I continue to gather the makings of Lenie’s greenhouse from the doors and windows they are tearing out of the front of the BHM building to make way for a new Subway franchise there. Today I got the double glass doors made of tempered glass. I already snatched two panes of 4-foot by 8-foot tempered glass windows. Very strong glass that will stand up to almost any type of weather. You could whack it with a 2 by 4 and it wouldn’t break. I’ll build it over the winter. I like heavy structural stuff like this to build with, rather than the plastic poles and plastic sheeting many people use for their greenhouses. I guess I’m just a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Mas Ayoob’s article arrives Mas Ayoob’s article for the Christmas issue arrived in the mail today. Superb and informative! An important article too! We print so many articles in BHM that are not just good and informative, but are important for people to read. I’m very lucky to have convinced Mas so many years ago to write for BHM. It didn’t take much convincing. He simply said sure when I asked him through an intermediary. He just liked the magazine. He wrote for BHM for a couple of years before I finally made a trip to New Hampshire to meet him. Very smart, pleasant, unassuming guy. Mas spends much of his time travelling all over the country giving specialized gun defense classes, some to cops like himself and some to ordinary citizens. He is much in demand. Aside from being a lethal force and gun expert and a champion shooter, however, Mas is a “natural” as a writer. I asked another Syrian, Habeeb Salloum, who also writes for BHM, if there is something in the Syrian makeup that makes people like him and Mas natural users of the English language. I was trying to make a comparison with a lot of Irish people who also have an easy ability writing in English. But Habeeb wasn’t aware of any particular character trait, nor am I aware of any particular character trait for the Irish. It is peculiar, however, that certain groups of people seem to have particular talents for certain things. Jews, for example, make the greatest chess masters, while Germans make the best physicists. Get a German Jew like Einstein and look what happens: the great mysteries of physics get solved. Why is this? Is it the way their brains are structurally configured. And look at Americans in general: We’ve always been the great inventors and innovators. The internet is only our latest great invention. We invent, other people’s copy and improve upon our inventions. Why is that? It probably has a lot to do with the fact we are a very diverse mix of people so produce clever offspring by the mere act of breeding. But it also has a lot to do with our political system; as a society we encourage our children to roam far and wide and take in all they can with their lives. An American’s easy opportunity to pursue whatever career he or she fancies, encourages them to seize opportunity wherever it appears. Americans are born to explore and experiment, so we are naturally creative as a byproduct. Still dealing with photo caption problems We tried a new captioning plug-in on my blog, but it doesn’t quite work in Firefox and screwed up the text in Internet Explorer, for both the present and past posts. It automatically displays captions from the jpeg file, so it would be quicker when posting — if we can get it to work properly. But if we can’t get it to work properly, we’ll stay with the Photoshop workaround. Please be patient as we experiment with these fixes. Since I am an American, I am perfectly qualified to invent a photo captioning system that will work, look nice, and be quick to use. — Dave

I mentioned once before that I am a computer idiot, but I’m proud to report that after only three months of blogging I’ve learned to put captions on the photos I post. Oliver, BHM’s webmaster, showed me how to do it with Photoshop since Wordpress, the blogging software we use, doesn’t appear to have that capability. This is a workaround, obviously, and I’m lucky to be familiar with Photoshop as it has been a basic tool of publishing since the computer age began. It goes to show that blogging software, and all this computer technology that is hurtling publishing into the 21st Century, is still relatively primitive when it comes to what I consider basic capabilities.

That said, I like Wordpress for its ease of use. If it allows this computer idiot to use it, it’s got to be pretty good. Wordpress does support captions that you can read by running your cursor over the photo, but that seems like a lame way to have readers read captions. Besides, I couldn’t get the captions to show up in Mozilla Firefox, which about 15 percent of readers use to access the BHM blog. Oliver came up with the Photoshop idea after we spent an hour on the phone trying to solve the Firefox problem. We did also solve the Firefox problem.

If anyone knows of an easier way to put captions on the photos, kindly let me know.

Blog comments

I also discovered I had a lot more comments on my blog posts than I thought. I just didn’t think to look back through the posts to check comments put on previous posts days after I made the posts. I should have responded to some of the comments, and will try to do so in the future. All this blogging stuff is new for me, but I will catch on to the technicalities of how it’s done soon.

I also think I’ll begin to narrow the focus of this blog to a behind-the-scenes look at publishing a magazine, which was my original intent. Right now the blog is all over the place, which has been good to get me used to how to do blogging. But a narrower focus will help build readership, and since I’m a publisher I’m obviously interested in building readership.

A publishing tip

Here’s a publishing tip: Just yesterday I had to go into a previous blog and correct the spelling of someone’s name. It is always unacceptable to misspell a person’s name in full view of the world. It is the greatest error of publishing. I know the Mom of this person, and she said she didn’t mind that I misspelled her daughter’s name. It may not bother her, but it should bother a publisher. Facts must be correct, and the most important fact in publishing is the proper spelling of people’s names. It is not so bad to misspell an ordinary word (people always forgive simple mistakes), but a misspelled name is a MAJOR error in publishing, damaging the credibility of a publication. A name, properly spelled, is very important to most readers. If you ever publish your own magazine or newspaper, or even a little newsletter for your local soccer team, this Rule should be a primary concern.

Progress is swift on new Subway

Progress has been swift on the building of a new Subway into the front of the BHM building. They gutted the front of our building less than two weeks ago, but have now installed all the plumbing and framed the exterior walls. They expect to complete everything and open for business in another four weeks.

The kids at the “open campus” Gold Beach High School across the street will be glad of that. So won’t I. Now I can walk next door for lunch. I can also start collecting rent! That’s the best payoff for BHM. We now have a long-term tenant.

We left our campsite in the rain and came home to find the wind that had accompanied the rain had blown down our corn. My boys and I tied it back up today with some old parachute cord. Glad the rain held off until our last night of camping. I posted Jackie Clay’s blog as soon as we got home last night. She sends the blog and questions to me and I post them. Annie’s internet is now active in North Carolina so she’ll resume administration of the blogs again pretty soon. That will make Jackie’s blog go much smoother. There are a lot of technical considerations when administering multiple blogs, such as Jackie’s, David Lee’s, Silveira’s, and mine. They have to do with programs like Feedburner, Technorati, etc., all stuff that goes over my head rather quickly. I need the information these programs provide, but Annie is better able to handle the technical nuances that arise with them, so I’ll glad to hand blog administration back to her in a few days. My legs are comfortably sore from camping. I rode my bike every day, swam in the river, and chopped the wood we brought along. Good healthy trip for a 63-year-old publisher who must spend a lot of time behind a computer. One of our camping neighbors, Lou and Dalene Daniel, of Cherry Valley, California, had a really nifty big wall tent they had bought from Reliable Tents in Billings, Montana. He’s a retired fireman and they now camp all over. Their home is near Palm Springs in the desert, so they have to travel about a thousand miles for their two weeks of camping at Quosatana on the Rogue River. Lou had built a barrel stove for his tent out of a kit he had bought from an online outfit — vogelzang.com. By a kit, I mean he bought the front panel and the collar, then welded up the rest onto a small barrel himself. Their tent was a big wall tent you use on hunting expeditions — at least 20 feet by 10 feet. He says the stove keeps it very comfortable in any weather. I asked him to do an article on him welding up his next stove, and he said he would. He’s going to try and sell them online. He also had a hot shower enclosure outdoors, which he bought from Cabela’s catalogue. That’s what I missed most — a shower. But swimming in the river kept us fairly clean. They also had a small Coleman oven in which his wife could cook bread. Lenie wants one so she can cook up apple and blackberry cobbler the next time we go to Quosatana. I’m always finding good ideas or helpful products from people I meet.