Seven Up is the seventh outing in the series about Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter. This time she’s after an old mobster who kills people and is dating her grandmother.
What I Liked
As with many of the Plum stories, it is often the secondary characters that add spice and liveliness to the story. DeChooch, the old and inept mobster, is a hoot and we get to see a lot more interactions with Moonman. There are so many cute scenes — like when she finds a bunch of stolen merchandise in a bedroom, asks for an explanation, and ends up buying a toaster. Oh and there’s a little thing about planning a wedding.
What I Didn’t Like
The basic premise of why everyone is looking for DeChooch is a bit far-fetched, but whatever. In addition, the arrival of sister Valerie with two kids in tow adds little to the story. And don’t get me started on the kidnapping of Grandma.
One of my goals for this year was to improve some of my digital setup. Some of that is for photography, some of it is for astronomy, a few other things here and there, but the three big “techno” areas for me this year are my laptop/writing setup, my TV subscriptions / antenna options, and my audio files. Namely, my music collection in digital form.
I’ve been delaying a deep dive into the world of MP3 management for some time, partly as I’ve been burned before. Several times, I thought that I had found a solution, everything seemed to be working, I was making some progress, and then BAM! The app stopped being supported. Or I had a crash and lost a bunch of work. Not the actual music files themselves, I’m pretty good at backing them up, but having a good file structure with a good management program and a player? Not so much.
I used to love programs like WinAmp. Simple interface, could handle the synch with my iPod well, heck it even would synch with a Sony Walkman (yes, they used the name for a small line of MP3 players at one point too, and because it is small, lightweight and functional, I still use it as my music player of choice when portability is the main factor). I almost never use my phone or tablet for music playback as it is just a license to suck battery life. I’ve struggled with ripping from time to time, finding a good setup, good parameters that didn’t produce overly large file sizes that I wouldn’t notice the benefit of cuz I have basic system for playback and no real discerning ability with my ears. I have an old boss that has more money tied up in high-end audio WIRING then I have in my entire stereo collection.
But I was determined to do it right. Now, just to be clear, I wasn’t looking for a perfect solution, nor even a solution to a “problem” per se, I was just wanting to update my approach, maybe find some baby steps that I could take. Wow, was I in for a surprise.
50,000 reasons to hate iTunes
While I was starting to figure out how I wanted to sort my library with as few “layers” as possible, I updated iTunes just to keep it up to date. It is after all a good store. I had pushed everything over there in my last go around about 18 months ago, and I had decided pretty much at the time to go all in on iTunes, right up until I noticed a couple of files seemed to “change” quality and size after I synched with iTunes. It seemed odd, so I started looking at it more closely. In addition, in one case, iTunes even changed the filenames of two files — assigning the song name for Track 7 to Track 8, and visa versa. Weirdness in naming and how did some of the files shrink? WTF?
I then starting looking around online and found out that iTunes has a unique little feature. By default, when you synch, if it finds the file in its library, it doesn’t “upload” and save your copy. No, it just uses its copy (to save bandwidth and file size). No biggie, right? Except it then goes a step further in the synch and REPLACES your copy with the file from its database since it knows it is safe and sanitized. Which isn’t a huge deal if the files were the same…except they weren’t. I had ripped at a higher quality than the iTunes version, so my files were originally larger, and now they were “downgraded” to a lower quality and smaller size. Would I notice? Probably not when actually listening, I don’t have an audiophile’s ear nor the equipment. You can turn the setting off with a little tweaking, if you know to even look for it, but the default is to replace all existing files with the iTunes version. I found a few horror stories online where someone had some specific backups of old recordings that got replaced by iTunes with no warning or notification, and after a couple of subsequent backups not knowing there was anything wrong with the originals, their backups were now just the iTunes version. Bye bye sweet memories, hello commercial pablum. While these problems stood out, there were lots of other quirks people had found and posted online, and it made nervous enough to want to manage my music files myself without an auto-synch taking over. I manage my ebooks the same way — myself with my own software, not Amazon’s or Kobo’s or Nook’s, etc.
So my commitment to iTunes was done, and it slowed my music-organizing work in 2015. I tried Music Bee, but it wasn’t really jiving for me, and I eventually completed stalled. Until this past week, when I got back into it. I checked the iTunes install, and now it was REALLY weird. While I had some 3500 files stored in the iTunes media folders, only 35 were showing up in the actual iTunes app. I had them all in there before. I had done massive work to upload, sort, tweak the meta data, etc. Gone. So my hope of exporting and importing was gone. No biggie, it hadn’t been finished anyway, and I wasn’t sure what I was using now anyway.
Except then I noticed another problem. Those 3500 files. It seemed like a lot, well structured, but there were a few odd things missing. Like Jacob’s kids songs. I had four or five CDs ripped, and they weren’t there. Then I noticed some collections missing from the 1940s and 1950s. WTF? Where are the rest of my music files?
I had told iTunes back in the day that it could have permission to manage my music folders. Which meant it imported everything from another directory that was a bit chaotic. I never noticed at the time, too busy working within iTunes to notice that when it imported it into the directory, it DIDN’T actually complete the job. I knew it hadn’t uploaded everything, and in fact I hadn’t wanted it to until better organized, but I thought it had at least COPIED everything and that it was now all IN the directory. Nope. Not even close. I have another 40K files that just aren’t there. No, not another 40K songs, there’s a lot of chaff in that mix, with lots of duplicates, but probably another 10K active songs. I knew they weren’t in iTunes, like I said, but they should have been in the iTunes media folder. Nada.
Small panic. Maybe they’re elsewhere in the drive? Nope, I cleaned those up LONG ago. Cuz iTunes had them, no worries. Except it didn’t. So I checked my backups…of course, 18 months ago, my backups would have had those secondary directories. But now? I’ve completely rolled over 2 or 3 times since then. So my backup is JUST what iTunes has. Yikes. 50,000 down to 3500? That’s a big reason to hate iTunes a little, even if it isn’t entirely iTunes fault (I should have verified that it copied what I told it to copy!).
Digital packrat
I dug out two old backup drives, ones I’m loathe to just ditch even if they are not part of my regular backup routine now. I loaded them up and started working my way through them. One was relatively empty, easy to wipe and set aside for a future secondary or tertiary backup of some key files (it’s a 500GB drive but requires power, so not simple USB mobile device). The second is a 2TB workhorse. Killed tons of crap that I don’t need anymore, long since improved or reorganized, but then I found my old music files.
They’re relatively a disaster in terms of organization, no question about it. But the extra files are there. Some overlap with what I already have, but surprisingly not as much as I might have thought. What did I find? 3000 folders, 40K of files and 160GB of music related materials. Ah, so that’s why my Music backups didn’t take up as much time or size as I would have expected. I should have twigged to it earlier, but I trusted the wrong app.
Which means I have to copy all of those over, sort them, and figure out what I’m going to do with my new apps.
New apps
I mentioned that I had Music Bee for awhile but it just wasn’t “singing” to me. Then, with a cellphone plan that I have, I got Spotify for free for two years. Instant music, no need to organized, synch, or do anything else. It was just there. Or at least it is there for two years in total, another six months or so. I’m not totally comfortable with subscription based music consumption, partly as I don’t use it anywhere near enough to make it worth it, and at the end, you don’t own anything. It is just “temporary”. Why rent when I can buy?
Except of course I need to rip a lot of stuff, and I want it in a good format so I only do it once. Plus I want to be able to upload it somewhere where I can access it via the web. Oh, and I want to be able to synch to my Walkman, play it on an old tablet connected to my stereo, and just for fun, synch the music to an old iPhone or two. Easy peasy, right? Let’s break it down in order.
For the streaming, it is relatively easy. While there are a number of apps and sites, the three biggest are Spotify, Google Play Music (GPM) and iTunes. I already ditched iTunes, and I already have Spotify but it isn’t doing everything I want nor does it have great options for my own music so much as just using their existing library. Which means those two are not high on my list.
Since I use Google for everything anyway, I started looking pretty heavily at GPM. I can upload up to 50K of my own songs. And then I can stream them. And it’s free. If I want to upgrade to the full streaming system, it is $10 and I can have up to 10 devices. Colour me sold. Why didn’t I do this LONG ago?
So that left me merely with finding a good music manager for my desktop. Most of the big ones would work fine, and most of the real differences between a lot of them are graphical user interface choices. I prefer a simple list layout, something relatively like Windows Explorer even. But the real kicker for me is to where I want to be able to transfer the music. I almost never listen on my PC itself, partly as it is in a shared office with my wife. Instead, I want to be able to transfer it to six separate devices:
My Sony Walkman — as I mentioned, it’s an MP3 player that Sony slapped the Walkman rubrique on for branding, but it is small without being like an Apple nano. Good size, works well, good battery life. I load it up with my music and then it sits on there until I get bored with it and want something else. Not very quick to be changed, I mean. But I want the app to recognize it;
My old iTouch — I have an old iTouch, and I want to be able to just dump a ton of stuff on to it and plug it into my bedside clock radio/stereo. I could stream off of Google Play through my network, but really I just want it to be a physical storage device with direct loading; and,
Andrea’s old iPhone — she has an old iPhone 4 or 5 that had a cracked screen, so I got it repaired with the intention of giving it to Jacob as a simple camera and portable app toy. The synching with iTunes for apps isn’t very functional though, with the software getting a little long in the tooth, so I’m looking at repurposing to be another portable music player. I’m also going to try using it as an underwater camera in one of those sealable pouches, and well, if it dies, no great loss;
The other three are a bit different though as they are three fully functional Android devices, which means I can either stream or synch with them direct.
My phone — I have a 32GB SD card in it, so I could just copy it over. Or I can run the Google Play Music app. It would be great though if I could synch wirelessly with my phone, the way I do to upload my photos when I want to transfer them to the PC;
My big tablet — My newer tablet is wireless, and like my phone, I can either synch the music and carry it with me on the SD card or I can just stream GPM. But either way, it would be great to synch wirelessly with the PC; and,
My old small tablet — I have an older slower Samsung tablet that is basically collecting dust in my office. It isn’t fast, it isn’t fancy, but it still runs everything on Google. So my plan is to copy everything over, either wirelessly or not, and / or install GPM on it, and hook it up to the computer in our family room. Instant stereo feed.
Now, with those six devices in mind, I fully expected I would not be able to do it with one app. I thought, “Okay, one app to synch with the first batch” and hopefully I could find another that would handle the second. Or I could just use GPM to stream it. Except as I was reading online of the top 10 music managers from 2016, I came across Media Monkey again.
Media Monkey
I had seen this app before, back in the day, and I ended up with Music Bee and iTunes. But as I went through a good review over on Tom’s Guide of music managers, I was dropping some of them fast. Won’t synch with iDevices? Gone. Trouble with other MP3 players? Pass.
Wait a second. It says Media Monkey will synch with regular MP3 players AND iDevices? Hold the phones — it will also synch with Android WIRELESSLY? Holy cow, that sounds like the perfect app.
Sure, it’s a bit of a pig for display, a little small here and there, without much opportunity to fix it. The skins are terrible (had to revert to Windows). But it does have a file tree-like view option. Text for the rest. Recognizes my Sony device. Synched wirelessly with my phone.
And if I rename a heading in the music view, it renames the actual folder in the hard drive. Outstanding.
This will bear some careful examination, but I think I’ve found my tool.
My first e-reading device was a Palm Pilot. I had an early Palm III for a short while, a cast-off as I recall, and then I got one through work and it was the Tungsten. A beautiful device, and I tried everything on it, including reading an ebook. Something old, free, likely from the Gutenberg Project. It was neat, but not something to write home about. I killed my Tungsten in a freak accident at a hockey game involving a folding guest chair, a coat pocket, and a crunching sound as I sat back down after cheering for a goal. I still remember the feeling later that night when I went to put the Tungsten on charge and saw the destroyed screen. I eventually moved on somewhat reluctantly to a combined Palm Pilot / phone (a rudimentary smart phone) called the Treo, but it was far too small to read on and I never tried.
I was still a purist. I liked paper and I have the basement full of books to prove it. Successive moves in 1997 and 1998 didn’t kill that purity but three more in 2004, 2007, and 2011 did put a damper on my paper enthusiasm. I love my books, and if I had a place to put them out all on nice shelves, I would. But I don’t have a library like that, and honestly, I don’t want to use up the space in the house to do that. It’s just not worth it considering many tend to be “read once, shelve forever”. They are on storage shelves in the basement now, and my wife was mildly concerned about the previous rate of accumulation, but the real motivator for me to change showed up around the time of the last move.
I bought a Kindle 3 — not touchscreen, just side buttons and a keyboard, and only monochrome. Very much like the early Palm III if I’m honest. But the e-ink is glorious to read. I boost the font size a bit, not quite “large print”, but I’m getting older and I quite like the reduced strain. I confess that some print books have had such small type, I tossed them quickly back on the shelf and bought an e-version instead.
Since the K3, I have become a device-agnostic e-whore. I’ll read on anything, anywhere, anytime. A couple of times when I’ve wondered if I would like a series or not, I’ve even downloaded the first volume onto my desktop, particularly when there are sales or promos, and then read the entire thing on my main computer just because I got engrossed or my other devices were charging. Not often, but 2 or 3 times. I’ve read on the Tungsten, the K3, three different tablets, at least three different phones, a laptop and a netbook.
I know, I know, many of you might say, “Never! Paper or die!”. But that’s not the test for me, because I am all about the content. I like to lose myself in the story, and if the story is good, I don’t care what format it is. Podcast, TV show, movie, animated, live theatre, magazines, I don’t care. I want to get lost in the story.
In my most arrogant days, I think the e-book partially appeals to me because it is faster. I don’t just mean that I can order a book and download in seconds, which is a factor, but that I also can read faster. I can turn pages faster. You might not think that is significant, physically, but mentally for me it seems a lot like experiences with old typewriters and early word processors. The QWERTY layout that is popular for typing was designed to prevent people from going too fast — the keys would hit each other. So it had to be fast enough to make it worthwhile, but not too fast and crash. Early wordprocessing had the opposite challenge. If it took longer than about half a second (can’t remember the actual threshold now) for the character to appear on the screen after the key was pressed, typists would stop to see if it had gone through. Their brain processed the key press and needed to see the character appear right afterward or it would stop and wait for it to appear. For me, the K3 was perfect…I could turn the page fast enough that there was no chance of me “leaving the story”.
I have left a story many times with books, particularly at the end of chapters, simply from the time it takes to manually turn the page, complete with all the sensory input that goes with it. I can feel myself stopping even for a split-second and pulling myself briefly out of the story. With the e-ink, the refresh is almost instantaneous. I am a very fast reader, and that matters to me because I read so fast.
For example, one time I was reading the novelization of one of the Spiderman movies. I finished it in just under 2 hours, about the same length of time as the movie runs. It was like watching it spool on the screen before me, just like a movie, only it was just my imagination. A totally immersive experience. Oddly enough though, that one was on paper.
But I’ve had it happen while reading e-books a lot more often — I just zip along at lightning speed. Which makes up for an odd fact — I can’t skim read on my Kindle. If I’m trying to digest some non-fiction stuff really fast for work, for example, I know how to skim read / almost-speed-read to get through the salient facts. Relax my eyes, focus on the top half of the text line, skip words that are often long adjectives, focus on verbs and nouns. I can’t do it for long texts, maybe a few pages before I start to gloss over.
But sometimes when I’m reading a novel in paper, and the author for some reason decides to drop two pages of exposition or description into an active scene, my brain goes on auto-pilot skimming forward a paragraph or two until the action starts again. It happens, particularly with new release debut authors. Yet I can’t do it on the e-ink devices or even tablets or phones. Just not the right font, I think, or maybe I just don’t see enough of the text before I have to skip to the next screen. Either way, it doesn’t work. But the speed of screen refreshes is way faster than turning pages in a paper book and keeps me reading.
The last six years with the Kindle match the statistical profile of many an e-book reader with a new device. It starts off hot and heavy — one of Amazon’s busiest download days in recent years has been Christmas day itself or Boxing Day…people with new Kindles or other devices have them all charged and ready to go, and they start downloading books for the first time.
In 2011, one of the biggest “unique features” of Amazon was the daily deals on e-books. Lots of authors putting books on promo for four or five days at a time, often for 99 cents, or just as often, many giving away book 1 of a series for free. Kind of like drug dealers giving samples to hook clients. And there was a cottage industry that was born with it…e-zines that advertised the deals. Now the market is flooded, which might sound like a good thing, but really is just info overload.
Yet myself, like many an avid reader, couldn’t say no to free books. A free guidebook for Web HTML? Sure, I’ll take that. I do webpages. A new mystery novel with a librarian as the detective? Sign me up and I’ll download right now. Cool. A new series of basic guides to a variety of topics from property law to biology, from world history to a Korean cookbook? Sure, it’s free, I’ll DL it. And I did. Over the last five years, about 850 books from Amazon. I estimate I probably bought maybe 50-75 of those, almost all except 2 or 3 were deeply discounted, and the rest were freebies. Why did I download them? Cuz they were free, and it was like crack to a reader. And they don’t take up space in my house. If I don’t want it, I’ll delete it. Maybe it will be good, and I am a voracious reader for any subject matter.
I also made the mistake of reading about the Gutenberg Project. For those who haven’t heard of it, it is basically an old book preservation project run as crowd-sourcing for books that are past their copyright period and long out of print. Lots of countries have different copyright periods, so one country might have 25 years, another 50, another 75, etc. Beyond that period, except where copyrights have been extended by other legal means, the books are now in the public domain. Of course, they didn’t have e-books 50 years ago, which means someone scans the old book and uploads it. Often they have sophisticated scanners that can scan whole books at once, even turning pages, and save as a PDF-like file.
Then the crowdsourcing comes in — anyone can join, read a page of some book, and “fix” the optical character recognition. Because of font issues, the computer might read a “the” as “be”…so you see on your screen the JPG or PDF version side-by-side with a raw text box that shows what the computer thinks is the right text. You read the image, adjust any of the text that needs to be adjusted (like a copy-editor or proofer) and say “save”. That puts that page into a larger quality control process where a Level 2 editor looks at the page and reads your text and approves it or not. Once you have “proven” reliable in your edits, you too can become a Level 2 editor or be given a harder book or your edits might even bypass Level 2 and go straight to Level 3. Level 3 looks at things like a compiled text where your page 1 and someone else’s page 2, and someone else’s page 3 are all merged together into pages 1-3. Depending on the project in each country, there may be one person at the end who reads the whole book and makes sure there are no obvious errors. Just reading it, not comparing it to the original text. Some of the edits are consistency issues…for example, did you capitalize a word that the book didn’t because you think it should be capitalized whereas someone else was literal? And when it is done and added to the inventory, any user who finds an error can flag it for an update.
You don’t have to be an editor to look at completed books though, it was just how I got sucked in. I loved the idea, partly as I worked in a library when I was in university, and the idea of books being lost to the ages is somewhat horrifying, matched with the beautiful, low-cost, crowd-sourcing of preservation by simple readers instead of a large bureaucracy. Even if you do get involved, it isn’t necessarily time-consuming. Sure, like any “hobby”, there are dedicated nutjobs where it becomes their life. But you can edit for a few minutes any time you have free space in your calendar.
And then the unthinkable happened. I discovered that they had their ENTIRE collection downloadable as DVD copies. 1000s of books on disk with a simple download. I resisted for awhile. Browsing. Being selective. There’s a lot of stuff in there I’ll never read. And then one day, for no apparent trigger, I cracked. I just downloaded the whole collection and put it in Calibre.
You would think that was enough. And it generally has been. An e-book overdose to scare me straight. But it’s been made worse by bad cyber management on my desktop. Because of some computer problems over the years, a lot of files that I have on my machine have gotten duplicated into multiple directories. For example, a collection of photos from a trip might have been saved as 2012 – Newfoundland and another copy, backed up on another disk, said Newfoundland – 2012. Not knowing which was the “good” set, I saved both for future “clean-up” and rationalization.
E-book files suffered the same fate. Multiple times. Plus I didn’t exactly know how to organize my library very well in Calibre (an e-book library management program). So I would import collection X into one library with a separate library in another. But I’d only get so far and then get sidetracked with other priorities. Which would mean I had a partially sorted library, often with 2 or 3 copies of the same file. Add in multiple e-book formats one time where I stupidly told it to create a PDF, EPUB and a MOBI copy of everything, and my library went crazy. Keeping them all as separate entries in the library.
As part of my goals for the year, I decided I wanted to read more and part of that required me to create a better set-up for Calibre with my libraries. And I discovered the clean-up problem was far worse than I imagined:
67,293 files
53.5 GB of space
25,469 titles
Ook.
I suspect that at least 75% of the 25K titles are actually duplicates or format variations under separate listings, so that leaves me with 6000 or so actual titles. Deleting Gutenberg stuff takes me down at least two thirds of that, so 2000 or so titles of itnerest, with about 1200 being non-fiction titles that are possibly throw-aways. Call it 800 titles to actually process, of which about half are ones that are basically free replacements for titles I have in paper.
So I have about 400 titles to be read that are half-way decent, possibly in three formats – EPUB, Mobi, PDF, and possibly, AZW (Amazon format).
Okay, that’s still quite the addiction. Not rehab country just yet, but still. 🙂 My goal is to have the library vastly cleaned up by June. I just have to find ways within Calibre to better eliminate duplicate titles that just happen to have separate formats or even the same file.
Set in the 1970s, a Russian poet has sought asylum in the U.S. Days before he qualifies for citizenship, he is kidnapped from Grand Central Station. Why was he taken? How can they help him? Where is he?
What I Liked
The story diverges on two tracks — a black-bag CIA operative comes in from the cold just enough to maintain full deniability while he looks for the missing poet. At the same time, an FBI manager keeps poking and prodding trying to find out why. Neither one knows the other exists, and the two stories remain fully compartmentalized.
What I Didn’t Like
The opening is extremely descriptive, almost one step removed from the action, and it takes a while until you fully engage in the two tracks.
The author is a book reviewer for the Washington Post; this is the story of his life up until graduation from university.
What I Liked
Dirda was recommended to me by a colleague from work, whose appetites for reading are far more literary than mine. He actually recommended Bound to Please, which is a collection of Dirda’s reviews of more literary prose from throughout history, but I tripped over this book first. I’m quite glad I did as I probably won’t read the collection of essays until I’ve read most of the tomes reviewed, but An Open Book is a fantastic autobiography.
It reads in some place like Angela’s Ashes without the darkness of Irish poverty. However, it is not without conflict or family dysfunction during the author’s childhood, and he tells the story in places with openness and unashamed personal bias.
The main part of the story recounts Dirda’s intellectual progress as he moved through comic strips from the newspaper (p.49), pun and joke books (everyone sing: “great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts”!), the TAB book club (p.66), the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series (p.90), a brief stint with romance novels (p.201), and the importance of great literature to challenging society and even changing history (p.290). It also includes his non-literary education – playing with BB guns (p.81), understanding firsthand how hard his father’s job was (p.185), learning about art and music (p.267), the ceasing to care about grades when writing essays and the corresponding improvements in marks (p.310), the contribution of early influences in his life to later character traits (p.320), and looking back at one’s life (p.321).
The book recounts his life relatively linearly in time, yet with lots of interesting digressions that veer away from developments in his personal life and situation with the book he was reading at the time.
What I Didn’t Like
It would have been interesting to see more of the reactions from teachers throughout the author’s life, including perhaps even tracking some of them down. It is hard to imagine exactly how certain ones would have reacted to his precocious reading of more advanced novels, and the existing allusions to some of their reactions are rudimentary at best. As well, the final decision (to become a freelance journalist upon leaving university) is rushed in the story and negates much of the relaxed pace to that point.
The Bottom Line
See the early influences on a literary book reviewer.
