StinkFight.com

You don’t need to buy Adobe Acrobat Distiller to make PDFs. CutePDF is an AWESOME freeware PDF utility, with no crapware. Info and download link here. Direct small download here. Supports Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista (x32/x64).

You install it, then you can “print” a GREAT looking PDF document directly from Microsoft Word or any other program that has a “print” option. You can export Word docs, make eBooks, even make a PDF of a webpage. (Click here for the PDF I made of this page while I was in “post-writing” admin mode.)

I almost think that it looks better than PDFs made from Distiller, at least with the one-click settings in CutePDF. (Acrobat has many many deep menus for changing various things, I’ll still use that for outputting books to send to the printer. But CutePDF opens faster, renders faster, and looks better for simple things like a book proposal or a business letter.)

You click on “print” from whatever program you’re in, then you have to pick “CutePDF writer” from your drop-down list of “printers.”

This is my old office, in my bedroom, which I use for everything: audio, video, writing, video production, etc.

We call this room “the radio shack.”

Below is my new office, in the spare bedroom, which I use only for writing my new book. Bought a new computer just for the book.

We call this room “Disco Placid” after the character on CSI. And I totally dig this new lamp. It’s from Ikea, and uses 20 light-emitting diodes. It’s low energy and the perfect color and brightness to work under.

(The second photo makes a great desktop.)

By the way, I sent a pitch for my book out to some high-end self-help literary agents. One said she’d like to see the full proposal and sample chapters. Working on that now.

I came up with a better title for my new book: A User’s Manual for the Human Experience. The book has evolved in scope past the old title, and that certainly nails it better than Practical Emotional Self-Defense to Live and Work Smarter. The book is a movement waiting to happen. It will change the world for the better more than anything I’ve ever done. I’m writing it now, and it’s great.

My plan is to write it, edit it, self-publish it on demand and sell paperback copies on Amazon. I also plan to release the text of the book and eBook under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Attribution license, so people can copy, remix and share it. Since I want the message to spread, I will release the eBook for free on BitTorrent via PirateBay and Greylodge. I will also encourage people to do translations into other languages and give away eBooks of the translated version.

I like the “Gift Economy” idea of making the text available electronically, but selling the treeware version will allow me the possibility of making some money on a project I will have dedicated a full year to creating. I will also sell T-shirts and mugs and such, and audiobooks.

After the book is released, I will record and edit a very high-quality audiobook of Debra Jean reading the book (with me reading the “Closing Arguments” chapter). In recognition of the amount of work involved in this, I plan to retain copyright ownership of the master recordings of the audio book. May try to find a distributor for the audiobook.

The entire audiobook will be available on data DVD for about 8 bucks ppd. Much more reasonable than corporation-marketed prices, but still enough that I’d make a few bucks on each one. I’ll also try to leverage the whole thing into speaking engagements. I’ll pull every favor I can from everyone I know to blog, mention and push it, because it’s more than a book, it’s something huge, something that could help every human on the planet.

My release of DIY or DIE was my invention for alternative publication before I had even heard of CC. The film was copyrighted, but in the licensing of the DVD I allowed people to make 10 copies for friends, and allowed each of those ten people to make 10 copies. I also sell the DVD cheap, eight bucks.

The DIY or DIE DVD was the first instance of a commercial media product being released under copyright but giving users express permission to make non-commercial copies. The DVD was also released with no copy protection, and no region encoding.

As for my new book, if anyone has additional “business plan” ideas for how to spread the creamy goodness to the world, I’m open to it.

I just e-mailed the below letter to President Obama. I sent copies to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Diane Feinstein, Senator Barbara Boxer, Congressman Henry Waxman, California State Senator Fran Pavley and California state Representative Julia Brownley.

Here’s a link to make it easier to find and e-mail your reps:
http://www.capwiz.com/nra/dbq/officials/

Subject: The Second Amendment is an individual right

Dear President Obama,

I am reading a very well researched book that I highly recommend to you. I think that you, as a lawyer, a defender of the Constitution, and a lover of American History, would find it an enjoyable read.

It’s called “The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms” by constitutional attorney Stephen P. Halbrook. It traces the actual intent of the Founding Fathers and proves, by citation of letters, speeches and newspaper articles from that era, that the Founders meant The Second Amendment as an individual right.

The argument is effectively resolved in the book’s introduction:

“The ‘right of the people’ as used in the First, Second and Fourth Amendments are contrasted with such phrases as ‘the militia, when in actual service’ in the Fifth Amendment and with the powers ‘reserved to the states respectively’ in the Tenth Amendment.”

The book then continues with 420 pages of proof that the Second Amendment was meant as an individual right. It also contains a large amount of information on the racist roots of gun control in America, how some of the earliest gun laws were to prevent blacks from protecting themselves against men who wanted to see them back in chains again.

On that subject, I’d also like to recommend that you read the book “Black Man with a Gun” by Reverend Kenneth Blanchard. It’s a wonderful work by a great American patriot who is deeply religious. That book also addresses the Biblical precedent of the right to bear arms for self-defense.

I wish you a wonderful presidency, I welcome that America has come full circle and elected an African American. Race as a non-issue is long overdue.

As a citizen, I urge you please not to promote or endorse any bills that will restrict the Second Amendment as an individual right of non-criminal citizens to freely own, bear, and lawfully use guns, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which you promised to preserve, protect and defend in your Oath of Office.

Respectfully, Michael W. Dean

P.S. Aretha Franklin was wonderful. Thank you for bringing some heart to the presidency.

(Also see: Open letter to our new president”)

—-

The Second Amendment is an individual right!

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

(The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States)

The party line among gun-grabbers is that the Second Amendment is a collective right, that it refers to the states’ rights to maintain a militia. The party line of intelligent gun owners, such as myself, is that it is an individual right.

I am reading a very well researched book called The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms by Stephen P. Halbrook. It traces the actual intent of the Founding Fathers and proves, by citation of letters, speeches and newspaper articles from that era, that the Founders meant it as an individual right.

The argument is effectively solved in the book’s introduction:

The “right of the people” as used in the First, Second and Fourth Amendments are contrasted with such phrases as “the militia, when in actual service” in the Fifth Amendment and with the powers “reserved to the states respectively” in the Tenth Amendment.”

Then the book goes on for 420 pages more proof that the Second Amendment is an individual right, if anyone still has their doubts.

The Second Amendment is very much in danger as of yesterday. Obama is surrounding himself with gun haters from the Clinton administration, and putting them in place at the highest levels - including his chief of staff (Rohm Emanuel), attorney general (Eric Holder) and secretary of state (Hilary Clinton).

I’m worried about Obama’s appointees, on many levels. And does any one besides me find it specious that Hilary hated Obama when they were running against each other, and now they’re best buds? And how about Obama appointing Timothy Geithner in charge of the treasury? The guy who does his taxes with Quicken and then forgets to pay them? Any CPA working in a storefront would be a better bet. Hell, at least I go to a CPA and then pay what I owe. Didn’t anyone in Obama’s administration check this guy out?

I have a friend who recently tried out for a reality TV show. He underwent immense amounts of background checks from the channel producing the show.

I find it a disturbing world where reality TV vets its contestants more thoroughly than the president vets the guy in charge of all the money in America.

I’m going to start doing something I’ve never done: writing my legislative representatives regularly, and encouraging others to do so. Will probably get me on a list, and maybe a knock on my door, but I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m just an American trying to work “within the system” while that’s still possible.

Do most people even know who their representatives are? I do. And all of mine are very anti-Second Amendment. Here’s a link to make it easier to find and e-mail your reps.

(That link can be used for writing your reps about anything, not just about the Second Amendment or the president’s poor choices of staff, which are the two things that I wrote to them about tonight.)

OK, OK, I’d rather work than hack….

So, I pussed out and deleted Puppy Linux from the “System Tray of life.”

I had this great idea to get an old IBM ThinkPad laptop, remove the hard drives, install an internal USB drive running Puppy, and write my new book on it. Was also approved by Make Magazine to write an article on this process. Sadly, the article will not be written. Here’s why….

Here’s me inside the old ThinkPad:

ThinkPads are well made, and are easy to take apart. The manual tells you how. They’re made for scientists, not grandmas. Want proof? Here’s a 2004 NASA photo from Wikipedia of a cosmonaut with “Several ThinkPads in use aboard the International Space Station”:

The one he’s using is the exact one I bought for 200 bucks on eBay.

It was all going well until I spilled hot solder on the motherboard and ruined it. I threw the 200 laptop in the trash, and immediately drove to Circuit City and bought a brand new HP Pavilion with 4 gigs of RAM running (gasp) Windows Vista.

Vista had a LOT of problems at first rollout, but the big update pack (which is already in my version) fixed most of it, including providing drivers that weren’t there in the first rollout. That’s how Microsoft does things. They sell you a shiny new broken car, then fix it later for free (while you’re trying to drive it).

The very young, slightly rude salespeople at Circuit City, who were probably selling shoes last month, kept trying to upsell me, hard. They could not understand that someone would rather have a less expensive model with a nice keyboard click than a fancier model with an output for high-def TV monitor. I finally told the kid, “I’m going to buy a laptop within the next half hour. I know exactly what I’m looking for. I do not need your help, and I know far more about computers than you. I’ll come find you when I’m ready, so you can ring it up and get your commission. He said “We don’t get commission any more” and walked away. (I forgot, they fired all the knowlegable sales people nationwide to save money, and hired people off the street at minimum wage, and replaced commissions with quotas.)

I hated Vista before, and it still doesn’t run all my programs (I still have them running on my other laptop, which is running XP, and is set up to a monitor). I know I said I’d never use Vista. But if you turn off all the flashy bullshit that Vista has to try to make it look like a Mac, it runs screamingly fast. (Here’s a great tutorial on doing that.) Because the hardware needed to run Vista with all that stuff is powerful. So if you turn it all off, it’s great. I also like that Vista has true sleep mode, which is great for the way I write. I often write in bursts of 15-20 minutes, get up and do something else, then come back, write five minutes, get up, come back, write an hour, etc. Sleep mode enables me to have long battery life while doing that all over the house (or outside, when weather gets nicer.)

I also set it up to look like Win 98, which is easier, and uses less memory. (Right click on Start, go to Properties/Classic Start Menu.)

I love that everything is one click, not two, in Vista. I think they’re even imitating Linux with that, but I’ve always wondered, “Why two clicks? it’s a waste of my energy, it adds up, and it hurts my hands with my 2 million clicks a year.” (By the way, MouseCount runs well on Vista.)

Computer was only $750. Damn computers are getting better and faster and cheaper. I skipped getting the three-year extended warranty (for $350 bucks), partly because I replace my computers about every year, and partially because in this economy, Circuit City is likely to be out of business in three years.

I really do have the new laptop set up only to write my next book, which I plan being a bestseller. Did set it up for the Internet, but only to search web for research, and to FTP backups to a hidden folder on a website. Only other program I put on it is Microsoft Word 2003 (the best version of it. It reached perfection at that point, and never got better.

Also, one thing that would have made writing my book on Puppy Linux harder was the fact that the word processor, AbiWord, has a bug that makes the “find” function crash, and then you have to re-open the program. I use “find” constantly in my writing, due to the way I write. I sort of just start writing ideas, then go back and move them around and expand on them. I have to be able to find certain ideas, based on words in them, quickly in order to do that.

I did bring one thing over from Puppy Linux, and some Linux people may consider putting this on a Vista box as heresy, but I love the Puppy desktop art so much, I brought it over.

So - here’s my streamlined “write-one-best-seller-only” desktop, with only four icons:

I still think Puppy Linux is a great thing, but I need the right tools for the job.

Here’s an unrelated but nifty photo of our cats. It’s rare that Charlie (the middle one) puts up with the squittens being this close to her, so I had to document it for the ages:

(This started as a comment I was going to post on this thread, but I decided it was blogworthy in and of itself.):

Jeff Jones wrote:

When I first discovered you, I was impressed with the way you approached art. It was a totally different creative mindset to me.

My reply:

One thing is that when I’m not writing on a schedule for pay (like I did with the YouTube book), and when I’m working alone on a project (like the “lady book” or my new self-help book), I pretty much only work when I’m manic.

I’m not manic/depressive, I’m manic/sleepy. I’ll go four or five days of sleeping only about 5 hours a night and working intensely in a manic phase, then sleep 8 or 9 hours a night and mostly watch TV and surf the Web. (I can spend 8 hours falling down link holes on Wikipedia alone!)

At the moment I’m in the sleepy state, and I’m actually feeling a tiny bit guilty because I’m not working on the book, even though I KNOW this is how I work. I have to remind myself of that sometimes.

And often in the sleepy phase, I take a lot of notes that I’ll expand on later in the current project when I’m back to the manic phase. Something I’ll see on TV or in the newspaper will remind me of something that I saw when I was young, and I’ll make a note to put that idea into the new book, and it works out great.

I’ve got eight? Nine? published books under my belt. I can’t even remember how many, I’d have to count. If I KNEW without counting, I’d be resting on my laurels. The first one was published in 2000. So I’ve done more than one a year for eight years, in addition to making two films in that time, and doing five podcasts, traveling the US and Europe showing films, and I can’t even remember what else. I don’t even count the four blogs I’ve maintained, that’s just spillover. So I KNOW this new book will get finished, and I know it will happen in the next 12 months, probably much sooner.

I’ve spent the last week amassing notes, outlines, pitches, e-mails I’ve written to people and such for the self-help book. I’ve got a folder on my desktop with 120,000 words of my writing. Probably half of that will make it into this book. The target length for this book is 70,000 words, so I’ve already written most of it. The job now is making it coherent. Which brings up another quote of mine “Everything that can be done, has been done. Being a great artist today consists simply of being a great editor.”

Another thing I have to remember is that some constant work over a long time line beats working constantly to the point where I get burned out and abandon a project.

Something I heard in a long time ago that I really like is “Trust the process.” If your process is true, you can trust it to work.

MWD

I don’t really believe in “New Year’s Resolutions.” They don’t work. People go back on them by January 20th, if not sooner. Things only work when you make a “daily resolution” each day. (Like how AA members don’t drink “one day at a time.”)

My main new “one day at a time” goal this year, however, is to stop doing so much free art (I’ve done more than enough) and put that energy to making enough money for us to retire (or at least for DJ to quit her day job). We want to buy some land somewhere we cannot hear our neighbors, where we can shoot guns off our porch, and not see anyone when we don’t feel like it. I don’t just mean not visit anyone, I mean not SEE anyone. That takes at least 30 acres, and that ain’t cheap.

To accomplish this goal, I’m going to need to write a few bestseller books. I’ve never written one, but really think I can now. And I can write one that delivers what it promises. It’s not just a desire to “write something to sell”, it’s a desire to write something that’s so valuable to people that it WILL sell.

My next book is called “Practical Emotional Self-Defense” (PESD), it’s about dealing with idiots. I think it’s going to be “a winner.”

I’ve started about five books I haven’t finished in the past year (and did finish two books in that time, which are both out in the world now.)

None of those “failed” attempts are really failures. They were trial runs and research for this book.

It’s all good.

MWD

(and this post is going IN the book. It’s just that kind of book!)

Happy new year! (we slept through midnight, I’m up starting my new year now.)

I tried Puppy Linux on my laptop, it’s pretty amazing. Runs from a flash drive, can do a lot, including graphics, web, e-mail, word processing and photography.

I just bought this 200-dollar laptop on eBay. Bought it from a seller with nothing but positive feedback. It’s a Working IBM Thinkpad A31 Laptop,1.6Ghz, WiFi, 15″ LCD, CD-RW, 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and a USB port.

I’m going to install Puppy and use it to write my next book. My next book is called “Practical Emotional Self-Defense”, it’s about dealing with idiots, and it’s going to make me a millionaire. Mark my words. (I don’t believe in New Years resolutions, but how’s that for a plan. And we’re four hours into the new year, and I’ve already written 3000 words of the new book.)

Puppy Linux is a mindblowingly cool operating system, and easy as pie to use. I’ve always been afraid of Linux, thinking “Windowz works well enough, why bother?” But Puppy is no bother. It works BETTER than Windowz.

Puppy is free, and it will turn a slow older Windows machine into a fast little writing tool. The whole OS, with a bunch of programs, is only 90 megs! (as opposed to the 8000 megs of Windows with no programs). You can even run it entirely loaded into memory, from a CD ROM.

Yay! Happy new puppy hobby for the new year!
I have a friend who’s working her way through college, she’s smart and geeky, but under employed. I suggested to her that she buy lots of older working laptops with no OS (you can find them on eBay for like 50 bucks sometimes if you buy five or ten of them), install and configure Puppy, and sell them for a small profit to help with college expenses. She might do it. And that’s permitted in the Puppy license. The Puppy Linux website even has a link for people who sell pre-configured Pup boxes, though I didn’t see any who were doing it with laptops, just desktop computers.