Shiro‘s doing awesome. She now weights 28 grams, incredibly energetic and jumps on top of Kuro all the time to assert her dominance. Yay! :)

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Have you seen Nalini‘s Angels' Blood cover? It's just awesome. It's out on March 3. I can't wait. :)

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Two industry insiders' view on Kindle's text-to-speech feature:

Neil Gaiman's position is that TTS is okay. Jason Pinter disagrees since TTS can potentially cannibalize audio sales. He quoted an interview with Robert B. Parker:

…what about an author who makes $60,000 a year, $10,000 of which comes from audio sales? What if, down the road, the Kindle cannibalizes his/her audio sales to the point where another contract is not offered? Audiobooks are more expensive to produce than print books and carry a higher price tag, so the author loses out on a certain dollar amount for every audio sale lost. Saying this issue is no big deal is like a politician claiming we're in a “mental recession” while riding in his private jet, unaware that below him there are people losing their homes. At some point perspective is lost, and while arguing dollars and cents may seem silly to some, to other it ceding this completely may at some point alter their career.

There have been other blogs and organizations stating their positions on TTS. But what I find singularly interesting is that most of pro-TTS people are telling authors to just hand over rights without getting compensated. I haven't seen a single pro-TTS people telling Amazon to cough up some dough and pay the authors for TTS.

BTW — IBM has TTS technology that sounds like a real human. So it is a very real possibility that something like Kindle TTS may replace audio books within years.

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This interview with Binky Urban just rocks. I love the part where she discusses McCormick.

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Nathan Bransford discusses sympathetic v. unsympathetic characters. Everyone should go read it. :)

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That's it! Do you have anything to share? Or discuss further? :)

mood: stuffed…! Hero Material and I had three days of gluttony starting Friday
eureka of the week: figured out two important world building / plot elements in All the King's Women; must incorporate them into the current draft

Happy belated V-Day! :)

Hero Material and I ate tons of food. On Friday, I made cheese fondue — very very good! — and on Saturday, we had Italian and on Sunday, I made beef stew and a ton of garlic bread.

I still feel stuffed.

We also went to a local jewelry store on Saturday to look at some custom made rings and design diagrams (pics). I do like diamonds, but for our engagement and wedding, we decided to go for sapphires. Hero Material has six loose gems, and I love their deep blue color. The issue, of course, is the right setting.

I liked some of the designs, but it was much more than I expected to pay. And to be honest, I'm not sure if I want to spend that much money given the current economic condition (recession) and so on. Hero Material thinks that I'm fiscally conservative — meaning I don't like to spend money even during bubble — but we'll have to see. The designer told us that it takes about twenty days, so if we give her a month, she'll have all the rings ready for us.

(My mom was determined to send me hundreds of jewelry store catalogs. I had to ask her to not bother since it's really not necessary.)

Speaking of spending money…

Numerous Japanese news stations reported about U.S. “stimulus” bill's “Buy American” clause. (BTW — it was very amusing to watch it since Japan is incredibly protective of its own domestic firms.) The foreign countries' problem isn't that the U.S. is spending the money it doesn't have, but that it wishes to use that money to buy American-made steel and so on for construction projects, etc.

Now, I'm not a big fan of protectionism — I'll blog more about how it can really hurt consumers later with some examples from Japan — but come on! The bill is supposed to stimulate domestic economy. The American taxpayers are going to be infuriated if the government uses $800 billion of their money and stimulate the economy of some other countries, when American economy is in recession.

I can't help but think that the countries that complain are just looking for “free lunch”. They don't want to spend the money but still get the benefits. If they want to stimulate their own domestic industry, they too can pass a $800 billion stimulus bill.

mood: feeling great
number of times I worked out this week: four! (miracle!)
number of oysters I had this week: sixteen

Got a good bit of writing done. The scenes aren't as fleshed out as I'd like, and I need to add more descriptions, etc., but they can come later.

Today's progress:

And now…here's the revolutionary laptop I want. :mrgreen:

Now gas is dirt cheap again in the States. I heard that it's going for $1.50 / gallon. This is great for many of us short-term as we ride out the current recession. But it's a disaster if we let the cheap gas lure us into complacency and not innovate green technology, such as solar power, etc.

Why?

Because as long as we depend on oil as our primary fuel, we'll always be at the mercy of the OPEC nations. Take a look at the following list of member countries (* denotes founding member):

• Algeria
• Angola
• Ecuador
• Iran*
• Iraq*
• Kuwait*
• Libya
• Nigeria
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia*
• United Arab Emirates
• Venezuela*

How many of them do you suppose is our ally and promoter of human rights we hold so dear? Not many. We worry about things like gender equality in countries like Iran and Iraq and Nigeria and/or Iranian nuclear threats, etc. Guess what? They can do what they do because we give them lots and lots of money for oil.

Hero Material and I've been watching The Closer recently, and who would've thought it would manifest in my subconscious?

A couple of nights ago, I had this weird dream that Kuro committed some kind of crime. I don't even know what he did, but that's not the point of my dream. The poor hamster was arrested, complete with teeny handcuffs. Shiro, with her litter, came to the police station to defend him. I was playing the Brenda Leigh Johnson character (the investigator, if you're not familiar with the series), so of course I asked her lots of difficult questions. The poor hamster squeaked in distress, hopping around on the table, but I didn't believe that she was telling me the truth. Meanwhile the infant hamsters were writhing on the table, blind, deaf and hairless. It was just really surreal. Kuro told Shiro he loved her, and the dream more or less ended.

On the non-weird-dream / hamster front, the weather's been odd. The temperature plunged suddenly, and it's freezing here. The big news here is the “massive” layoffs of maybe 2,000 workers or so by several local corporations. In Japan, there are two tiers of employment: seishain (full-time regular company workers) and contract / temporary workers. The latter category is broken down into two categories: shokutaku shain and hakken shain. Shokutaku shain is someone employed directly by the company on a short-term contractual basis, usually for a year. Hakken shain is what most Americans consider temp workers, meaning the company got them through temp agencies. When companies decide to cut costs, they usually let go of their contract / temp workers first. Currently Japan still clings to lifetime employment, and companies have certain obligations to their seishain. That includes not firing them first, paying for their health and pension insurance premiums, giving perks, bonuses, etc. (Contract / temp workers do not receive any bonuses or pay raises, etc.) Due to all this inequity in employment, a lot of non-seishain have been protesting the recent layoffs, etc. Furthermore, IBM Japan laid off its seishain (gasp!), which created even more drama. Oi.

BTW — The Big Three bailout is a huge conversation topic in Japan. After all, it does affect Japanese firms. Auto suppliers hope for the bailout since many of them have contracts with the Big Three. I enjoy reading financial analyses, etc. but if I read another person write that Japanese firms have a huge cost advantage because they get free health insurance and pension, I'm going to scream. I've been in two countries with nationalized health care. It is not free. Everyone must pay. People pay about $400 or so per month, and if they're seishain, companies pay a big chunk of it. Companies also pay for their pensions. If that's not bad enough, Japanese companies must ensure that their workers aren't overweight or overly rotund around the middle or pay an enormous fine to the Health Ministry for overburdening the national health insurance system. Furthermore, the government had a huge screwup with its pension funds, and since Japan has too many retirees and not enough young workers, it's planning to double the sales tax. So please, stop with all this “free” stuff.

I can't believe I went over a week without blogging. I try to post more regularly.

Happy belated Thanksgiving. I hope everyone ate a lot of turkey. We didn't celebrate it since Thursday is a regular weekday here. Shiro is getting very rotund these days. Not only is she getting bigger, but she's also quite squeaky. She squeaks at Kuro all the time and kicks him out of the nest. Maybe he bought her a vacuum cleaner?

Furthermore, Shiro sometimes sits on Kuro. In Japan, there's a saying that goes something like “the wife's butt is bearing down upon the husband”. It means the husband is the wife's b*tch. Here's a example of what she does to that poor boy. Sorry the picture quality is poor, but they were squirming the entire time.

This is Shiro eating her veggies. She loves to nibble on them.

This is Kuro and Shiro fighting (or something). They sometimes paw each other and squeak. The picture looks yellow because of the reflection from their cage top, which is orange.

This is Kuro debating between a bath and a nap.

On the writing side: All the King's Women as my NaNo project…it was a failure in that I didn't get to write 50k words. But I also figured out what was wrong with it. So it's not all bad.

How's everyone else doing?