Copyright Infringement and E-Books

Just some of my thoughts......  Please feel free to share your own.

Already the publishing industry has seen changed due to e-readers such as the Nook, Kindle and iPad.  A lot of people incorrectly assume that this has been bad for the publishing companies, but I have to disagree.  As an aspiring author that has extensively researched book publishing; as well as someone who regularly reviews books for publishing companies, I can attest to the fact that they have changed with the times in many ways.  Just because a book is published in an electronic capacity does not mean that it was not attached to a publishing company.  Publishing companies also have a hand in many e-books, and aide in processes such as editing.  Most major authors are publishing in multiple formats, hardback, paperback, audio and e-books.  The biggest take-away from publishing companies is the ease in self-publishing that has been brought about.  However, having read and reviewed books from many independent authors, I have found a lot lacking in many books that are not professionally produced.  The editing is atrocious and takes away from the story.  This results in a book being released that is in more of a draft format than a polished copy feel that readers want to see.  Self-publishing also does not provide for assistance in advertisement and the author must to their own marketing, which utilizes many social networking sites.  Self-publishing can be successful and profitable if done correctly.  There are also many ways to “print on demand” that allows an independent author to have physical copies of books made up without a publishing company.  In order for a publishing company to truly be affected it takes a knowledgeable driven author that has reliable editing and promotion help, otherwise the published books are a better read. 

Copyright issues will always be a problem as long as it is easy to copy the information and share it.  Many e-books are available at free at one time or another.  I personally only “purchase” amazon kindle books during “free” sales.  I am legally obtaining the books, and never having to pay.  Books, as with music sell based on reviews and word of mouth.  I have received many books for free in the past few months because the author or publishing company is giving them away for a free review.  Ripping off a story is illegal and should be punished, but sharing a story for the review and word of mouth it will generate is still in the best interest of the author, and can help obtain future fans and sales. 

When it comes to the reading of physical or e-books, I still will choose a physical book every time.  There is just something about being able to hold a book in my hands that makes me feel even more connected to the story.  I also love being able to put the book on my bookshelf.  One of my dreams in life has been to have a multiple story library in my house.  I think it was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast library, which was based off of a real castle in Germany.  E-readers are better for travel and for quick reading as they stay on the page that you last left off when you turn it back on.  It the best to have both for certain books that are only published in digital format.  

How You Are Embarrassing Yourself Online Without Even Knowing It

Normally I try to leave my complaints about crazy views in articles to myself, but sometimes one sticks out so markedly that I just can't keep my mouth shut....  While looking at Digital Citizenship Articles for class, I came across this "gem" of an article.  I just had to share it.
The article that I came across that I felt intense disagreement with was  How You Are Embarrassing Yourself Online Without Even Knowing It  written by Simone Smith.

 
Smith starts out by talking about profile pictures not being as straightforward as one might think.  I agree with her that “superficial evaluations of appearance still count."  However, with that being said I have to disagree when she says “Pushing an agenda, an obsession, or parental pride in posts is annoying enough; should you use an image of a child / fictional character / pet / cause / spouse as your profile photo, you are performing the equivalent action next to every single post you make.” 
 
When I read this my first thought was that she is obviously not a parent.  As a parent I love to see the pictures of my friends’ children and hear about their hilarious antics.  Fictional characters also tell me a lot about a person and again, if I can relate I like it even more.  As an animal lover, I am always ok with animal photos.  Using a photo of a spouse is broadcasting your love for someone who matters to you.  Broadcasting something like marriage equality or breast cancer causes are in no way annoying to me.   I find that if this is done on a social networking forum such as facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. that this is perfectly acceptable.  I can relate to all of these things (even if I do not have a spouse).  I feel that this article was written by someone who was very close-minded about the world and found annoyance in many aspects of life.  I consider myself to be an open-minded person and I welcome anyone to have the ability to broadcast to the world what matters to them and what their likes are.  It is THEIR Facebook page, not mine.  If I do not like it, I do not have to look at it or be their Facebook friend, I can even hide their posts. 
 
Towards the end of the article Smith also said “Having no online presence at all can be one of the most damaging mistakes you can make. Those who refuse to craft and maintain an online presence run the risk of being seen as arrogant, paranoid or technologically unsophisticated."  There is so much wrong in this statement for me.  The biggest negativity I have felt towards someone without an online presence is that when getting to know a possible dating prospect it is either one: a lie about having a profile or two; they are married.  Other than that, I don’t consider anyone to be arrogant if they do not have a Facebook.  A lot of people feel the same “annoyance” as Smith at things that people post, so they choose not to have a Facebook or twitter account.  Other people have children online and do not want to see what their kids are doing.  Although, you better believe I will be cyber stalking my son’s activities like nobody’s business.  Another example I can think of is younger adults that do not want their parents seeing what they are up to.  This is more an option of privacy.   There are also the people who are constantly working, or even living overseas in censored countries.   People do survive without connecting every day. 
Smith goes on to say “Unless you are over 60, you should have a persistently-maintained online presence. Even if you have a really good reason for not wanting to have an online presence, the majority of people won't see it that way. Consider how difficult it can be to eat out with a friend who only consumes gluten-free, organic, vegetarian, locally-produced food. Those choices might be healthy, ethical and even safer, but they give you fewer means of interaction, and might even give you the feeling that this friend thinks he's better than you.”  All I can get out of this is that old people obviously don’t need technology….  My 80+ grandparents are all on Facebook so that we can keep in touch and share photos.   Also that once again this article was written by a very close-minded individual that finds anyone’s interests outside of her own to be negative and a personal attack on her lifestyle in one way or another. 
 
Smith then finishes off this thought with “At a minimum, create a complete LinkedIn profile and/or a respectable Facebook profile. Those basic steps can prevent friends -- or even potential employers -- from completely discounting you (many companies do not even recruit people outside of LinkedIn and some will not hire individuals without active Facebook pages.)”  Although I can agree that employer do search your digital footprint for activity, I have never known any employer who did not hire based on lack of social activity.  Being a part of hiring processes myself, the first places we searched were places like Arrested.com to see if anyone has been arrested for something that would affect their security clearance, and then we go on to sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.  However, especially in my career it is always important and openly encouraged to privatize your social networks as much as possible if you so choose to have one.  This could lead to someone being unsearchable whether they have a social networking profile or not. 
 
Smith goes on to rant about status message content by saying “If you have many friends, but very few Facebook likes or comments on your posts, honestly ask yourself whether you are providing something of value to them (if nobody cares enough to like or comment on what you posted, chances are the answer is "no")…… The more boring you become, the less likely you are to never even show up in a friend's feed. This is not only just due to special algorithms, but friends actively choosing to un-follow or manually hide your posts because they are tired of seeing them.”  According to Smith, your Facebook friends are obviously (I am exaggerating here) only on Facebook in order to entertain you and to seek your approval on life and that boring people do not deserve social media.  As a self-proclaimed “boring person” I can personally take offense to this statement.  I honestly am not even sure what else to say that I have not even said.  I feel as though with these types of views that perhaps Smith needs to reassess the Facebook friends she has so that no one has to listen to her negativity on whether or not their social networking is fulfilling her life of petty judgmental nature.  According to Smith a digital footprint is all about making your life appear much more interesting while never boring or annoying your “friends” who most likely have no real interest in who you are as a person.

Here are some of my annoying pictures

 

Insight Into My Worklife

In case anyone is interested in knowing a little bit of the mysticism surrounding me at work, I wanted to share this with you.  I don't talk about work very often but when I had to write about a difficult challenge I had faced I ended up resorting to one of many projects I have worked on in the past. Let me know some of your challenging situations if you are open to share, whether work related or not.  Here is one of mine:

As a contractor working on a military education and training base I was tasked with being the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the main Application Exercise (APEX) for the students. This exercise tests the previously learned skills of the students to ensure that they have actually learned what they needed to out of the 6 month training course to go out into the operational Air Force.  During this time I was asked to combine a previous 3 Day Exercise with a 6 day exercise, turning it into a 9 day exercise that was synchronized and flowed easily, as well as to update the information from static dates of 2008 to static dates of 2011.  Although both exercises featured the same countries in play they were both created by different people and taken from different sources using various dates.  During initial creation they were intended to be separate stand-alone exercises.  This was a massive task that was assigned solely to me intended to be done with the combination of multiple companies and several people.  Due to the reassessment of personnel I ended up doing the majority of the work single-handedly on behalf of the company I worked for.  To add onto the massive project there was a timeline of 3-6 months in order to have the project completed on time for the re-write of the course that I was supporting as all material had to be completed at the same time for it to be approved and signed off on by the military.  The end result was 1042 pieces of message traffic for a day and night shift as well as a plethora of products (imagery, tracking products, PowerPoint briefings, etc.)  I can also throw in the fact that I was in my 2^nd and 3^rd trimester of my pregnancy with my first child as a single mother during this time.  Needless to say this was a daunting task, but it was one that I welcomed with open arms.  I love nothing more than to be faced with a challenge that I can shape into the best work I can accomplish.  Initially I had to start with figuring out what needed to be included in this project, the resources that I could utilize (as this was a classified exercise and not all resources are readily available) and the timeline that I had to work with.  I worked first on scrubbing (going through and seeing what was still relevant, what needed deleting, what needed changing) the message traffic.  After this I had to make personal contact with resources (personnel and websites) around the military that had worked with similar information and countries.  I had to use quite a combination of finesse and effective communication/people skills over the phone, and through email to get pointed in the right direction.  This was ongoing for many months to get the full range resources and the knowledge that was needed.  I had to come up with the best time management and most effective method of accomplishing all of these things.  Halfway through the project my timeline was cut from having 6 months remaining, to 3 months remaining.  I put in many overtime hours and was able to get all of the products including plotting over a thousand forces on Falconview (a computer based map of the military forces in play).  I had to constantly keep up communication between companies involved to ensure that both sides were synchronized in timing of events, visualization and messages that were dependent upon one another.  During this time I created many new products, still utilized years later, to help any teaching instructors to understand the exercise, and to be able to effectively teach the exercise with the best result of learning and knowledge absorption for the students during the hardest tasks they will face yet in the course.  Although many of my solutions to this problem took on a creative tone, it wasn’t until most of the time consuming work was done that I came up with the best solution yet.  My most creative solution to this monumental task was to take all of the work that I had previously accomplished and put myself in the shoes of the student, to try to envision myself as the audience that would be presented with and tested on this material and see it from their eyes.  I wanted this exercise which had now become my baby to be the most effective and most beneficial 9 days that they could be faced with at the end of their training.  I went through the exercise and acted as though I was in charge of all of the groups at once (during a normal class the students are broken up into 5-6 separate groups to track different aspects of the military forces (Air, Ground, Navy, Defensive Missiles, Special Ops/Ballistic Missiles).  I went through all of the visualizations; I read through each piece of message traffic (multiple times) and I acted as though I was one of the students.  I took each of these groups and I created student products of PowerPoint briefing to track the forces and to brief to the instructors, I moved the forces along with the traffic to ensure that force structure and amounts were adding up to where they should.  I had to track along and ensure that events would follow likely TTP (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) for my target countries.   I had to be sure that this exercise was as realistic as possible given the static dates that were chosen.  From this creative solution I caught multiple minute force structure and number discrepancies that would not have been as clear otherwise.  In so doing, I was able to save credibility of the exercise when it came to the scrutiny of an actual running class as well as many man hours searching through for these discrepancies after the fact.   This also allowed me to ensure that I could confidently hand over this finished product to the military for validation and official release as an exercise that would be utilized according the military training standards across the Air Force.  I was also able to come up with number and force structure cheat sheets for the instructors to utilize for the beginning and end of each exercise day so that the instructors were able to adequately gauge the status of their students’ ability to keep track of what was going on in the exercise and better assess their finalized briefings.

Pregnant me about a month before my son was born

Letter Writing: Old Fashioned Romantic Gestures

I have a few fairly old fashioned tastes when it comes to what I want from a man and a relationship. One of these things is that I want a man who will take the thought and time to send me an actual handwritten letter, and send it through the mail with *gasp* an actual stamp. I find that I can eliminate a LOT of suitors with this one simple request. Their response to this request tells me a LOT about them. I get a lot of excuses such as; "I hate writing" "I have bad handwriting" "I could do it in a couple of months when I have more free time" "I don't have time for stuff like that" "I don't have any stamps or envelopes", etc. If you can't take the time to do something as simple as write me a letter, than I must not mean very much to you. If you cannot take the time to some something so simple and thoughtful and personal than you aren't very serious about wanting to court me. There is only one person who has actually said that they would write to me.... I find this sad, but also hopeful that all is not lost in the hopes of real love.

Another reason why letters mean so much to me is that when my parents got divorced, my mother gave me all of the letters that my dad wrote to her when he was away at college before they got married talking about how much he loved her and me and I can't read them without crying. I also have her journals from when she was younger and those are some of my most priceless possessions, along with photos. I have boxes that I take with me everywhere of every letter that anyone has ever written to me from middle school until now. The written word is so amazing. Somehow you take more time to think when you actually wrote on paper than you do on a computer or through text. It takes that extra thought to know that what you are writing will be there on paper forever.

I know that I wrote more before being a mother and now I have sucked at it in the written form, I have been documenting a lot electronically, but that could all go away one day. I keep buying journals that I want to fill the pages of, I have them next to my bed, I used them for dream journals and late night thoughts but I bought a bunch of fun new colored pens so that I can have even more incentive to write more. I need to get on it myself. I need to print out more pictures for Liam to have and to post up around the house and to have actual REAL photo albums for Liam to look through. 

Taking Things For Granted: Socks and My Sister

Today I was listening to a bunch of stories going around a room and there was one by a man who had been sitting quietly and decided to share his recent experience.  He was talking about how his bicycle had been broken and so he went to buy a replacement one as well as a pair of shoes (just your basic generic brand name shoes and some doctor prescribed socks).  He started adding everything up and realized that he did not have enough money to get anything and had to put the socks back because he had to have the bike for transportation and needed the shoes to be able to ride the bike, so the socks would have to be left behind.  Instead of feeling sad about this, he instead felt very thankful that he was able to afford the bicycle because he could not work or function without some form of transportation.  He was feeling joy at this gift in life.

I was sitting there listening to this story and it touched me to my very core.  I couldn't hold back my tears to even think about it.  I sit here and worry about so many stupid little things and this man can't even buy socks to wear with his shoes.  And he is happy for what he can afford instead, and feeling very thankful.  I was shamed that I could ever be living in a state that was not in constant gratitude because I have SO very much in life.  I know that I do my best to be thankful for all that I have when I can think on the times that I would have been happy with a quarter of what I have.  I wasn't needing anything for Christmas, I was so thankful to be able to give Liam what I could and was truly feeling bad that I could not provide more for him this year with all that has happened.  Although I have had my fair share of curve balls thrown at me, especially in this past year I have somehow managed to make it day by day, week by week, month by month, until here we are looking at a new year.  I have no idea how I have managed to afford some of the things that I have had to pay for, and I just send my thanks and my blessings out to the universe and am in gratitude for all of the amazing help that I receive in each moment.  I am so blessed that I only have to work one job to provide for my son, and that I am able to see him and spend time with him and feel comfortable in where he spends his day in the hours that we have to be apart.
I was overcome with thoughts of my sister more than anything.  I love my sister, I always have and I always will, but goodness knows we are polar opposites in almost everything in life.  we have lived together off and on since she was about 16 years old.  There have been good times, there have been bad times.  Somehow we always find a way to smile and joke and laugh our way back to happy times.  I know that in the last year and two I have been hard on her.  I am always making her mad for "trying to be her mother and not her sister."  I wish I knew how to be different with her.  I try really hard to be a better sister.  I am maternal at heart but I always think of her as one of my best friends.  I love her through thick and thin.  I was thinking about the stupid things that I have been mad at her for in the past and the things that we argue about and I felt so incredibly ashamed for some of the ways that I want my sister's thinking to be different than what it is.  For wanting her to see things through someone else's eyes.  I have always tried to push my own life's lessons onto her instead of really accepting her as who she is, no matter how hard it can be to watch.  I know that I worry about her more as a mom than a sister sometimes, I know that I can be the overbearing overprotective sister, I am the "party pooper" and the boring one.  I hate to see my sister in any pain at all, I always wish that I could take it all away and feel it for her and just see her be happy and free in life all of the time.  I have shamefully been envious of my sister at times.  I have felt that there was unfair advantages given to her for things that I worked so hard for so long to achieve.  I have wanted things to be "fair" to have been given the same punishments when growing up.  Whereas I would accept whatever punishment was given to me and serve it out, finding a way to own it and do what I wanted to do anyway, my sister would argue for days and get off virtually free in my eyes.  It was hard growing up seven years apart and having our own unique generation gap.  Somehow this man's story about socks made me think about all of these things and more.  I just sat there ashamed at myself for not being the sister that my own sister deserved to have.  I just wanted to break down and cry, as I am while I write this.  I just wanted to hug my sister and beg for her forgiveness to tell her that nothing in the past mattered that the only thing that mattered in life was that she was my sister and I loved her with all of my heart.  Although I did get to see my sister later in the day it was amidst chaos and I was able to convey at lest part of this message to her and hug her and tell her that I was truly sorry.  I am so thankful for that opportunity even if the emotions I felt then and that I feel now have no comparison in words....

To end the man's story he went to check out and before leaving the store, he was stopped by someone who handed him a shopping bag, inside of the bag was the pair of socks that he was unable to afford, and he was simply told that someone had purchased them for him.  He eyes filled with tears as he told this part, and I felt like I must be the most selfish person in the room.  I wanted to go out and buy everyone socks and hide out in stores to watch what people put back and anonymously buy them for them when they seem unable to get it themselves.  I wanted to give away so many of Liam's toys to someone who could better use them in mass amounts.  (I am still in search of a needy family for this purpose). 

Anyway to sum up this post, I just wanted to share how this man's story effected my way of thinking and my emotions and hope that maybe even one person can read it and feel the need to act as well. 
For after all this is the season for loving and giving to those in need.

My beautiful sister and I