Mark of the Cobra

I don't want to write too much on this blog about my books, for that I have my other blog Herbert's Place, but a little advertising here won't hurt.

My latest book 'Mark of the Cobra' has been released this last weekend by Melange Books, LLC, my publisher. It is an erotic thriller and not for the faint of heart. I love the cover the cover-artist at Melange Books designed. I did have some input into the picture. I spent quite some time looking for suitable pictures on websites that offer art. I found three pictures I liked. One was a scantily dressed woman kneeling on a bed, another of a man with two guns, and pictures of a coiled cobra. I suggested what I envisioned on the cover and the artist put it together into one pictures and added the title. I'm not trying to take away from the artist, just thought I'd like to take a tiny bit of credit. She did a wonderful job and I'm happy with the results. That is one of the benefits of publishing with a publisher that lets you work with the artist. We do have some input. It is not easy to come up with something useful sometimes. It would be much easier if we could contract an artist like Boris to design and draw a suitable picture, but that privilege is reserved only for the big authors who work with large print publishers. It cost a ton of money.
If you're interested in looking at the picture, please visit Herbert's Place.

Touch

A few days ago we watched the new show on TV 'Touch'. It stars Kiefer Sutherland as a father with a son who doesn't talk. But the son is a genius in his own way. He sees everything around him in numbers and he can foretell the future. In this first episode we get introduced to some characters and everything seems to be a bit confusing, but it all comes together in the end. Looks like a good show and we may just watch it. Kiefer Sutherland was the main character in the TV series 24. We only watched the last season and we loved it. Now we're a bit sorry we didn't watch it from the beginning.

Sony E-reader - a new gadget for us

 I bought my wife a Sony E-reader for Christmas, the PRS-T1. It has Wi-Fi and a touch screen. I spent an awful long much time getting my router hooked up so we could use the Wi-Fi. I don’t want to go into details here, but it is far from being as easy as everyone tells you. Maybe younger people don’t have the problems getting used to new gadgets. I finally discovered that I was using the password incorrectly.  When I set up my router I used capital letters, but when I tried to get the E-reader to connect, I used small letters, not realizing the password was case-sensitive. That’s the fun and frustration with using computers. They have no imagination.

I managed to connect to our local library and borrowed some books. At first, I downloaded them onto my computer and transferred them to the reader. Then I got an update on the reader and after that the E-reader program on the computer didn’t co-operate. It tried to synchronize with the reader but something went wrong and I got the informative message: ‘E-reader has to shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.’ Thank you so much for that. At least it was polite.

I did find a way to transfer the books even without the E-reader-program’s co-operation.

Everything went fine until yesterday when the E-reader froze up. It wouldn’t respond to anything. We couldn’t even shut it off. When a computer freezes up, you can unplug it and then restart it again. How can you unplug a device that runs on batteries?

I have to say, the Sony support site is not easy to navigate. They don’t make it easy. They are mainly concerned in advertising their goods. It is hard to find the menu and even harder to print out once you find it.

I did find out how to reset the reader, which I did. It seemed to work fine, until we tried to open the books. We couldn’t open any. We received a message: Error. Protected by Digital Rights Management.

I didn’t find anything on that on the Sony site. I sent the Sony support team an email and received an answer back this morning. At least they did respond fairly quickly, but the suggestions were not satisfactory. They suggested to shut down the reader and reset it and then turn it back on a few times to see if it was indeed frozen.

Well…it was frozen. We knew that already. And the problem was it could not be shut off in the first place.

What I did then was to delete the books from the reader and upload them again from my computer. That did the trick.

I came to the conclusion, when you reset the reader you lose certain information. Luckily, I didn’t have to go through the whole lengthy process of getting back on to Wi-Fi. That still worked.

One thing I learned, it is best to download the books onto my computer and then transfer them to the reader. This way, if anything happens to the reader, I still have the books. Even though I found, the borrowed books were still downloadable on our account with the public library, which means, even if we lose them, they are still available until they have to be returned.

Purchased books may be another matter. It is best to have them on the computer.

Oh, the fun we have with technology. For me the written book is still my number one choice. I like to look at it on the bookshelf, like to touch it, like to look at the cover, like to flip the pages physically. And I don’t have to worry that it may disappear while I’m reading it. And if I don’t like the book anymore, I can use the pages to start a fire in the fireplace, wrap a present, or maybe there are other uses for the paper…When I was young, we had small squares cut from the pages of a newspaper hanging on a nail in the outhouse. Can’t do that with electronic pages.

I guess I’m just an old dinosaur and maybe not as easily influenced by all the gadgets introduced to us. We used to be able to watch TV for free, just with rabbit ears or an antenna on the roof. They took that away from us. Now we need a service-provider…and that isn’t free anymore. Now we have digital TV. There are so many channels available, one could spend the whole day watching something. We have only the basic channels and can’t even watch all the shows. I guess, we could, if we’d sit all day long in front of the box. Besides, I spent too much time already on my computer, dealing with all the error messages and program failures. Sometimes it is best just to shut everything off and go for a walk…without the cell phone, the mp3 player, the Blackberry, the iphone, or whatever the latest gadget may be called. Just breathe the fresh air, listen to real birds singing, watch real clouds, look at real trees, perhaps stop and talk to a neighbor or friend in person, instead of texting or scyping them.

In fact, I’m wasting time right now writing this little essay, instead of walking around outside. On second thought, looking out of the window I see it is quite miserable out there. It is cloudy, the wind is blowing, and the streets are slippery. Maybe I’ll stay at home after all.

More about the fish

I took my friend Don's suggestion to heart. Here is the big Northern Pike as it looks now on the wall.

A big Fish

I belong to the 7 Oaks Game and Fish Association in Winnipeg. We have a newsletter ‘Campfire Chatter’. It’s a wonderful newsletter, mainly because my son is the editor. It gave me an opportunity to write a few articles, of which two have been published so far.

I started a column called ‘Memories on the Wall’. Here is the first article I wrote. I thought the readers of my new blog may enjoy it.

There is a sixteen-pound Northern Pike hanging in our sunroom. It needs to be dusted once in awhile to remove the spider webs and restore the shiny colors. It has been hanging there for only a few years. Before that it graced one of the walls in our cottage at Louise Lake in Ontario. Sixteen pounds may not sound like much to some anglers, but it is the largest fish I ever caught. I still remember the day I caught it like it was yesterday, even though over twenty years have gone by since then.

I was busy doing some work at the cottage. It was August 1^st, 1990. I decided to take some time off and go fishing over the lunch hour. It was hot and muggy and I didn’t really expect to catch anything, but I needed to have a rest.

I took out the canoe and paddled about a hundred feet into the lake and let the canoe drift slowly along the weedy shore. It must have been on the second or third cast when I hooked into something. At first I thought I was stuck in the weeds or on a large log, because when I began reeling in there was only passive resistance. I didn’t want to loose my new bait, a black jig with a three-inch white and gray rubber fish. I was using a twelve-pound test line on an open-faced Shimano 300 reel.

Why a twelve pound line? Well, I have to turn the clock back about two weeks. My two sons and I were fishing one evening for walleye, perch, crappies, and bullheads (we used to smoke them). We caught mostly perch and a few walleye using worms. When we ran out of worms we cut up the perch and used them for bait. Suddenly we were hooking larger fish but could never even get them to the surface, because they just broke the six and eight pound lines we were using.

The next day, my son and I marched over to the local bait and tackle store to buy twenty-pound test line. Yes, we meant business. The salesman gave us this odd look and asked if we were going after whales. When we told him we were after big jacks (Northern Pike) he recommended a twelve-pound line. Since my old reel wasn’t good enough anymore I also bought a new reel.

Anyway, I slowly reeled in the large log I assumed to have on the other end when it suddenly exploded onto the surface. And now the battle began. I knew I had something big.

In the meantime my sons were looking out of the window to see how I was doing. “It looks like Dad is in trouble,” they told my wife, “his canoe is going all over the place.” So all three of them came running to check out what my problem was. When I saw them, I yelled, “Bring the boat and a large net.” I only had a small net with me and worried whatever I had on the hook wouldn’t fit into it. By this time I had brought the fish near the boat and it looked huge. When I dipped the net into the water sheer luck made the Pike curl right into it.

I scooped it out of the water and into the boat. The bait fell out of the Pike’s mouth and I realized how lucky I had been. Now, before this I had never caught anything larger than four pounds, so this fellow looked like a giant beside me in the small canoe, snapping like an angry crocodile with teeth to match. It scared the living daylights out of me. I panicked and began hitting it on the head with the paddle.

“What are you doing?” one of my sons yelled from shore.

“I’m trying to kill it,” I yelled back, but then I calmed down a bit. I even managed to paddle back to shore without tipping the canoe.

When I was finally standing on shore, my trophy in my arms, I yelled, “Take a picture! Somebody take a picture!”

“Aren’t you going to keep it?” my wife asked.

“Of course I will keep it. I’m going to stuff this baby.”

“So what is your hurry?”

I had to admit, there was no hurry. This Northern Pike was mine, I would get it mounted, and it would hang on my wall until the day I died.

Now it doesn’t look you huge and frightening anymore, but every time I look at it I remember the rush I felt when I reeled in the big boy.

Just to prove that I didn't make up this story (after all I am a writer with a fertile imagination) here is a picture of me with my trophy.