Monday 29 July 2013

Silverstone Classic 2013




Had a really great time at the Silverstone Classic last weekend. A heady combination of show cars, historic races and time to go round the pits to see the racers in preparation. The bands in the evening cranked out familiar tunes to pass the darker hours.

Like this lad, petrol heads never lose that fascination with super sized motors.




Go see 30 + Lamborginis jostling to get out the car park on YouTube  or best of the rest gallery of cars here.

Compilation of Video clips from weekend.




Cheers

Gannett





Saturday 13 July 2013

Publishing - revolution

My sister published a book today. It took 20 years to write but just a couple of hours to publish to the world.  No fancy software was required just MS Word and a web browser to upload to the Kindle self publishing store.  Preparation of the manuscript takes the usual effort for writing, proofing and simple formatting but then upload and publish is really straightforward.

To work best as an eBook simple consistent formatting is required. A page break before each chapter and use paragraph styles to format the headings helps build a live link "Table of contents" page.  That along with some cover artwork makes the complete package.

No more waiting for publisher approval, no more slaughter of trees, the kindle publishing platform is direct and all electronic process.

Originally the development of DTP was all about being able to emulate the technical requirements needed for paper and ink publishing but for ebooks, where the page is formatted on the fly, almost no formatting is needed.


I haven't examined all the commercial arrangements, and I don't know if there are fortunes to be made, that probably comes down to promotion and marketing but the ability to access such an efficient publishing platform is a true revolution.

And the book ....  It's a tale for youngsters told from the view point of Nipper a brave sheepdog that saved 300 cows and sheep from a barn fire.  Over in the kindle store ...  







Wednesday 10 July 2013

Not surprised by this.


The Independent newspaper reports ...

British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows

Research shows public opinion often deviates from facts on key social issues including crime, benefit fraud and immigration ....


It's probably because more folks read the Daily Mail than The Independent and Daily Telegraph put together :-). The Daily Mail, like much of the press these days, is a shameful paper that will print what it thinks the public wants to read regardless of the facts of a situation. Specialising in taking opposite ends of a story in the same week it has the morals of a crack den.

Newspapers have a guiding influence on public opinion, so the research above proves how badly they are doing their core function.

Gannett