gizmag posts combined with longer, more considered items by me based on the events of the day.

I'm going to need that.

Coming to the crossroads

You may have noticed that posts have been a bit sparse lately on Ephemeral Isle and non-exist on its sister blogs.  That's for a number of reasons.  I've been very busy with clients and deadlines, I had to deal with a medical scare that turned out to be a false alarm and my liver isn't packing up after all, but the biggest reason is that both my wife and I are undergoing some major career shifts that will completely change our routines for at least the next year.  It's a sound plan and will put us on a much better footing, but it also means making some sacrifices and hard choices.

I've been running EI since 2004 and since then I've started three other blogs.  They've been great fun and I love doing them, but they were never meant to be a hobby.  They were intended to attract traffic to Tales of Future Past and my freelance writing business with the side benefit of generating some advertising revenue.  In other words, it's a business.  Unfortunately, it hasn't created either the revenue nor traffic nor demonstration of growth  to justify as much effort as I've put into them.  In other other words, I can't justify the investment.  Therefore, I've had to do some serious thinking and I've concluded that blogs are going to have to take a backseat to my other endeavours until the financial situation improves drastically.

That doesn't mean that I'm quitting.  It does mean, however, that I'm going to be cutting back considerably.  The other blogs will be only occasional affairs with postings made when time and suitable material collide.  As to EI, I'll still do the video features, so there'll always be something here, but the four posts a day routine will fall back to posting what I think is the most interesting or important as time permits on an irregular basis.

Thanks to all my regular readers, thanks for your support and please subscribe to the RSS feed so you won't miss what does come up.

Ta for now.

Libaries and studies

The nerve centre of davidszondy.com

The Art of Manliness looks at the libraries, studies and writing rooms of 15 famous men.

Sadly, the one at Chez Szondy (seen here) isn't included.

Hiatus

Going on hiatus. Returning on 10 April.

The Deadline

I've got two deadlines due today,  so posting will be a bit spotty through tomorrow.

Pardon?

Headline:

Do people in the Northwest have an accent?

Yes, and you can cut it with a knife.  My wife, who is a native Washingtonian, thinks she's accentless and thinks I'm kidding when I tell her that she has a very thick one and  I sometimes have trouble understanding her.

At least I've got her and the daughter using proper words like "car park" and "offie" and the daughter's Rs are softer than her class mates', so the cause of civilisation is not lost.

We apologise for the inconvenience

If you've been visiting the site today, you may have run into a malware warning.  With Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning and a lot of clicking, I identified the source as a recent post that's since been deleted and normal service will now resume.

Still here

Visitors have been wondering why the postings have been so sparse lately.   It's a good question.  Fact is, I'm still here, but the past two months have been a succession of setbacks that we're just crawling out from under.  We've been through blizzards, power outages, a week-long Internet outage, visiting relatives, one car scrapped when the big end went and the other in the shop with a cracked fuel pump due to the"green" government's insistence on putting ethanol in the petrol leading to lovely ice in the fuel line.  Oh, and there's been a bout of sinus, a bit of minor surgery–not to mention car hunting to replace the dead Blazer.  The latter was particularly bothersome as being down to only one car meant that I had to play chauffeur for up to twelve hours a day.  Add on a load of lost deadlines because of all of the above and the postings had to take a back seat for a bit.

Anyway, the light's at the end of the tunnel or the eggs on the boil or whatever metaphor is apt, so these ramblings will get a bit more regular.

Knock wood.

Chez Szondy digs out

We have been fighting the ravages of a winter storm since Monday and the results have not been pretty.  Casualties so far have been the Blazer, which was destroyed on Tuesday trying to get up the hill and may be scrapped.  I'm not certain of this because the machine was towed into town and I haven't had a chance to look at it.  The mechanic said that it's a dead loss, but so did the last one who looked at it two years ago.   The other is the PT Cruiser, which we believe cracked a fuel line when we tried to start it this morning.  Another tow job and one that means some fearful logistical problems if we're wrong.

The other part of the week has been marked by heavy snows and freezing temperatures.  It's bad enough that the roads have been impassable.  I've already ended up trudging a couple of miles up our road over the past few days.  It's also covered tree branches with thick snow, which has caused all manner of havoc with roads made even more impassable, outbuildings collapsing under blankets of snow and frequent power outages.  Worse, when the power was on the clouds were so thick with ice that the satellite signal might as well have been hitting a brick wall.

The upshot: I awoke this morning to a a land of wet, melting snow feeding what is certain to be flooding down in the valley, no power, no heat save in the living room, the prospect of boiling a kettle on the emergency camp stove, a child who has been housebound for the better part of a week, a wife who has been kept from work during her busiest time of the year and is close to despair, two dogs who are having nervous breakdowns because of all the outages and yours truly missing every deadline imaginable.

Since I'm writing this, the power has obviously come back on and I'm overheating every room in the house just in case it blips out, I'm waiting for the two truck to haul the Cruiser into town and wife and daughter have bags packed just in case the car can't be repaired today and they have to evacuate to Grandma and Grandpa's house while I stay home to take care of the dogs and keep the pipes from freezing.

Needless to say, this is a long way of telling everyone that blogging will be light over the next few days while I sort things out this end.

No wonder I'm getting these headaches.

Sisyphus gets up the hill at last

And I am back.  More or less.  The last three weeks have been a nightmare.  Like an idiot, I'd figured I'd have no problem working through Christmas.  It seemed so simple; just a matter of time management.  Never mind that I've always been rubbish at time management.  This Christmas it would work.  Okay, I'd miss out on getting anything done Christmas Day and I'd probably sleep most of Boxing Day, but I was sure I'd be able to disappear for a few hours in the afternoon to write articles and do some contract work.

Nope.  Didn't happen.  Instead, I ended up with an endless procession of errands, family visits, visiting family and errands involving visiting visiting family.  That's something that I could have handled, except I woke up a week ago last Thursday and discovered that the satellite modem was out.  I don't mean "out" as in it was a bit wonky, I mean "out" as in it was completely US; a dead box that wasn't shifting a single electron through its circuits.  Two calls to technical support, the first ending in a shouting match, only to have the serviceman call and say that he can't get out to Chez Szondy in less than a week.

So, it was a week without the Internet except for the short periods I could drive into town, which is no way to run a freelance writing business.  This threw all my deadlines into the bin and I was frantically rescheduling everything and hoping that none of my clients were getting too cheesed off at me.  A week later, the serviceman showed up at the crack of dawn–which around here in January is eight o'clock.  Within five minutes, he'd found the problem in the voltage converter in the power cable, replaced the unit and everything was up and running.  Then he called the tech support people for a sign off and learned that one diagnostic wasn't returning a number, so he went outside and replaced the satellite dish transceiver.  By this time another serviceman turned up.  Even with the extra help, the tech desk still wouldn't sign off, so they replaced the modem, so the only thing left of the original system was the dish itself and the cables.  During this, they called the tech desk six times, were hung up on twice, and the five minute fix had stretched to four and a half hours.

What finally resolved it was when they discovered that the tech desk had shut off the relevant software at their end, which is why that one little number wasn't showing up.

I had the satisfaction later of telling my wife that I'm not the only one who tears a strip off of tech support.

That was last Thursday.  Since then, I've been doing a massive job of catch up on high-priority jobs and wading through a small sea of emails.  It was only a few hours ago that got even enough of a breather to make this entry.

I'm not out of the woods yet.  There's still a lot to do.  There are contracts to complete and articles to submit, but at least my workload is overwhelming instead of impossible.

We call that progress.

Anyway, long story short:  I'm back and as the workload eases, I'll be getting some posts up.  With any luck, I'll be back up to speed within a week.

If Phobos Grunt doesn't land on my office, which I'm not ruling out.

We're back... Sort of.

Good news:  The internet connection is finally fixed and I'm back on line.  The bad news: I have insane deadlines over the weekend thanks to all the disruptions.

Back Tuesday.

Service interruption continues

My satellite modem has died, as in it's now an inert lump of plastic and silicon that won't even power up, and the serviceman can't get a replacement until Thursday, so my only Internet time is now the few hours I can manage in town between now and then when everything isn't closed up for the holidays.

Given that this has completely kicked over all the deadlines I have looming, it means that posting here will continue spotty through the next week.

Slow Week

We have family visiting Chez Szondy this week at the same time I'm facing a string of deadlines that Christmas has already kept me away from for too long.  Therefore, though I'll be posting the usual video features on Ephemeral Isle, other posts will be as and when I can find time.

Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

And we're back

Sort of.  I'm well enough to get back to the computer–though it's the netbook and I'm confined to bed most of the day.  It'll be posting as I come across interesting things during the day until I'm properly up and about.

Either that, or a stream of conciousness account of some of the more vivid hallucinations if I get my meds wrong.

Flu

I fixed the dryer last night

And yes, I was rather pleased with myself.

Seriously, though, this does say something about the age we live in.  Twenty years ago, I'd have called in a repairman without even thinking about it.  No, that's not right.  Twenty years ago I was living on a boat and I'd have been shouting "How the blazes did a broken clothes dryer get on my deck?"  Anyway, I didn't know any more about home appliances then than I do now and the thought of fixing one would have been out of the question.

Now?  The washing machine stops agitating,  a burner on the cooker goes out or the dryer stops heating and I just run it through Google, find a tutorial on Youtube and in a couple of hours I'm ready to pull out the tool kit.  In fact, the only regret I had this time around is that I kicked myself for not pulling up the how-to video on my netbook so I'd have it right there while I was yanking out the heating assembly.

This doesn't even include how easy it was to find a shop with the right part I needed.  In fact, I found one a couple of streets over from a Denny's diner so I could have dinner afterwards with the daughter, wife and wife's octogenarian grandfather who's getting on a bit.

I'm bringing this up not to merely say "gosh, how wonderful things are," but because I realise how hard it is to explain to my daughter what a revolution occurred before she was born.  She's nine-years old, has her own phone that connects to the Internet (I keep her utterly ignorant of how to use most of its functions because it's strictly for emergencies) and she complains because it hasn't got a touch screen.  If someone had handed me a bit of technology like that when I was nine I'd have been horrified because I'd have been convinced that I was now obligated to wear tights and fight crime.

My daughter now lives in a world where she has instant access to whole libraries at no charge.  She can call up all sorts of tools that will carry out calculations that ate up hours or even days of my youth.  She can with a single mouse click watch thousands of films, play chess, or chat with someone on the other side of the world.  She thinks nothing of the fact that I routinely have video conferences with people in Australia,  negotiate with clients in Hong Kong and do other things that were once the reserve of power players in pressed suits, yet Daddy does it at a scuffed Ikea desk while wearing his jammies as his work clothes.  She has no idea of how restricted information was only a couple of decades ago or how isolated the world was from itself.  I sometimes tell about how we only had two television channels when I was a boy and no DVDs or video on demand and she looks at me as if I'm mad.  She does that anyway, but this was especially insane.   How could there be a world where she couldn't talk to Mama instantly when she hurt her knee or where you had to describe an axolotl rather than pulling up an image on the phone.  She lives in a world where information is a fire hose and the trick is to control the flow to make it manageable.  The challenge is to turn it into knowledge and to turn that knowledge into wisdom.  Put then, that's always been the case.  Some things never change.

Now if I can just convince her that rotary phones aren't a fable.

Day lost

It's been an insane couple of days.  Yesterday, I felt like death warmed over, wrapped in Saran wrap, put back in the fridge, forgotten for a fortnight, reheated again in the microwave and then chucked in the bin after it was proven to be a bad idea.  I think they got pizza instead.  Today, I was up, ready to go and eager to hit the to-do list with a vengeance.  The only trouble was, my computer was in the same state today as I was yesterday.

Not the computer, technically, but my internet connection.  That may not seem like an important distinction these days, but it is when I'm trying to get some work done, all the stuff I need is on the Web and it doesn't matter which computer I use because they're all up the spout.  Personally, I blame the satellite company.  Making an Internet connection via a geosynchronous satellite 26,199 miles above the Earth is always less than ideal.  Just listen in on one of my Skype conversations filled with awkward pauses and constant apologies about speaking over the other person.  Never mind if a video feed is involved.  Then I always regret not recording it because I'm sure I'd be hailed as the new Fellini.   It doesn't help that I'm certain that my provider has oversubscribed the service and that it can't cope with the load, so any time between 8 AM and 5 PM is like swimming in Silly Putty without the advantages.  Today was particularly bad to the point where even their own troubleshooting programme couldn't make sense of what was going on.

Obvious, really.

The upshot of this was that I spent five hours dealing with pages that wouldn't load, email that couldn't be checked and a to-do list that remained a not done list.  This is the reason why I am currently writing this on my netbook in the public library and why the entries for today are so thin.  Worse, between wasting so much time at home and then decamping to town, I'm not getting anything done anyway.

I think the whole thing was a sign from God that I should have just binned the whole day and read Clarkson on Cars.

I am Szondy: Mender of Washers

Day one and holiday is already paying dividends.  This was exactly my reaction after I fixed the washing machine.

Family Month

The Szondy family is taking a month off so we can catch up with ourselves, so posting is going to be a little light.  I'll check in when I can, but there are lawns to mow, fish to catch and beer to drink.  And if there's enough beer, the lawn and fish can look after themselves.