Windows 7 Sound Recording Using Goldwave and Power Mixer

For these many long years The Git has been using Goldwave to both record and edit sound files on his PC. Goldwave is very easy to use compared to other software of its ilk that The Git has tried out, is inexpensive to purchase and has never, ever failed to perform flawlessly over the decade and a half or more he has used it. Goldwave’s creator promised to never charge for upgrades and also allows the end user to have it installed on more than one machine providing only one copy is in active use at a time.

The only fly in the ointment occurred when using Goldwave running on Windows 7. The Git records vinyl records to the media PC in the main living area, then transfers the raw sound files to his main working PC for editing. There’s a “brief” description of the process at the end of this post. Playing the raw file in Goldwave produced a bizarre parody of the original sound; it was at a much higher pitch and sounded as though it had been heavily modified on a Fairlight CMI! Playing the same file using Foobar 2000 produced the sounds expected. Fortunately, Goldwave’s excellent FAQ led to the offending setting in Windows 7 that was the cause of the problem and all was well with the world — well, almost.

When using Windows XP, you can constantly display the recording level controls and adjust the levels in real time. This is not possible in Windows 7. The recording level setting is nested several dialog boxes deep: Control Panel, Hardware and Sound, Manage audio devices, Select the Recording tab tab, Select the Line-in device, Click the Properties button, Select the Line-in tab and you can finally adjust the recording level. It seems that Microsoft has determined to stymie its users’ use of Windows for sound recording!

Fortunately, there’s a neat shareware tool called Power Mixer that you can run either as an application, or a service. It provides an uncluttered window with your playback and recording level controls all neatly displayed for immediate use. It’s free for a 14 day trial and $US18 to purchase, though look at their discount offers before buying. As well as solving The Git’s problem, it allows you to save your settings to be invoked at the press of a hot key. Very useful when you have multiple sound sources that have widely differing sound levels. It’s arguable that Microsoft’s implementation of the mixer in Windows XP was more than good enough for general use and should have been continued in Windows Vista and 7. The Gittish POV is that paying $US18 to save endless farting about with deliberately crippled controls is a bargain, but then even in retirement, The Git’s time is worth significantly more than $US18/hr.

Digitising Vinyl Records

(originally posted on the old blog on 17 April 2007)

The Git has a rather fine collection of vinyl records, mainly from the 1970s, and he has been converting them to digital format. Why would he bother doing that? Many of these recordings have not been released on CD, or weren’t when The Git transcribed them. Quite often, when one of these old recordings is released on CD, it has been remastered and all too often remastered horribly. Some, like Electronique Guerilla’s first album, are quite expensive to purchase on CD. Here is how the transcription process works from a very Gittish point of view.

First, you need a turntable. The Git’s old Jim Sugden turntable died some time ago, so it was replaced by the serviceable and far from expensive modern equivalent from Pro-Ject. It came with a carbon fibre tone arm and Ortofon OM-5 cartridge, though The Git had the supplier replace the latter with his Audio Technica moving coil cartridge. This may have been a mistake. When it came time to replace the worn stylus, the cartridge needed to be removed and sent away for the stylus to be replaced. Since there was a backlog of disks to be transcribed, The Git researched which reasonable quality cartridge to purchase as an inexpensive replacement. It turned out that the Ortofon was much more than good enough and remarkably inexpensive.

Next you need to get the signal from the turntable into your computer. Vinyl records were made with a limited bass signal and a high level of higher frequencies. Restoring the signal to a flat frequency response (RIAA compensation) can be performed by your recording software, but it’s not generally recommended. The Git purchased a Pro-Ject pre-amplifier that can accept either moving magnet, or moving coil input. There are cheaper and higher quality versions and The Git chose the former. The results are more than good enough for his old ears. Unlike the ears of some of his friends, they have not been severely damaged by Neil Young concerts so the chances are good you don’t need to shell out the extra dollars. It’s your call.

Few people appreciate that moving a stylus around in a wiggly vinyl groove generates some remarkably high forces. It softens the vinyl sufficiently for each play to create permanent distortion in the form of increased high frequency content even at very low tracking forces. Any particle of dust caught between the record and the stylus creates major permanent damage at that point and results in a click, or pop. So, cleaning the record before transcription is very important. The Git’s budget doesn’t stretch to a vacuum cleaning system. First, he rinses the record thoroughly before very gently scrubbing the record with a very soft old toothbrush dipped in dilute non-ionic detergent. The idea here isn’t to reach into the grooves with the bristles, but to have them flicking about on the high points of the vinyl, hopefully generating turbulent suds to swish any gritty particles out of the grooves. Since the results are extremely gratifying sonically, The Git assumes that what he is doing is much better than doing nothing, or merely brushing the record with a carbon fibre brush. Some pundits will be horrified, but The Git expects that he won’t be playing these records again any time soon. Finally, the record is thoroughly rinsed in clean water. You may need to use distilled, or deionised water. The Git’s water supply leaves no visible residue.

Very stubborn, waxy residues on records require the addition of a small amount of methylated spirit to the detergent solution. It’s likely that this will also remove some of the vinyl plasticiser that keeps the vinyl flexible, so it’s probably a good idea not to use this unless strictly necessary.

The Git has a couple of document racks to hold the records while any excess water evaporates. The bulk of the water is removed by dabbing with a clean cotton handkerchief that has seen better days.

The Git was hoping to use his Mac to do some recording, but the software accompanying the iMic USB sound adaptor, Final Vinyl, produced weird results. When opening the resultant WAV file on his PC for editing, he discovered that the sound was mono, rather than stereo and half-speed. As well, the recording level controls were far too small and fiddly to use. The Git has been using Goldwave for sound recording on his PC for several years now. The supplier has been true to his word and never charged for upgrades. The Git has had no problem creating and modifying sound files using Goldwave, though he has on occasion evaluated other software.

If you are old enough to have recorded copies of vinyl records to audio cassette, or reel-to-reel tape, you will remember having to keep the recording level high enough to keep tape noise to a minimum, yet not to saturate the tape. An occasional excursion of signal level into the non-linear area of tape response might pass unnoticed, but overloading a digital recording creates awful sounds that can be ignored by no-one. There is no significant noise floor you are trying to keep the recorded signal above in a digital recording, so there’s no pressing need to keep the signal peaks as high as possible. A recording that’s a bit too “quiet” can have its volume increased after it’s recorded.

The recording leaves you with a 30-50 minute long sound file that needs some treatment before it’s ready for commitment to CD, or other format. First, the beginning of the file needs to be snipped where the stylus was placed in the run-in groove. A cue is then placed at the beginning of the file with the name of the first track. The name can be anything you like, but if you are going to be storing the files to be read by a computer, the song title is a good idea. If the results are to be stored as an audio CD, it can be any arbitrary string as the software can automatically number the tracks in sequence. For example, The Git labelled the cue point of the first track of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme ”Acknowledgement” (without the quotes). Each section is demarked by labelled cue points, the middle portion when the record was turned over snipped as well as the end of the sound file. When all this is done, the software is instructed to split the file at the cue points into separately labelled files, one for each track. Using the previous example, the first track of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme became “01 Acknowledgement.wav”.

Having created the separate wave files, they could then be used by Nero Burning ROM (for example) to directly create an audio CD. Chances are though that the sound needs some titivating first. It’s worth bearing in mind that you have by now invested more time than the time it took to play the record. You are a little over a third to halfway to the end of the process. Before manipulating the sound files, you should consider storing them in their current form. If you later decide to re-titivate the files, you don’t want to go all the way back to the beginning of the process. Windows WAV files contain a considerable amount of redundant information, so they can be compressed to save on storage space. Instead of PKZIP, or your other favourite file compressor, you can use either Monkey’s Audio, or FLAC so that you can play the resultant sound file with suitable plug-ins. The Git will have more to say about audio compression later in this piece.

The main distortions in the recording that we can do something about are:

• pops and clicks
• crackle
• tape hiss

Pops and clicks are caused by major groove damage. Fortunately, the waveform of pops and clicks are distinctive and the software is capable of analysing the recording and either removing them completely, or diminishing them to a level where they are no longer a distraction. You decide the responsiveness of the software to the pops and clicks, either accepting the default, or changing the sensitivity. The more vigorous your declicking and depopping, the more you affect the overall music quality. The Git usually goes with the default setting in Goldwave as it is not over-zealous in its effect. Any major clicks, he removes manually before the automatic process.

To remove a click manually requires zooming in on the offending portion of the signal. A segment of the signal immediately adjacent to the click is copied to the clipboard, then pasted over the click. Obtaining a satisfactory result requires a little practice and occasionally, a final tweak of the signal. The signal trace can be moved by pointing at it with the mouse cursor and holding down the left mouse button and dragging. Practice makes perfect here.

The Git only decrackles an occasional recording, such as Little Stevie Wonder’s The 12 Year Old Genius. Yes, The Git is that old Decrackling has even more of an effect on the wanted music than declicking/depopping. Removing tape hiss more damaging still to the underlying sound. However, it is up to you how much cleaning up of your recordings is needed.

The Finished Product

Once you have your finished files, its time to play them. Of course you can play them as-is, but WAV files are somewhat bulkier than they need be. When playing them on the computer, it makes more sense to compress them so that they consume less disk space. There are two sorts of compression: lossy and lossless. There would be few who have not heard about lossy compression CODECs for music. While there are several sorts, the most common is MP3. Unfortunately, this entails removing some of the “unnecessary” musical information in order to make the file size smaller. This is fine on a low-fidelity playback system, but it degrades the music noticeably on a hi-fi even if you lack Golden Ears.

Lossless compression, on the other hand loses no musical information. A player with the appropriate CODEC will play the compressed file with no loss in fidelity. There are two such CODECs that The Git knows of: Monkey’s Audio and FLAC. Monkey’s Audio is Windows only while FLAC is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux. Here’s a comparison of file sizes using John and Beverley Martyn’s song, Primrose Hill:

Original WAV file	31,089 KB
FLAC (level 7)	16,930 KB
Monkey’s Audio (extra high)	16,581 KB
MP3 (320 Kbps)	7,053 KB

Monkey’s Audio and FLAC have varying levels of compression, with the higher rates taking longer to compress files than the lower rates. In each instance for the comparison, The Git chose the second highest as a compromise between time and space-saving. The highest level takes a fair while longer, especially when compressing multiple files, for a diminished rate of space saving. The MP3 is the highest quality lossy compression available and shows dramatically greater space saving, albeit at a noticeable loss of fidelity. dBPoweramp Music Converter is the “Swiss Army Knife” of file converters for the audio enthusiast allowing conversion between a large number of different file formats.

The Git is storing his sound files on a USB external hard disk connected to a Core-Solo Toshiba notebook purchased specifically for playing music. The internal sound card leaves somewhat to be desired in quality of output. The iMic external USB sound adapter, originally purchased for recording on the Mac Mini, also has a very low output requiring the power amplifier gain control to be advanced near to its maximum. A Soundblaster external USB sound adapter has been on order for some weeks now, but has failed to make an appearance yet.

For playing the sound files, The Git is using a minimalist application called Foobar. Foobar has replay gain support, but more than 6dB of gain causes distortion in the iMic. Hopefully, the output of the Soundblaster will be higher. Foobar beats any other sound player The Git has used into a cocked hat for simplicity and power. There should be more applications written so well. Using random track play of the whole music collection is a bit like having a radio station devoted to your musical tastes. Using random album play brings back memories of another life when The Git was a DJ who often played whole album sides.

Burning CDs from your audio files requires you to make a change in the burn settings. Nero and most other CD burning software automatically places a few seconds of silence between tracks. You will either need to turn that off, or eliminate your recorded silence from the audio files. Live recordings just run on produce unexpected silences between the songs if you don’t remember to change the burn setting.

Addendum

The external USB Soundblaster worked well as expected, though only briefly. Not so very long after this was originally written, The Git built a dedicated media machine with lots of hard disk space and a digital TV card driving a 32 inch LCD TV. While the software that came with the TV card flatly refused to work (Pinnacle TVCentre Pro), Windows Media Center mostly works like a charm. Very occasionally, it decides that there’s no signal from the TV aerial, though it mysteriously knows what channel it’s tuned to and the program that is playing. Sometimes, restarting Media Center fixes the problem, sometimes it takes a restart of the PC. Recently, both these techniques failed to work and so The Git reinstalled Windows 7 and relevant software and the problem has yet to reappear. It would appear that bit-rot is still a feature of Windows!

Problem Solved

Thanks to his friend Ray, a computer programmer, The Git now has his legitimate copy of FrontPage 2003. This is Good.

The responses from eBay/PayPal and Microsoft on the other hand are Not Good.

eBay/PayPal allow a purchaser to open a dispute. From the email sent by them in response to The Git’s email explaining the issue:

In  the  Resolution  Center  you  can:

*  Report  a  transaction  problem  and  communicate  directly  with  your  seller.

*  Respond  to  a  transaction  problem  and  communicate  with  your  buyer.

*  Resolve  an  account  limitation.

*  Report  unauthorized  account  activity.

*  Ask  us  to  investigate  a  transaction  problem

Unfortunately, this requires a Transaction ID and since The Git paid by credit card, he has no Transaction ID. Which is why he emailed eBay/PayPal. After The Git repeated himself, the message finally got through. The response now is “send us an email”. Duh! What does this idiot think I did?

Microsoft’s response started off well:

Dear Jonathan, Warm greetings from Microsoft Customer Service Australia and new [sic] Zealand.

but deteriorated. They suggest that I should have purchased the software from Microsoft, or one of their authorised resellers. This idiot doesn’t seem to know that neither Microsoft, nor any of their authorised resellers have the product for sale. Worse, at the head of the list of resellers is harvey Norman (aka Hardly Normal). Several years ago, The Git purchased a computer game from Hardly Normal for the Gitling. The software refused to install because it was labelled “For sale in the USA & Canada only”. The price sticker had been placed over this label so that it could not be read!

Upon returning to the store with the software, The Git was informed that all he had to do was change the computer’s Regional Settings to the USA, or Canada and all would be well. The Git told the sales idiot that all would not be well. Several of the Gitling’s applications were sensitive to Regional Settings changes (Excel for example). What The Git wanted was software for the Australian market, not greyware. The sales idiot responded that all of Hardly Normal’s software was greyware, putting paid to The Git buying anything from that store again. Microsoft, it seems, would prefer us to purchase greyware, rather than legitimate software.

Fortunately, eBay/Paypal eventually saw sense and The Git’s $60 was refunded.

“It’s turned out nice again!” — George Formby

Inventing One’s Own Reality

Back in the 1970s my friends and I mostly had very long hair and often, while doing what people with very long hair did in those days, we talked about moving back to the land as an ideal way of life. I remember that one summer several did. And all returned early in the ensuing winter. Well, almost all.

The end of the decade found me broke and contemplating Living the Good Life. I had always more or less carefully tailored my income to maximise my leisure-time. Leisure to me was eating gourmet food, including at restaurants (where my long hair was not always appreciated), buying and reading good books, and conversation with people who could think through things rather than merely air their prejudices and fornication.

My source of income at the time was painting landscape pictures to compete with the sterile prints sold in department stores. My long haired friends went from door-to-door selling the paintings and gaining an occasional commission for a painting from a favourite photograph. They also sold prints of my pen and ink drawings. (You can grab one here, though be warned, they look much better printed than on-screen.) The sales staff paid me for what they sold, keeping the balance in their pockets.

The sales staff kept approximately 30-35% of the money taken and each week I paid bonuses to the top salesman or woman. And that person sometimes made more than I did as I had considerable manufacturing costs. That didn’t bother me in the least. I was making several times per hour than I had as a clerk, and above all, I was happy. We were all working less hours than the ordinary Joes, approximately twenty hours per week in my case. I was particularly happy with the business model: everyone was in control of their own income.

Occasionally, sales would create demand for pictures beyond my capacity to provide, so I would pay wages to someone to help make the canvases. These were manufactured from reject linen table cloths from a laundry glued to plywood and painted with gesso and were very much cheaper than the canvas panels sold by the art suppliers. The prints were mounted on acid-free mat boards imported in bulk from the mainland.

Not everyone was happy, however. Some people were incapable of understanding how to sell the paintings. The sales staff were in essence entertainers competing with television. If the evening’s TV shows were popular, like Starsky and Hutch, sales were down. If there was shite on TV, the reverse was true. Invariably, when sales records were broken, it was a Tuesday night! When given instruction, the people who couldn’t sell very many would say, “I couldn’t say/do that! I’d feel silly.” The instruction, by the way, wasn’t in the form of scripts — just general approaches that one had to weave into a personal approach. The best sales staff were very creative people, often talented artists or musicians. Many, if not most went on to bigger and better things.

Some of the unhappiness was in the “poor starving artist” community. While the poor starving artists waited forlornly for the world to beat a path to their door, The Git beat a path to the door of his clients, many of whom became repeat customers. (God, I would have given my eye teeth for a computerised system to replace the card file I used to track customers and paper spreadsheet to keep track of my costs!) The poor starving artists and people who couldn’t sell, or be bothered selling, became increasingly vocal in their opposition to my business. They declared that I was ripping off both the public and the sales staff.

Regarding the former, I introduced a cooling-off period before it was made law for door-to-door sales. The advantage to this is well illustrated by the following. The Git had accepted a commission to paint a picture of the Arthur River from a photograph. A week or so after the sale was consummated, Terry, who was particularly good at procuring commissions, phoned me: “The client’s unhappy with the painting, but it’s a commission”.

“Give him his money back and double the price,” The Git said. The painting had taken twice as long to complete as anticipated. Such things happen when you’re having fun!

Terry was delighted with the result! Fifteen minutes later, he sold the painting to the next door neighbour who was far from annoyed when he discovered what had happened. We have no idea what the person who commissioned the painting said when he discovered he could have doubled his money. Terry went on to co-own a chain of paharmacies Australia-wide after he finished his pharmacy degree. Here’s a picture of the fast version of Arthur River:

The image quality isn’t all that flash because of the camera flash in my phone.

I was losing my talented sales people to bigger and better things and finding it hard to recruit replacements. Hobart is a small community of only a couple of hundred thousand. Then disaster struck. My top three sales staff had taken my advice about drink driving and caught a cab after their Friday night celebration. The incompetent taxi driver rolled the cab, killing Kahm, breaking Andreas’s femur and Robert went into a 20 year depression as a result of Kahm dying in his arms.

Kahm was the most truly happy person we had ever met. His sister phoned and asked, “Was he laughing when he died?” Indeed he was. Kahm taught me one of the most important lessons of my life: Carpe diem! (seize the day).

The ensuing two years were a trial by fire, quite literally at times. My office/home/studio was attacked by an arsonist. The end of the decade found me wondering how I’d been suckered into “selling” $AU40,000 of my artwork to a company that immediately declared bankruptcy. I couldn’t pay my bills, so had to declare bankruptcy myself.

The business that cost me $AU300 to start and made $AU300 profit in its first five days was defunct. My wife had left me, having pocketed the last three months’ rent, and I sold my precious books for less than the four most expensive had cost me. The stamp collection returned considerably more and I managed to break even. I contemplated suicide.

One book I hadn’t read yet, I kept: Og Mandino’s The Greatest Miracle in the World. It saved my life; thanks Og, wherever you are! Ah, the power of the written word!

I still had one asset left and I decided to do something about it before my now ex-wife remembered it. We had a rather tasty collection of vintage wine and I commenced to drink it. A somewhat blurry few weeks later found me invited to a garden party by a long-time friend, Jane. As we walked along the street, I asked about the fifty dollar bill tucked between her breasts. “Oh, that’s for whoever proposes marriage to me,” she hinted. As usual, I ignored Jane’s hint, preferring her friendship to a life of mutual misunderstanding.

Also, I must have had a premonition. At the party was the most stunning woman I ever met. I don’t mean in the Hollywood Movie Star sense; it was something else. Not, I hasten to add that Marguerite is unlovely, just not boringly glamorous. Almost our first words to each other were: “Ain’t never getting married again”. It was four years before we eventually took that step.

Margie (usually SWMBO in my blogs) and I share an interest in gardening although mine was untested at that time. Curiously, I had picked up two issues of an organic gardening magazine while passing through airports that just happened to be the two missing from Margie’s collection. We decided that since I was likely to remain poor for the near future, that we would be better off living in the country. Finding just the right place took almost twelve months.

The farmlet we bought was a hovel on 10 acres of good, strong land. For two years I renovated the cottage and developed a small market garden almost entirely with hand tools. Only the initial ground-breaking was done with power machinery borrowed from neighbours. When Margie conceived The Gitling, we decided to plunge fully into “poverty” and she gave up her job in the city. Our frugal life was tough, but we frequently reflected on how sorry we felt for the poor “rich” people as we toasted each other with home-made wine, and ate a gourmet meal made entirely from food that we had grown for ourselves.

When we had dinner guests, they would invariably say: “That’s the best lamb we ever tasted”. It would amuse me to tell them that it wasn’t lamb — it was goat! But only after the meal was finished.

A particular friend, originally from America, took a trip back to the States around this time. He said that Thanksgiving was particularly hard to endure. His sister had proudly prepared the meal “from scratch”. This entailed instant mashed potatoes, frozen vegetables and frozen turkey. My friend said all he could think about was helping me slaughter the animal were were about to eat, and picking those peas, and dig those carrots, and it was all real food with real flavour.

I suspect, though this is verging perilously close to New Age bullshit, that food cooked with a wood fire is qualitatively different from that cooked with electricity. I can readily explain the flavour difference between organically grown versus conventional with hard science, but not the difference that the wood fire seems to have on the available energy from food so cooked.

When for several years I became a proselyte for the the organic farming movement, I would talk science to the farmers and agricultural scientists. But when I talked to consumers, I talked politics:

“If you grow your own potatoes, you have done several quite important things. You have removed the necessity to earn the dollars to buy those potatoes and if your income is subject to your control, you can then choose to pay less taxes. If, like me, you grew them organically, you have no need of the agrochemical inputs and so you have reduced the income of the agrochemical companies and in turn their taxes. You have had useful physical exercise that improves your health and so reduces the necessity to visit the doctor. You have saved transporting the potatoes from the farmer’s paddock, to the warehouse, to the supermarket and home, reducing the amount of fossil fuel burned. The most profoundly political act you can make is not to vote for Tweedle Dumb or Tweedle Dumber, or protest about what you can never control, but to grow your own food and take control of your own life.”

When asked about the certification of organic produce, Vermont’s Eliot Coleman said: “Get to know the first name of the person growing your food, then you won’t have to worry about how it’s grown”. A wise man.

When we took up our land and cottage in late January 1982 we were left almost penniless. Even though it cost us only $AU26,000 Marguerite had to borrow from the bank, remembering that I was still a bankrupt and therefore wasn’t able to borrow. Margie also owned a small block of land that she put up for sale, though that took several years to sell. The first priority after helping the neighbours fight bush fires, was to make a garden.

At the top end of the block, over a hundred metres from the cottage, there is a dam and immediately below that is where I made my first garden. The neighbours lent us a short length of PVC irrigation pipe to siphon water to the parched ground. We had arrived in the middle of a drought. I knew next to nothing about gardening excepting what I had read, but we managed to be moderately successful, and I began my writing career at this time. Grass Roots magazine paid me the princely sum of $AU5 per full page article and I think I managed to persuade Organic Gardening magazine to pay me occasionally too.

While I learned the gardening business, I discovered an excellent way of reducing demand on our income: brewing my own beer. While making beer from brew-kits was economical and pleasant, I set out to invent a way to extract my own malt from malted barley. The key to doing this is very careful temperature control and the usual method is with accurate, thermostatically controlled electric heating, and this was beyond our means. We purchased a very large stainless steel saucepan that justified its cost because of the wide variety of uses to which it would be put. At various times it has made stock from soup bones, jam, soup, ham and bacon among other things. Not just beer.

I made a giant “teapot cosy” for the saucepan using an old bedspread and worn out woollen pullovers. By pitching the cracked barley malt into water at the upper temperature range that the enzymes will tolerate, and leaving the saucepan snuggled up in the “teapot cosy”, conversion of the starch to maltose would complete overnight. Incomplete conversion leads to cloudy beer.

When I did a time and motion study, we were saving more than double the wage paid to labourers when I costed the beer at the same price as local normal beer. In fact, whenever we had a party, we noticed that the revellers invariably drank our beer and left the commercial beer they had brought with them. Boutique beer being double the price of normal means that in reality we were “earning” four times labourers’ wages and it was tax free. I was tempted by a wealthy friend to brew for him at normal pub prices, but the illegality of this prevented me taking him up on his kind offer.

Most of the labour cost of production was in bottle washing. Wine doesn’t need the secondary ferment to produce gas and froth that beer does, so I decided to make wine. We bottled approximately half the wine in a fermenter, and the other half we drank from the fermenter. Wine matures more rapidly in bulk than in bottles, so we usually had plenty of large food-quality plastic buckets with snap-on lids sitting quietly in the laundry. The wines were “country” wines: blackberry, rhubarb, red currant, black currant, elderberry, and plum. They have the happy characteristic of maturing more quickly than grape wine.

Robert Wright once wrote in a magazine article:

“The point where more wealth ceases to imply more happiness is around $10,000 per capita annually—roughly where Greece, Portugal, and South Korea are now. Above that point, additional dollars don’t seem to cheer up nations, and national differences in happiness hinge on the intangibles of culture. The Irish are appreciably happier than the Germans, the Japanese, and the British, though less wealthy than all of them.”

For more than two decades, our average annual income was remarkably close to $US10,000. While the popular image of our “peasant” lifestyle is one of unremitting toil, this is far from the truth. True, we did not drive a recent motor car, but we did have  current generation (not cutting edge) computers, a decent home-made hi-fi music system, and a comfortable, albeit dilapidated home. Did we feel deprived? Far from it.

A little over a decade ago, we came to the conclusion that although our lifestyle worked well while we were young and fit, we needed to think about the onset of the sunset part of our lives. Few people realise that the old age pension schemes the western social democracies promise us are thinly disguised Ponzi schemes. We needed to prepare for our old age independently of government.

Initially, I went back into the conventional workforce for 16 months managing a computer training office and training end users myself. The job kept me from home for 12 hours a day (includes commute time), five days a week for $AU36,000 a year, a slightly above average income here in Tasmania. Out of the $AU36k, I was paying approximately $AU12k in taxes leaving $AU24k. Commute cost was $AU2k using public transport. Despite pressure from the boss, I refused to buy a vehicle that would have cost 5-10 times as much. That left around $A22k, or approximately $US13k at that time. I had more than doubled my time away from home for a net increase in income of around $US3k. The garden was neglected during this period and we often had to eat tired old supermarket stuff. While the cost was probably considerably less than $US1k pa, the lower quality certainly added to the decrease in happiness and overall lower feeling of wellbeing of that period.

During that employment, the business was charging my time out at $AU80/hr. So I started my own, more focussed computer training business charging a similar rate. The money accumulated in the closing years of the twentieth century enabled us to build The House of Steel. Building our dream home saved around $AU150k, money we didn’t need to earn and pay tax on. Neither did we need to borrow an enormous amount from the bank that we would have to pay interest on. We did however borrow some and that led to a realisation; you can leverage borrowings to grow more money.

After we moved in to our new home, we finished renovating the cottage we had inhabited for over twenty years and sold it and half an acre of our land for $AU140k. We now had some $AU500k in cash and assets. These assets have enabled us to purchase two rental properties that, needless to say, we manage ourselves. Unfortunately, this income falls somewhat short of what we will likely need over the next decade, or so. A brief re-entry to the salaried workforce several years left The Git grumpy and dissatisfied, leading to his decision to return to writing for an income. And a considerable elevation in his spirits.

Thought for the day:

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true. — Henry Fielding

The New World of Publishing

The Git’s long-time reader Don Armstrong wrote:

Thank you! I’m impressed with Yahoo – they didn’t SpamCan you. There’s fame for you, if you like.

I’m also medium impressed with your hairs. There appear to be several of them, and they appear to be quite elongated. Not as many as I’ve got, of course, but longer and thicker. Longer and thicker is a good thing, I guess, when you start getting up there in years.

Publishing. Isn’t that a bit like starting a deck-chair-hire business – on the Titanic?

Actually, hehoomustnotbenamed (but whose initials are RBT) has had some interesting stuff to say or link to, about e-publishing. He makes some sense, although you need to sort through what IS, in the USA, vs what IS in Australia. His arguments about e-publishing on Amazon at $2.99 per copy, or even down to $0.99, where it becomes just a “who cares, what can I lose” button-push, are thought-provoking. There are authors out there who are raking in many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, just because not only are they competent authors (as so many are), but also because they’re decided to sell electrons cheap, many times over.

Don

Well Don, if you are going to have a hair-raising experience, it’s best to have plenty of hair I always say

The Git made some predictions about publishing a decade ago and the detail is proving as fascinating as having seen some of it through a glass darkly.

eBooks are certainly a success story; “We know that ebook uptake, as measured in sales or their percentage of publishers’ revenues, has doubled or more than doubled every year since 2007.” But note that nearly all of these sales are for fiction. The Kindle and its kindred devices are not kind to graphics, making them at this time unsuited to certain kinds of publication, even some fiction (think maps for example).

Print-on-Demand (POD) has transformed the market for books that sell in relatively low volumes. This area is dominated by non-fiction. The big advantage of POD is that low inventory costs somewhat offset the higher per print and bind cost. Amazon could never have the millions of books for sale that it does if it had to warehouse thousands of copies of books that sell in relatively small volumes. There’s also less moving of books from place to place prior to purchase.

The downside of POD is that affordable books can only include a small number of relatively low quality greyscale images. While you can have full colour, it is prohibitively expensive since every page must be printed on a full colour printer.

An increasing number of authors are self-publishing using POD. The printing/book distributing company invoices the author for the cost of books distributed and pays the author receipts for books sold. A number of authors report double the income on sales compared to the royalty they would have received when dealing with a regular publisher.

Blogging too is a form of publishing; it’s just insanely difficult to raise any significant income from it. Worse, the more time you spend writing a blog, the less time you have to write revenue-raising material. Worse still, the longer you blog, the more difficult it becomes to keep your audience amused with fresh material. And if you thought things couldn’t get worse still, you are wrong; the longer you continue to blog, the lower your Google PageRank becomes. PageRank is important if you want to have Googlers find your page near the top of a search.

So, now you know why The Git has moved his blog here, and left most of the older material on the sturmsoft website. Gradually, the old material there will be replaced by samples of published material and invitations to purchase. Ashwood Books will also publish more draft manuscripts and solicit feedback from readers so that the end product will be more finely tuned to readers’ needs.

Blogging is actually an addiction that The Git would most likely be better off without. However, it is fun, and The Git hopes to strike some sort of balance between writing for a living and finding time to indulge himself here.

References

Four years into the ebook revolution: things we know and things we don’t know

Self Publishing and Printing Your Own Book

Thought for the Day

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem. — Malcolm Forbes

A Bit of an Antediluvian

The Git doesn’t quite date from before the flood, but he is more than a little conservative in many ways. For example, his website (www.sturmsoft.com) is coded in HTML 4.0 Transitional, not HTML 5. There’s no XML, Flash, ASP, PHP etc. This means that almost any browser will render those pages in an entirely predictable/unpredictable [delete whichever is inapplicable] manner. But they will render in a useable way.

Just as The Git left off blogging, he had tried out MS FrontPage 2003 for creating his pages and liked it very much (with some caveats). The tabbed interface was the main attraction. The other aspect of all the Microsoft software The Git appreciates is that the dictionary is the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, not UK, or US dictionaries.

Of course FP 2003 is now considered old hat and Microsoft don’t sell it. Actually, The Git didn’t need the binaries, he already had the CD. What he needed was a Product Key. After a little searching The Git found a chap selling what he claimed was the download version, full product on eBay for the reasonable price of $US60. The Git paid his money and proceeded to download the software. The download was borked, but we won’t go there yet. Inspecting the setup.ini file displayed the Product Code string in the form XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXX which is clearly incorrect. The leading and trailing parts have twice the number of digits as a valid code.

The Git contacted the vendor who told him that he had to run the setup.exe file he had modified to eliminate the need for the purchaser to manually enter the Product Code. As it happens, The Git’s DL had borked before the setup.exe file had dlownloaded. Two further attempts were also dismal failures. The Git had no intention of running the executable; he was curious as to what the payload in that file was. The vendor has refused to divulge the Product Code, so The Git has contacted eBay and Microsoft.

So why not use Expression? The Git hears you asking. Well he went to City Software, a Melbourne discount software seller he frequents from time to time, and discovered the following:

Microsoft Visual Studio Premium 2010 – (Save $809.00 off RRP) — $8,721.00.

Yeah right. Like he really wants to blow that kind of bread.

So how about Corporate Software? “Search Results For: Expression Sorry, no data was found for those search terms.”

CorpSoft have Microsoft FrontPage 2002 + BONUS Publisher 2002 for $AU170, but The Git wants FP 2003, not 2002 and he loathes and detests all versions of Publisher he has ever been forced to use. It might be the case that Publisher 2002 is a fine product, but so is Adobe’s InDesign which The Git already owns.

And to add to the misery of this week (which hasn’t really been all bad), Peter Neilsen died. Peter was one of the nicest gentlemen The Git has ever been priveleged to befriend. Among his many achievements, he started one of Hobart’s first BBSs when The Git first started computing. He also managed to keep his legal wife and a de facto happy back in those dim dark days. The secret to the uccess of this arrangement, he claimed, was having the first wife choose the second. About a decade ago, his next door neighbour stabbed him several times, and he lost both a kidney and his spleen. After leaving the hospital, he moved interstate and I missed his company badly.

On Sheep and Shepherds

The hostility of many people to the ideas of Karl Popper has The Git intrigued. Here’s The Git’s analysis of Popper ideas:

Problem Solving

Popper’s passion was problem solving. Not pseudo answers to hypothetical problems, real solutions to real problems. Popper notes the propensity of some academics (and others) to proclaiming: “The results of research indicate the problem to be much more difficult than originally thought. Here is how we failed to produce a satisfactory solution, demonstrating just how difficult the problem is.” Many social programs also fall into this category of non-solutions: educational reform has resulted in declining literacy and numeracy; crime has increased following the introduction of new crime control methods; economies decline as more government controls are introduced; all this despite the best intentions of those charged with their control.

Problem Solutions

Popper claims that most interesting problem solutions are not final. Following rigorous testing, they will eventually fail, providing the impetus to invent new and better solutions. The ideas for problem solutions come from the fertile imagination of individuals, that is they are guesses. Some guesses are good and are readily corroborated by observation and some are bad, being falsified by observation. Merely seeking corroboration will not generate new and better problem solutions. The best solutions are those we seek to falsify, but pass the tests we devise to falsify them.

Some people, like my Creationist friend Fran who helped build The House of Steel, believe that problem solutions come from God. He would pray to Him for the solutions to problems that inevitably arise in the building of a complex house and the answers would just as inevitably come to Fran, via his mind. Others believe that problem solutions are discovered, rather than invented. Sort of like Douglas Adams’ theory about humour. He claimed that there are humour bubbles floating about in the air, particularly in East Anglia, and that’s why tall people are much funnier than short people. When asked to explain Dudley Moore, he declared that proved his point entirely since he, Douglas Adams, was 20% funnier than Dud.

Another theory is that everything is predetermined, an inevitable consequence of believing that causality explains everything. Since the causes of future events have already taken place, all future events are immutable. Our attempts at problem solving are merely the result of the illusion of free will.

Problem solutions have a tendency to generate new and different problems. According to Hans Zinsser in Rats, Lice and History, the unusual rapid rise of Christianity may have been a response to despair in the general populace caused by a series of pandemics in the first centuries of the Common Era. The maintainers of Christian dogma took alarm at the increasing disparity between their calendars and the seasons. Surely, if the dogma was correct, and few doubted this, God would be annoyed if the Holy Days were being kept on some other day. Since the pandemics never went away for very long, this was manifest evidence for God’s annoyance. Isn’t justificationism wonderful?

The solution to the calendar problem was to encourage astronomy. While careful, scientific scrutiny of the heavens produced the desired result — better and more accurate calendars — it also had some unfortunate consequences. It split the Christian dogmatists into two warring factions: those who supported the newer, more accurate calendar and those who opposed its introduction, because, well, it was contrary to dogma to actually change things that were obviously put in place by God. Explaining things (justification) was OK, but change? Ptui!

There seems to be a perennial tension between two opposing viewpoints throughout the known history of the human race. One is that life is a zero-sum game and the other that life is not a zero-sum game. The zero-sum game believers consist of the controllers and those willing to be controlled: sheep and shepherds. The sheep are happy because, well, they have been told by the shepherds they should be. Anyway, after they have been eaten, they can pass on to a better place if they have been good little sheep and a worse one if they have been b-a-a-a-a-d sheep who don’t believe that life is a zero-sum game.

Justificationism

In his writing, Popper continually argues against what he calls justificationism — that is, the propensity to attempt to merely confirm one’s prejudices. Put simply, this takes the form of, for example, the proposition that all swans are white. Justification merely requires enumerating all the confirmatory sightings of white swans. Black swans in Tasmania can either be taken as a falsification of the original proposition, or be dismissed by declaring that observations of Tasmania’s black swans are merely anecdotal, or no ornithologist has ever seen a black swan.

Finding confirmations demonstrates the utility of an idea, but will never demonstrate its correctness, or nearness to truth. We can watch the sun rise in the east and set in the west until we are blue in the face, but that does not prepare us for the experience of passing beyond the Polar Circle where the sun does not rise and set every twenty four hours all year round.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Popper’s ideas are anti-authoritarian and anti-dogma, thus threatening those who would have us live by The Official Rules — in a word, Despots. It should come as no surprise then that his ideas annoy the sheep and their shepherds.

Thought for the day:

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Szent-Gyorgi

Out of the Blue

The Git did something foolish. After endless fiddle-faddling, he had moved all his old posts into a WordPress blog on his home website. Then he made it the default when you visited www.sturmsoft.com — this was a mistake. Replacing my old home page with the blog does not fit at all well into the new purpose for the website.. So the Git tried to revert things, somewhat unsuccessfully.

The Git carefully backed up the database and when he deleted the WordPress application, he was assured that the database backups would remain. They didn’t. So all that work and comments from readers vanished. Fortunately, with Google’s cache, the recent posts were retrieved. The old stuff can remain where it is.

Right now, the Git is frantically setting up a publishing company to publish his books. More on this later.

Many years ago, one of the Git’s favourite albums, “Out of the Blue” recorded by Mackenzie Theory was damaged at a party. It was far from a best seller, but it was cutting edge Prog Rock. Rob Mackenzie, Cleis Pearce and Paul Wheeler were friends; the Git cannot recall the name of the bass player. The inside cover photographs were taken by another friend, David Few.

A few days ago, Steve the Friendly Snail gave the Git the CD release of Out of the Blue. The music is just as good as when the Git used to frequent places like the TF Much Ballroom to hear them play