Another O'Henry Ending.....

Lately I have been taking advantage of my Kindle's Unlimited abitlity to download books for free. This feature allows Kindle authors to put their work out there and be compensated by a pool of the fees for Kindle Unlimited members. So you can get a bunch of free books.

I have been reading a bunch of detective stories about a private eye called Quinn. Actually an insurance investigator out of Philly. There are about ten books and they are pretty good. Nothing earth shattering but a good quick read.

Then there is a time travel series about this guy who is transported back to the Alamo and changes everything. He is transported into Colonel Travis's body and changes the course of history. There are three books so far and they are pretty cool.

Then there is one that made me smile. It's called "The Austrian Painter." In it they suppose that Germany wins the first World War. France is the main enemy and they come to peace with Britain because the war ends before the massive slaughter. The US is not involved and Britain keeps it's empire. The Kaiser stays in control as does the Czar. No communism.

It is very obvious who the Austrian painter is supposed to be. He is a vet of the first war and makes a decent living as painter in a peaceful prosperous Germany. The problem of colonialism is the main world wide problem and causes a war between France and Germany. Where this guy because a spokesman for the peace movement.

They reveal who he is in the last line of the story. You have to be a moron to have not figured it out but there are a lot of morons out there. In any event it is a great example of an O'Henry ending.  I have to laugh. Nice concept. Good execution. Well done.

Plus you can read it for free.

I hate technology

I don't, really, but some days I find myself frustrated by "labor saving" devices. Yesterday, our first warm day in a while, was a good day to mill a bowl out of a big chunk of white oak, or so I thought. I had designed the bowl, created a toolpath, and started the CNC running, when about 90% of the way through the roughing stage the z-axis went nuts and milled straight through the bottom of the bowl. Nice. Now I have more firewood and a puzzle to solve - why did the machine break?

Why? Because I used it. That is my corollary -- machines only break if you use them. Of course, if you depend upon machines for income, one can become stressed about that. So I try to focus on repair, and let the chips fall where they may, so to speak.

My debugging skills always get a workout in this kind of situation, and here's what I have done - swapped cables to isolate the suspect controller channel, swapped out the known bad controller board with another of unknown condition, discovered that the second board has a bad y-axis, swapped in yet another spare board, which, surprise surprise, has no working axes.

At this point I contacted the manufacturer -- guy says "Your machine is an antique, our repair guy refuses to work on those old cards, here, buy a new one for $1,600." Well, there you go. I might consider it, depending on how many changes I have to make to my upstream design software. Oy!

So, since I can't run the machine I might as well read a book on my Kindle. But before I download a new book I figure I should tidy up the memory - there are books on there I have read and won't read again, so I can delete those, right? Wrongo, bunkie - them sumbitches is on there permanently, as near as I can tell.

I mash the button that says delete, they are still there. I touch the book icon itself it says "Downloading". NOOOO - stop it - I want it gone, not reloaded!

So I go to the Amazon site, search for "Deleting books from Kindle" -- you'll never guess what they suggest. They want you to buy a book that tells you how to delete a book. Holy schnike! You cannot be serious!

So now I am working with a sales guy over at the CNC company to see what I can work out - like the Scottish regiment -- repair or replace, for those of you who know that joke. "Aye, we've decided to replace!", which is the opposite of the punchline -- turns out I don't have to buy new software, so there you have it.

Now if only I could delete a freakin' book from my Kindle - grrr...

As long as we are talking about roots...

suddenly everybody started ironing

Amazon quietly removed George Orwell's 1984 from its Kindle e-book readers due to a copyright fraud thing going on there.

Wireless network.

Whispernet.

Schwing, deleted the books from people's devices and refunded the money they paid.

And that proves ... something!

You should always buy your books in pop-up form. Free from the doings of Whispernet.

io9 via Small Dead Animals.