“It Must Have Been Ol’ Santa Claus,” Harry Connick Jr, 1993
I thought he was great in the Iron Giant, but I’m otherwise not too familiar with Harry Connick Jr’s work (Christmas and otherwise). After listening to this jazzy little number, I need to change that.
These last two years I have made lists of my favorite Christmas songs. Some classic, some modern, some just out there, but all full of Christmas cheer!
I tried to pick some of the more eclectic songs and different renditions of classics the first time around in 2014:
Please Come Home for Christmas – The Eagles
Winter Wonderland – The Eurythmics
Little St. Nick – The Beach Boys
If It Doesn’t Snow on Christmas – Gene Autry
Baby Its Cold Outside – Dean Martin
Christmas Vacation – Mavis Staples
What Child is this – Liona Boyd
White Christmas – The Drifters
Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid
Santa Claus and His Old Lady – Cheech and Chong
There’s Always Tomorrow – Janice Orenstein
Feliz Navidid – Jose Feliciano
Wonderful Christmastime – Paul McCartney
Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town – Bruce Springsteen
Last Christmas – Wham!
Happy Xmas (War is Over) – John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Run Rudolph Run – Chuck Berry
Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy – David Bowie and Bing Crosby
Someday at Christmas-Stevie Wonder
Merry Christmas Darling- Carpenters
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings” Feat. Sarah McLachlan
We Need a Little Christmas – Percy Faith
Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley
A Charlie Brown Christmas Soundtrack – Vince Girauldi Trio
Christmas at Ground Zero – Weird Al Yankovic
2015 featured more standards but there were still plenty of oddballs to be found.
The Christmas Song, Nat King Cole
Holly Jolly Christmas, Burl Ives
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Gene Autry
Happy Holiday, Andy Williams
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Andy Williams
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Brenda Lee
You’re a Mean One, Mister Grinch, Thurl Ravenscroft
Frosty the Snowman, Willie Nelson
Winter Wonderland, Huey Lewis and the News
Let it snow, Dean Martin
There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays, Perry Como
I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas, Gayla Peevy
Mannheim Steamroller
Santa Baby, Madonna
The Twelve Days of Christmas, John Denver and The Muppets
I’ll be Home for Christmas, Fats Domino
The Chipmunk Song, The Chipmunks
Sleigh Ride, Leroy Anderson
Carol of the Bells, Mykola Leontovych
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Jingle Bells, The Singing Dogs
Give Love on Christmas Day, The Jackson 5
Chrissy the Christmas Mouse, Debbie Reyonlds and Donald O’Connor
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, Elmo and Patsy
Christmas Dragnet, Stan Freberg
I don’t know that I’ll have another 25 this year, I’m shooting for 12, so stay tuned!
I installed Windows 10 on to my laptop a few weeks ago. I have been considering upgrading my main machine to 10 for a while, so dropping it onto the lappy seemed like a good way to take it for a test drive.
I had upgraded my ASUS Windows 8 tablet to 10 shortly after the free offer appeared. It started out great, but the lack of good apps (which I have complained about) turned it into a mini-laptop. Having a mini-laptop is cool, but I wanted to use my tablet as, well, a tablet, so the ASUS has collected dust in favor of my more app-centric iPad mini.
Back to the laptop: While waiting for app updates to download in the Store, I poked around and found the page for the Facebook app. I had used it previously and it actually wasn’t too bad until Microsoft stopped updating it. I think somewhere down the way MS and FB had a fight, but that’s neither here nor there. As new features kept getting added to Facebook, the Windows app was stuck in time. Thinking back, its obsolescence and overall lack of apps was likely one of the things that drove me away from Windows Phone. Old news, I know.
A sentence on the page intrigued me, though: “New for Windows 10!” Why not? I download the app and prepared to be underwhelmed. As a test, I hovered over one of the ‘Like’ links to see if the additional options would appear. Much to my surprise, they did! I did some more clicking around and was delighted to see that the app had all the features that had been missing from the previous version. It isn’t perfect, but it is much more usable than it was before.
Encouraged by that success, I decided to re-download some other apps. I was surprised to find that they too had been updated, with improved results. I then turned on ‘Tablet Mode’ (which fullscreens all programs and apps) and was astounded that I could now use my Windows 10 tablet AS A TABLET. What a country!
All it took was a few good apps. Given my iPhone 6’s lackluster performance in buildings as of late, I might be willing to give Windows Phone another shot if Microsoft can get its apps together.
Maybe.
This week’s New Thing is my super-short story for January 2016. It is actually a follow-up to last November’s story, which ended on a cliffhanger.
In addition to writing words here, I have a personal slice-of-life podcast where I share my thoughts using spoken words! I have a dislike of overly long podcasts, so I decided to keep this one under five minutes.
There are a number of things that I don’t mind, but at the same time it’s sometimes fun to wave my metaphorical Cranky Old Man cane at the durn kids with their newfangled doohickeys and double-you-step music.
Case in point: Apple. I don’t mind them. I own a 2009 iMac and an original iPad mini. Both are quite good at what they do, and I continue to use them. Despite that, I like to thumb my nose at the ‘Apple guy’ in the office (there’s always one) and have back-and-forths with him about why I feel Microsoft is better. As if in retaliation, my original iPad mini has been slowly inching towards obsolescence with each iOS update. Recently, I was frustrated at not being able to play the neato new Fallout Shelter game for more than a few minutes without the poor thing crashing.
While the thought of getting a new iPad has crossed my mind, the thought of dropping a few hundred bucks on another one is not a pleasant one, especially since my Windows 8 tablet has proven to be quite capable, Microsoft Office notwithstanding.
Because of its creaky performance, I have been using the iPad mini as a hotspot more than anything else as of late. I would use my cell phone as a hotspot, but Cricket Wireless has internet sharing disabled on my Lumia 530. Jerks. So I send a few bucks to Verizon, turn on the iPad’s hotspot feature, set it down, and then use my Windows laptop or tablet to get things done.
Which brings me to my next point. I am, for better or for worse, married to Microsoft Windows as well as their ecosystem. Windows 8.1, Word, OneDrive and OneNote have all served me well over the years and I have no reason to stop using them.
In spite of that, I have decided to get an iPhone for my next phone. As I am not on a contract, I can make the jump whenever it pleases me, but more practical concerns such as home and vehicle maintenance take precedence. Nevertheless, whenever I am financially ready to make the jump I will be more than happy to for the following reasons:
Of course, there is some bad with the good:
I was on the fence about getting iPhone before writing this blog, but now that I’ve jotted down all the ups and downs, I’m all but certain I’m going to pull the trigger on one…eventually. $35 a month for cell service is going to be really hard to give up, though!
I purchased a Windows 8 tablet (ASUS VivoTab 8) back in January with the intention of using it as a laptop replacement. On paper, it sounded perfect:
Let’s run down the list:
And now we get to the device’s biggest problem: Microsoft Office. Because the VivoTab is capable of running the desktop version of Microsoft Office, that’s what you get. That would be pretty neat, but Office is not optimized for touch on an 8″ screen. Thus, I end up wasting time mashing its teeny icons with my sausage-fingers and fighting the interface instead of doing work. Styluses are no help either, they make me feel like I’m trying to draw on the screen with a fuzzing crayon. I bought a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard so I can get around Office more efficiently, but carrying them around and setting them up sucks some of that wonderful ‘portability’ out of the tablet.
Finally, Office 365 sucks horribly on this device. It had a terrible habit of slowing down to the point where I could see letters being placed on the screen one…at…a…time every few seconds. I would type out a full sentence and then wait for the poor thing to catch up before doing the next one because I didn’t want it to crash and potentially lose my work. I got into the habit of saving very frequently for a few frustrating weeks before removing the craptacular Office 365 and installing my copy of Office 2010. Needless to say, I have no intention of paying for Office 365 when the trial year runs out.
I really like my VivoTab 8, and if Microsoft could get around to making a version of Office that was suitable for smaller tablets, I would like it a whole lot more.
Oh wait, they already made one…it’s on my iPad mini! /facepalm
As I mentioned previously, I tend to carry a chip on 
my shoulder at work, which can increase or decrease in size depending on the derp that is being thrown my way by customers, coworkers, and the company I work for. I recently had an instance where working on a story during my lunch hour improved my mood and I felt happy throughout the remainder of the day.
It happened again. I got worked up into a lather one morning thanks to a coworker who couldn’t follow simple directions. I reached the point where I had to walk away from my desk because I wanted to hit something or someone. Lunch couldn’t come too soon because doggone it, I needed a break.
I returned to my desk and lunchtime soon arrived without incident. I tapped away on my tablet, looking for some mental respite from the day. I had earbuds on and was listening to music in an attempt to blot out the office noise. As is often the custom, I opened my ‘To Do’ directory and scrolled down the list of unfinished short stories, blog posts, podcast scripts, and book drafts for something to work on. I opened up the short story that I had started before. The words flew from my fingertips and I had a completed first draft by the time lunch was through. As was the case before, I felt better after the fact.
It then occurred to me that I hadn’t written any fiction in quite a few days; I had been spending them formatting “Fuzzy Words” for publication and recording and editing podcasts. I started to wonder: was I more easily upset because I hadn’t worked on any stories in a while? Have I gone from ‘I like to write’ to ‘I need to write?”
I previously mused about the universes my stories take place in. There, I mentioned that the majority of my stories did not take place in ‘the real world’ (Earth-Prime). Instead, I have a parallel world (Earth-F) that is inhabited by furries but is otherwise similar to our reality, but for the problems that possessing fur, claws, and sharp pointy teeth might introduce.
I recently found myself writing two stories that inched a bit closer to the real world than usual and went through the trouble of making sure they didn’t get too far away from their real-life influences.
The first, “Rules of the Game,” was based on the invention of basketball by James Naismith but transposed on to a world where a furry basketball league exists (FBA). While I had the basic outline for the story down, I took it upon myself to research both the real-life events that led to the creation of the game as well as what limited information I could find on the fictional history of the Furry Basketball Association. While I didn’t have to do so, I did the research in the interest of accuracy and I’d like to think the story came out better for it.
Another as-of-yet-unpublished story (“Epiphany”) gives a fictional account of what may have influenced the creation of some well-known characters. I could have simply written the story with no regards for the real events or individuals involved, but I wanted it to make real-world sense even though it doesn’t exactly take place in the real world. Once again, I did my research and I hope that the story stands up to scrutiny.
I might be the only one that cares about such things, but such is the price of having an anal-retentive computer guy brain!
On October 27, 2011, I uploaded One Sheet Stories to Amazon.com, which marked the beginning of my adventures in self-publishing. Three years later, I have self-published a total of six e-books to the tubes so far: one non-fiction book and five super-short story collections. My works can be found on Kindle, nook, iTunes, and Kobo.
Like many other creative persons, I hoped that my creations would be well received. While the number of copies of One Sheet Stories that were sold that first year could be counted on one hand (it’s free now), my second book, The Rules of Tech Support, has sold over one hundred copies and was downloaded over four hundred times when I gave it away on Amazon.
One reason I write is in the hope that this endeavor can result in financial independence, but realistically it will take some doing. I have received a small amount of royalties. Not much, but enough for me to let Uncle Sam know, for what that’s worth. There are definitely no plans for me to quit my day job anytime soon. I have, however, gained knowledge from my successes and failures that I have begun to share with others.
I like to think that my writing has improved over those three years; the fact that I give away some of my earliest works for free now is a reflection on how rough some of those early stories were. As evidenced by the slow start, I may have been a bit premature in attempting to sell my works. If nothing else, I learned that I needed to package at least seven stories to justify the ninety-nine cent price tag. Lessons learned and all that.
My attempts to sell paper copies of my books were met with what I can only describe as a fantastic level of indifference (insert lamenting about how ‘nobody reads anymore’ here), but the opportunity to spread the word about my work and talk to like-minded individuals have made up for the lack of financial success. Luckily the financial costs are low and the potential for higher levels of success are there, so I press on.
Of course, there are things that I still need to work on; length in particular is something that still vexes me. I have at least one idea for a novella that I would like to complete someday, but only a few partially finished chapters sit unloved on my hard drive. I have also taken a few tentative steps towards writing different kinds of stories, but the majority of my works are still humorous (I hope). Marketing is another challenge that I am looking forward to addressing in the future.
As I enter my fourth year of being a self-published author, I can only hope that as I write and publish more, I sell more and who knows, maybe someday I will get to really say ‘take this job and shove it’ for good. As my fourth year begins, I have two follow-ups to The Rules of Tech Support in the works as well as another science fiction collection and of course, more furry stories.
Writing and publishing has been an adventure for me so far, and I hope that you (and many others!) will join me on what should be a fun ride in the years ahead. Thanks for reading.
Eduardo Soliz 