Blogger Stories

  Updated cover for U-1215 Smashwords version Sales for U-1215 has become zero since June of this year. It's strange because I had consistent sales almost every month prior to this. Quarterly sales of U-1215 from 2016 to 2023 I don't know what happened so I sent off an inquiry to Smashwords. They said that it's probably due to a "long tail distribution." What is that? A long tail distribution is a type of statistical distribution that seems to explain what probably happened to my book. A book may do very well at the beginning but over time, will start to slump, meaning sales will start to slow down. There may be many reasons why this happens so I won't try to give examples. Eventually, sales drops to a much lower level than at the start and it may drop down to zero or stay at a low level indefinitely. If a book is very well written, sales may increase sharply and then plateau after some time. In this case the vertical part of the long tail refers to increase i

  This would have been a perfect start to a day...if this were true. I received this email today and, I have to admit, it got me excited...for a while. What author wouldn't be, right? You get an email from someone claiming to be from a film/television production company and proposing to turn your book into a film or television series. Wow! Hollywood, here I come! As I read through the email, red flags started to wave. The first paragraph says it's from Rhiley Roads and yet, the email address is from Adam Mckay, the CEO of Hyperobject Industry. Furthermore, the email address uses a gmail extension. Curious. Shouldn't an official email come from a corporate email address? I checked out Hyperobject Industries. It's a legit company run by Adam McKay and they've produced several movies and television series on Netflix. This email, however, uses the words "Hyperobject Industry" instead of "Hyperobject Industries." When you're representing a company

RTD Temperature vs Resistance Tables Those who know me know that I'm an instrumentation professional and I've been in the profession since 1985. One of the instruments that I've handled many times are RTDs, or R esistance T emperature D etectors. These are temperature measuring devices and are very popular in industries due to their accuracy, temperature range, and low drift. Handled and installed properly, they will last almost indefinitely. RTDs operate on the principle that metals change their electrical resistance in response to temperature. This means that you can determine the temperature of the RTD by mea-suring its resistance. Unfortunately, there many types of RTDs and each type has a different resistance at any given temperature. This is usually not a problem because instruments that use RTDs as a temperature measuring sensor perform the conversion of resistance to temperature internally. However, if the instrumentation technician or engineer doesn't have such

cover of U-66 vs USS Buckley Just published my newest book, U-66 vs USS Buckley Duel in the Atlantic. It's a book that's been in the works for around seven years.  Back in 2016, while I was researching for information about u-boats for my other book, U-1215, I came upon the story of U-66 and USS Buckley. The story I found was short so I went looking for more information about the event. The best source was from USS Buckley's after action report at the uboatarchive website. It detailed the almost minute-by-minute retelling of the whole battle. With no thought of publishing the story as a book, I gathered every bit of information I could get and filed them in a folder in my computer. I went ahead and published U-1215 and forgot about U-66. During the pandemic in 2020, the movie Greyhound came out. While watching it, the surface battle between the USS Greyhound and the u-boat struck me as very similar to the story of U-66 and USS Buckley. I decided to review the story and mak

This is something you don't see anymore. Back when I was a kid, I saw this rectangular thing on Dad's table. It had a slideable strip in the middle and a transparent sliding window with a thin line down the middle. There were numbers all over it that, at first, made me think it was a fancy ruler but the number spacing was all wrong. It couldn't be a ruler so what was it?  Ever the curious kid with a fascination for technical stuff, I asked Dad what it was (after experimenting with it for awhile). He called it a slide rule . So, it's a ruler without the extra "r" , I thought. So, how does it measure things. He said, "You don't measure with it. It helps me calculate things, like with multiplication." I guess my eyes went wide. My first thought was, " This thing can help me with my math? " "How does it work?" I asked him. He asked me to give him two numbers to multiply. I decided on something simple.  I wanted a test that I knew

My latest book,  My Facebook Notes , is finally published and is available at Smashwords, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. I expect it to appear soon in other online bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. So, what's it about? When I first joined Facebook back in 2009, I immediately noticed the Notes feature. My friends were using it to post inspirational articles but I wanted to be different. I decided to use it to write about my experiences about my travels. Those series of posts later became my first book, Funny Stories from My Travels (now retitled, Travel Mashups and Mishaps). Then, I began writing smaller stories, funny anecdotes, inspirational notes, and various other things. I had dozens of those notes and might have gone on and on if not for a change in Facebook. Around September 2020, Facebook announced that they were discontinuing the Notes feature. People could no longer make new notes but the old notes would still be available for viewing. I was saddened by the loss of

  My family recently had the sad experience that our brother suddenly died. I decided to go to Bacolod to see him one last time before he was cremated. But this post is not about my brother. It's about the experience my wife and I had with the airline that we took. I'm going to make a video about my brother but I haven't decided if I will make a blog post about him. I bought tickets for me and the wife several days in advance. The flight was on Monday and the tickets were purchased four days earlier. Since there were no direct flights to Bacolod from Cagayan de Oro, we had to have a layover in Cebu. Our flight to Cebu was scheduled for 1:35pm, arriving in Cebu at 2:25pm. The next leg was Cebu to Bacolod, departing at 4:45pm and arriving at 5:50pm.  The first sign of trouble was an email informing us that our Cebu to Bacolod leg had been cancelled so I had to find another flight. I was able to get a flight that departed Cebu at 7:30pm and arrived in Bacolod at 8:35pm. So, in

  Legend of the Moon is now available in the Google Playstore. I decided to put it up in the Playstore because, first of all, the Playstore is not included in the list of bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. Second reason is, the Playstore is not included in the list of bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. Okay, so it's obvious what the reason is. I don't have to give the third reason, right? (",) Anyway, Legend of the Moon is my first attempt at writing a novel. I put in about six months worth of work into that book. I didn't even intend to make it into a book at first. It started as a short story on my other blog. I was thinking, "I'll just make it three posts long, just three acts and it's done." As I wrote the story, I began adding elements, other situations, more characters, and soon, it had ballooned into several posts. Finally, I decided I'd change it into a full length novel and deleted the story from the blog and rewrote it