Gleefully Malicious Books
Today, I ordered a physical print proof of FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems.
The ebook is now available on my site, and is infiltrating other bookstores as you read this. Each ebookstore has its own internal speed–while I uploaded to Amazon first, I expect it to make the books available last.
I’ll keep the book page updated when FM:SF hits various stores.
Print should be available next week, barring problems.
I submitted several tech events to Penguicon, our local tech/SF/maker/assorted random WTF convention.
They accepted six: five talks and one panel.
So if you’re in Detroit on the weekend of 29 April-1 May, come by and see me bloviate about:
The last one, the Senior Sysadmin Panel, should be a lot of fun. I’m looking for 3-4 more people to sit on that panel. I was a pro sysadmin for 20 years at a variety of organizations. Ideally, while I’m moderating the panel, I’d like to be the junior sysadmin on it. Let me know if you’ll be at Penguicon and interested.
I’ve also expressed strong interest in being on the self-publishing panel, but I haven’t heard back on that yet. That’ll be on the lit track.
Other people have posted their thoughts on September’s 2015’s Oregon Coast writing workshop. Here’s mine.
I want to expand my readership, so I submit writing to people who can pay me for it. Selling a piece to a pro market is not only income, it’s advertising.
I’ve been using the same Word template for submitting for, oh, five years now. It has headers already set up, font size, paragraphing, and all that stuff. The first page starts with my name, meatspace address, phone number, and email address, some white space, and placeholders for title and first paragraph.
The last day of the workshop, Kristine Kathryn Rusch hands back the a piece I’d given her the day before and says “Look at your address.”
It’s fine. I mean, there’s my name, the house number and street, email address, and phone number.
I look back at Kris.
Kris says, “Look closely.”
I study it carefully. There’s my name. The house number. The street. My email address. You could email me, or call, or even address an old-fashioned envelope with this–
But there’s no city.
Or state.
Or zip code.
I’ve used this template for five years. I haven’t sold anything I’ve submitted for, oh, five years. Gee, I wonder why?
Hundreds of people have seen these manuscripts and did not notice that. Kris has seen that template dozens of times now, and didn’t notice it earlier.
Mind you, if the New Yorker actually wanted to buy my work, the editor would drop me an email. (In reality, if the New Yorker wanted to buy my work, I’d probably drop a kidney.) But still.
Check everything.
I did my year-end accounting yesterday, double-checking bank statements and receipts and credit card statements and making sure everything was in the Expenses Spreadsheet of Doom. (Doom, I say!)
My earlier financial predictions were wildly overblown, but we’re doing okay. Books take longer to write than I thought. Well, decent tech books, at least. I imagine crap books could be written pretty quickly.
More than one person has offered to support me via Patreon. The models there don’t really fit with the way I work. Some could be made to fit, but would require extra time and attention from me.
But people still want to offer me extra support. And when you’re working as a full time writer, the rule is that when someone offers you money for no good reason, you take it.
I’m pondering a per-book sponsorship, sold through my site. There would be an ebook tier and a print tier.
An ebook sponsor would get their name listed in the back of the ebook as a sponsor. They’d get a copy of the completed ebook, as well as access to in-progress drafts.
A print sponsor would get their name listed in the back of the print book and the ebook. I’d send them a copy of the ebook and a signed copy of the print book.
Sponsorship sales would remain open until the book goes to copyediting.
The question is, what would people offer as sponsorship? (The voices in my head say to charge $25 ebook and $100 print.) And are enough people interested to make it worthwhile?
I’m not entirely comfortable with this model. It shifts some risk to my sponsors. I might be attacked by a flock of rabid seagulls, or catch wheat rust, or succumb to gelato poisoning. But the sponsors know that risk.
Why post this hypothetical? I want your opinion. Would you buy some kind of sponsorship, and if so, how much would you think is fair?
nixCraft has posted a review of Tarsnap Mastery: Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid.
nixCraft makes a deliberate practice of listing pros and cons for each book they review. This is a good idea. The only con that they list is that “you most definitely need some basic Unix command-line knowledge.”
I can live with that. If you can’t use a command line, you shouldn’t be using Tarsnap.
I’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking me for my opinion on the Randi – xmj FreeBSD issue.
Short short answer: I am withholding comment until we hear some kind of response from FreeBSD’s core team. Or until we don’t.
Short answer: This looks really bad for FreeBSD’s leaders and the Foundation.
If a volunteer project has a volunteer who is honestly so dysfunctional that he doesn’t understand why he is offensive, the project does not need him. And the volunteer needs to get help until he’s capable of behaving in a civilized manner.
edit: your hate mail may be posted. Provided I find it worthy of such treatment, at my sole discretion.
edit2: Moderating all comments on this post. Because I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments. Gamergaters are notoriously resistant to human decency.
I’m going through the tech edits on FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems, integrating them into the manuscript so that it can go to copyedit.
As this book is available for early access purchase, without technical review, the manuscript starts with a disclaimer. The first step in prepping this manuscript is removing the disclaimer.
In my opinion, the disclaimers are often the most useful part of my tech books. I’m preserving this one for posterity.
FIRST DRAFT. NOT FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION. FOR TECHNICAL REVIEW ONLY. NOT FACT-CHECKED. PROBABLY COMPLETELY CHECKED OUT. SOME INFORMATION HEREIN NOT ONLY INCORRECT BUT ACTIVELY MALICIOUS, NO IDEA WHICH IS WHICH. CHEMICALLY UNSTABLE. NON-ORGANIC. CONTAINS NASTY LEECHY PLASTICS. BEWARE OF DROP BEARS, GAMERGATERS, AND SEA WEASELS. BRIDGE OUT. ONE WAY NO RETURN. MANUSCRIPT IS MORALLY BANKRUPT AND ENGAGED IN KARMIC PANHANDLING.
PLEASE SEND ANY CORRECTIONS TO THE AUTHOR. INCLUDE PAGE NUMBERS AND ENOUGH SURROUNDING CONTEXT SO HE KNOWS WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. LUCAS IS ALREADY CONFUSED, PLEASE DON’T MAKE IT ANY WORSE.
You can still get the early access version of FM:SF at my bookstore, at a 10% discount. When the book is finished, you’ll get access to the final version.
For some value of now, that is. I just realized I forgot to post this.
My November 11, 2015 mug.org talk about SSH is now on YouTube. This is one way to lose 90 minutes.
You can now get the in-progress but complete first draft of “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” at Tilted Windmill Press.
Buy it now, get 10% off. You get access to the early version as a PDF. When the final book is released, you’ll get the final EPUB, mobi, and print PDF versions.
This draft contains all the content I intend for this book, but it has not been tech reviewed. Tech reviewers have received the manuscript, and are busily marking all the ways that I am wrong, wrong, wrong.
The final print book will have a wraparound cover that looks much like below, with minor changes to accommodate the actual spine width. In my unbiased opinion, this is the most fantastic cover I’ve done.
Last night was the first semibug.org meeting, at the Hazel Park Raceway. Eleven people attended.
The next meeting will be at 7:00 PM, 1715 December 2015, at the Hazel Park Raceway.
The fourth floor of the HPR clubhouse was actually quite suitable for a user group meeting. HPR has horse races on Friday and Saturday night during spring and summer, but this time of year it relies on live videos of races in warm places. We had a conference table, but wound up sitting in chairs in a big circle while we hashed out what happened. The HPR staff was friendly and welcoming.
The discussions would have taken weeks of email, but we hashed everything out in about an hour.
I admitted that I’ve been acting as chairman, and asked if anyone else wanted the job. Nobody does. I’ll try it for a while, see what happens.
We’ve decided to try a couple different locations in the next few months and see what suits us best. Because of the holidays, we’re sticking with HPR in December.
We pillaged other user group agendas, and settled on a general meeting format.
And we adjourned to Bangkok Cuisine for babble. Which makes this the first BSD event I’ve been at in twenty years where beer was not involved.
We have presentations for our next four meeting.
SemiBUG presentations are NOT RECORDED at this time.
Four months of presentations sounds good to start, but the first presentations will be the easiest.
If we wind up staying at the HPR, during the summer we’ll probably do a “SemiBUG Friends and Family Visit the Horse Races” on a Friday or Saturday night, because nobody except Paul (who arranged the space) had ever seen one.
Oh, and one night we need to have the “My Home Network Is Worse than Your Home Network” game show. Just how many VLANs does an apartment need, anyway?