Gordon Woolf's Blog

Flying coffee cups and washing keyboards

I've seen plenty of near-full coffee cups go flying in publishers' offices, so I'm not ashamed to send back a manuscript with a slight sign that it was read while I was drinking or eating. I'm sure authors will consider that better than receiving back a manuscript which has not been open. (I'm told some stick a hair or similar across pages to check -- in the manner that crime novel detectives would stick a matchstick across a door to see if anyone had entered a room).

However, at one newspaper where I worked, the IT manager felt it neccessary to put up a large notice in the copy editors' area which read something like "If you must drink coffee at the desk, please take it without sugar!"

Apparently keyboards and terminals would survive the coffee, and he regularly had one or two keyboards hanging from the partitions in his workshop after being washed with a hose; the sugar is what does the damage. But I don't think any editor or publisher would dare to ban coffee for copy editors, certainly not on the late shift.

And I do know that several of those photographs from correspondents and readers which "went missing" mysteriously, were lost after being smothered in a takeaway curry.

I'm surprised how many lost items turned up in no fit state to return when I had to move everything out to have my office recarpeted. However I'm more worried by all the things I can't find since moving everything back in. I know where they used to be.

However, if you do spill something on a keyboard and decide to take the risk of washing and drying, the one thing not to do is to undo those screws underneath. At one time keyboards had little holders for the springs to fit in. Many modern ones do not, so any attempt to open them results in a spray of several hundred parts over a wide area. It's quite impressive.

I've just this minute thought that if one could loosen those screws just enough one could produce this effect at the first touch by someone else...

Anyone else remember those old DOS programs that could sit looking like the old C: prompt but when anything was typed in would bring up a message of something like "Checking hard drive -- about to go into cleaning cycle" and manage to make the built-in speaker which usually just beeped produce a passable imitation of a washing machine spin cycle?

I clone: it's the easy way back after a crash

The ultimate problem on a PC. It just would not boot up. The BIOS was trying to boot from the second hard drive and could not find the first. When I disabled the second hard drive the BIOS could not find a drive at all.

Removing the tray and then the drive from the tray I could feel it spinning but there was no sign of recognition even from my SATA docking station.

This was the disaster I knew would come and fortunately I was prepared.

My hard drives are mounted in removable trays, so I could easily swap from Win 7 to my XP drive, and that booted perfectly, proving, if I still needed proof, that it was a problem with the drive and nothing else.

But I had an easy way back to business. A month ago I had cloned my main drive using software called HDclone from Miray Software in Germany.

All I had to do was replace the faulty drive in the removable tray with the cloned one...that means loosening the tray cover, sliding that off then undoing four screws, replacing the drive, doing up the screws, sliding on and tightening the cover (one screw) and sliding it into the caddy. That takes about three minutes.

Reboot and there is my OS as it was a month ago. Copy back some files from the usual weekly backup via DriveImage (OK that software is ancient and I'll go for TrueImage when the Win7 version of that is out next month, but the old one still works perfectly) and the past day or so's email and Firefox history plus the password safe data from my thumbdrive (thanks to MozBackup).

I've since cloned the drive again and updated the cloned copy of my XP system. That takes time, but not when I have to be present. The PC will chug away for the 5 or 6 hours the cloning process takes.

The Mira website states that the latest version can create cloned drives even from within Windows but I'm currently using a bootable CD made by copying their .iso file to a CD-R. And the paid versions claim to work at twice the speed, and to be able to clone partitions as well as a full drive.

Even so, the company suggests that, to prove that the software will work on your system, you first download the free version and create a cloned drive. The appeal of then being able to do it in half the time will woo most users. The Basic edition as a download costs about US$25 (they price in Euros).

As I said, the software will work within Windows but as a self-booting CD it will copy just about any drive with any OS to any other drive which is at least the same size. And since the downloaded zip file includes an .iso file, Mac and Linux users should be able to create the bootable CD.

I'm not making any special claims for them, more for cloning as an adjunct to other backup systems. There are at least five other ways to clone a drive. See this page at Downloadquad

This was the second cloning application I tried and it did all that I needed, and simply, so I've stuck with it.

Oh yes, unless you want to read the manual, have one of those (usually green) converter plugs ready to put your mouse in via the PS/2 port instead of USB, though Mira may well have solved that with the new version that I'll download shortly.

Next time someone asks if you backup you can then say "I clone".

What happened to the failed drive? It was out of warranty with the dealer I bought it from, well over 12 months, but he suggested I look at the drive maker's website. That was Seagate. They have a page to enter the model and serial numbers and if it is within 5 years of manufacture, they replace it. I got a return number, sent it off and within two weeks a replacement came back. Only cost was one-way freight to get it to their depot.

Journalism at its best

As someone commented on an email list for copy editors, the the big difference at a smallish weekly is that just about anyone can march into the editor-publisher's office and take him to task for anything in the paper. They also collar him at the supermarket, on the street, or at a high school hockey game. "There is no statute of limitations. Accountability, up close and personal", stated the writer.

And for those reasons, in my view, it is the best form of journalism there is! My first experience of it (after having been an editor of a couple of magazines, including one with a worldwide circulation) was on a country town paper with an editorial staff of two (the owner/manager and me). It came out at 11am on a Thursday morning and if it was a few minutes late there would be a queue stretching down the street. Even the bus to the next town waited on the opposite side of the street though there was no official stop there -- the driver knew his passengers would be in the queue, as well as having to face the people in that tiny town if he arrived without the supply for the general store.

You very quickly get to know how to spell every family name in town, and you are working every hour that you are awake. Sometimes there are national stories too and you see the difference in the care which has to be taken to get things right. Getting the little facts right is also the key to acceptance as an outsider, especially when you print the things they'd rather were not said.

City newspapers used to send young reporters for spells of a few months on small country newspapers but that is a tradition which seems to have disappeared, though it helped many borderline publications to survive and gave the bigger newspapers much better journalists.

Does punctuation matter?

"Let's eat, Dad" or "Let's eat Dad". A comma can make a big difference.

Is punctuation more important than spelling?

I think it is. After all, most spelling is not so far off that you can't work out what the writer means - and this country and the UK understands what Americans write despite substantial spelling differences.

But an error in punctuation can cause mayhem. And while spelling checkers can at least offer some options, there has been little success with grammar checkers and even less success with the aspect of those which check punctuation.

Of course there will be arguments about where many commas should be put. They were a source of more disagreement with my co-author, Geoffrey Heard, on our book Success in Store than any other subject. I use more commas than he does, but we also tend to use them in different places. However, we did agree on those where they could influence the meaning, and that is important.

Lawyers tend not to use commas and one explained that they need to make it clear that when a comma is included in a contract they have considered its placement and have decided it is necessary.

Despite that, there have been problems with contracts where vast sums have depended on the interpretation of meaning based on a comma.

We can point to some sites where problems caused by this humblest of punctuation marks is discussed:

The University of Hawaii's Hohonu, a journal of academic writing has a nice piece online by Andy Gramlich: Commas, the biggest little quirks in the English language http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/academics/hohonu/writing.php?id=82

Commas have saved a life. lost a million dollars or been blasphemous according to stories at http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/A2E17AAC-4E28-4EA7-B1FC-D5064B155006/

National Punctuation Day was a not massively successful promotion in the USA but sadly it seems to have disappeared. Last year (2008) it was on September 24, but that's not far off as I write and the site is still all about last year, though some are still useful like the piece at http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/meaning.html .

My co-author (and now publisher) is probably right. I use too many commas. You can probably delete most in this article, but a few are needed, including, I hope, the very first one.

Where does news come from?

That's a question we really all know the answer to but which many of us have decided to forget or disregard.

News in its original form comes from two sources:

1. People who want the information to be known (i.e. businesses, groups, politicians, individuals).
2. People who ask questions of businesses, groups, politicians, individuals.

The first group, whether they know it or not, are publicists. The second group, again whether they know it or not, are journalists.

The second group are people who mostly have to be paid for doing their job by the people who read what they write. In some cases this direct payment can be separated by their work being paid for by the first group, usually indirectly by paying for space or time in the media which then has funds to publish output from the second group.

Group 1 knows that unless there is an acceptable quantity of material from Group 2, then Group 1's output will not be read as avidly and in extreme cases may not be read at all.

This was understood by the men of commerce who started the first trade magazines. By including at least some independent information in their catalogs, those catalogs were read more widely and more thoroughly.

But now news stories from the people in Group 2 may be so widely disseminated that the originators are forgotten. Google News Alerts can tell you what is happening, and of course they quote sources. A page of "old media" national news in a local online "webnews" is briefs which quote and link to earlier sources, not even necessarily to the publication which published the original story first.

There have been union battles to ensure that print journalists may receive a few cents extra if the story appears online for the first time, but who gets the benefit from a level of syndication where even the original syndicators may lose control.

The Murdochs are right in saying that the consumer must pay for online content, but the problem is working out just where the payment point is on a tortuous route from originator to the last consumer in the line.

Keeping to deadlines: How is it done?

How do editors budget their time to ensure that all deadlines get met? That was an interesting question on an email list. The question continued: What techniques/tricks do you find helpful?

I'm a former editor, chief sub-editor, sports editor, news editor, chief of reporting staff, publisher etc of various magazines and newspapers, and the prime technique I've seen is to ensure that the person outsiders are happy to deal with as the senior person is not the one who has responsibility for production and meeting deadlines.

Hence the many terms - managing editor, production editor, senior editor, editor in chief, and the sometimes junior position of just plain editor.

Then of course there are the positions which relate the to actual job being done, so, while I have been night editor on a morning newspaper, I was that for several hours on certain nights only.

Thus, the main technique is to not have the person responsible for deadlines being in a position to have time stolen.

When someone gets through those barriers, what is the next protection? As a normally quiet person, I've found shouting quite effective.

Plan for disasters, then only the details are "unforeseen". For example, on the production side, know who you can call to say -- "I need our paper printed tonight".

When someone else misses a deadline, you need to know which writers you can ask to get a major story written in a couple of hours? But don't allow deadlines to be broken in the first place. And always have backup material.

There will be deadlines which have to be met and deadlines which are set for those who are unable to meet deadlines. Telling a writer "You're too late; we may use it next issue," usually works.

The most difficult situation is when you are editor/publisher/owner and the only staff writer on a weekly newspaper. To help overcome that I had two offices -- the second one with entrances from back and front of the building.

For the editor to have a second desk in the main editorial production area was another trick I learned from the editor of a major daily and it can be easier to work in a busy, noisy office than in the quiet of the management offices where receptionists are loathe to tell anyone that you are in, but can't see anyone. At least they could look and truthfully say "he's not in his office".

On another paper, a long time ago, one of the linotype operators was infallible in knowing when I was in their area for a legitimate reason or when to say "Who are you hiding from?"

I love Douglas Adams' comment (you know the one: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by"), but unfortunately it doesn't work.

Planning for success

Any would be publisher is usually exhorted on the various discussion lists to "do a business plan".

I've sometimes joined that exhortation but when I was writing Success in Store: How to Start or Buy a Retail Business, Enjoy Running It and Make Money, I told my co-author that I've never had a business plan.

He then took me through how I'd started a couple of businesses, and justified his own "always have a business plan" position. He claimed I'd had quite a detailed plan in each instance -- it was just that I had not written it down! So, as a writer, the one thing I've never written down, is my plan for success. However, more of those businesses have gone according to plan than those which have not.

You will need a formal plan if you are going to borrow money. However, even then a business plan can be drawn up on the back of an envelope.

A nice restaurant I used to go to had paper tablecloths and marker pens in a glass on every table because the owner said her original business plan was drawn up over a meal in another restaurant and she had to appeal to the manager of that restaurant for some paper to write it down.

It also helps to include, in advance, what you will consider to be failure. ("I will have failed if I do not publish two books in the first six months, sell 1000 copies or not be within a few hundred dollars of breaking even in the second six months").

Too many people struggle on because they attempt to justify the changed cicumstances.

There's no reason why a "business" plan can't be that within 12 months "I will have published Uncle Joe's memoir, sold 20 copies and he'd added me to his will".

You could probably carry that one in your head.