A farewell to malls

I've written before about how shopping malls have been a large part of Melody's and my life. She was present at the grand opening of Lenox Square as an infant; I first set foot in malls when visiting cousins in Atlanta around 1969.

Well, it appears that our mall-going days are coming to an end, even though some malls continue to thrive. I have two pieces of news to report.

We took a trip to Mall of Georgia this afternoon, just to look around. It is big, prosperous, and astonishingly crowded, serving a multi-ethnic clientele. It left us wondering why so many other malls — Georgia Square Mall in Athens, Gwinnett Place Mall, Macon Mall, Mall of Valdosta — are dead or dying.

Sadly, the trip wasn't very useful, for two reasons. Melody, after six hip operations, isn't quite up to the amount of walking needed. And I found the whole place boring. Malls nowaday sell almost nothing but clothing, shoes, and personal adornments of various kinds (and snacks). There are no bookstores, hobby shops, record or CD stores, or anything specialized, and of course no Radio Shacks. My traditional points of interest don't exist. Mall of Georgia does have an Apple Computer store, but I didn't need anything from it. It appears that a lot of specialty stores are on the surrounding outparcels, not in the mall itself.

So we have little reason to go back to Mall of Georgia.

Meanwhile, I think I've made my last visit to Georgia Square Mall, our local one, which I last wrote about four years ago, when it was in almost the same state as today, nearly dead but hanging on.

I revisited it on June 1 and was shooed away for taking a picture with my phone. I don't know what the objection was; maybe they thought I was checking its condition for a prospective purchaser. But I will probably not go back.

Thirty years ago, it was a happy place.

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Crumbling infrastructure?
Important wide-area computer network services do not work

This morning, Truist Bank decided to flag as fraudulent my monthly $60 cell-phone payment. They texted me, then called me. I think I've gotten them to accept it now. Because I made a replacement payment, I may even be paid ahead for a month.

Truist is showing almost all my credit card charges for the past week as pending rather than completed.

Quicken will not download transactions from Truist or Chase; I'm not sure about Ally. It claims to be doing so successfully, but the transactions do not show up.

USPS Click-and-Ship acknowledged a problem and was inoperative for a while last night.

Yesterday and the day before, Facebook hung on me several times, requiring me to delete cookies and log back in to several services.

Friends are telling me that a variety of other services have been erratic lately, including state government web sites in another state.

In the middle of June, Ally Bank was having problems processing electronic payments, causing my June 15 estimated tax payments to fail. I have made replacement payments.

Around the same time, the IRS itself was also reporting problems processing electronic payments.

And you know of my recent, severe problems with the U.S. Postal Service. On top of that, for the past week, their e-mailed summaries of my mail have not been a very good match to what was actually delivered.

Some of these problems might reflect Iranian cybersabotage -- as if they were trying to attack major Internet infrastructure, and mostly failing, but degrading service in a spotty way -- but some predate our attack on June 22.

What's going wrong? Does the United States no longer function?

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It's a book!

My grandchildren and I have collaborated on a book about electronics for young people (and adult beginners). You saw me thinking about this six years ago, and here's the outcome.

Now take a look at the book's web page, read the sample pages, and get a million of your friends to buy the book!

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Problems with the U.S. Postal Service

The local employees are as helpful as ever, but I've had enough bad experiences lately that I do not recommend using the U.S. Postal Service to carry anything that would cause serious harm if lost or delayed.

I'm aware of allegations that the USPS is being mismanaged either to make it too unreliable for mail-in voting, or to prepare for its eventual discontinuation, or both. I'm not in a position to judge these claims.

What I know is that:

• In January, I sold a defunct, incomplete laptop for parts on eBay. I shipped via Priority Mail with tracking. USPS falsely reported it delivered when it was not. Because of its low value, and to get the transaction over with, I gave the buyer a refund and said that if it ever reached him, he could keep it. USPS reported it delivered again about a week later in the same place; I don't know if it really was.
• On April 12 I mailed an estimated tax payment to the IRS. By early May it had not reached them, and I reported it lost, stopped payment, and made a new payment electronically. In late May it finally showed up on my account as having arrived May 6. This is still being sorted out, and particularly whether I will incur a penalty for paying it late. (I can't cite the postmark on a piece of mail that nobody has ever seen.) I know that a state payment, mailed with the federal one, arrived very promptly. NOTE: This may not be a mail problem. There is some evidence that it was mislaid at the IRS after it was delivered.
• On May 30, I mailed two home movie reels to a digitizing service in Buford, Georgia, just 50 miles away, using Priority Mail with tracking. These are irreplaceable home movies from the 1960s; one of them has never been projected. (Fortunately, despite being irreplaceable, they are not actually the only photographs of anything important.) Above, you see this package's sad history. I have gotten attentive personal service from someone in the Buford post office, but they should not have been able to lose a tracked package in the first place!
  
  (Inside my box, the movie reels are in their original mailing boxes from the 1960s, with old Valdosta addresses, so I have also written to the Valdosta postmaster and the current occupants of those addresess. The person in Buford is also coordinating with the Valdosta postmaster, just in case the reels show up for delivery there. But my outer box was not easy to break open, and I think only an intentional thief could have opened it, if that's what happened.)

Meanwhile, the other day I used UPS to get a package to my grandchildren in Kentucky, and UPS was as good as USPS is bad; everything happened on time, and there were tracking messages every few hours.

If I may wax political for a moment: The Postal Service is a government service, not just a mail- and package-carrying enterprise. Back when it was founded, everyone realized that you can't run or grow a country without a postal service. That's why all governments have them. And the fixed, low first-class letter rate, the same everywhere in the United States, was essential to enable growth in sparsely populated areas. Yes, we are deliberately subsidizing sparsely populated areas. That's one of the goals of this and almost every country.

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Books, books, books!

I'm doing a lot of writing right now and, for the first time, working with Amazon KDP (self-publishing) rather than a publishing company. Electronic Experiments for Young Learners is probably going to hit the market later this month. Then, there are three more books in the works, all based on work I've already done, and possibly all on the market by the end of July. We'll see!

I don't know how sales via Amazon will compare with a regular publisher. But all my books have titles what will lead interested people to them — they are non-fiction. Melody and I have the skills to design, typeset, and lay out a book. (Somebody could make some money offering these skills to people who want to self-publish; many are doing so.) Via Amazon, I can sell the book for a lower price and still receive a higher royalty than with a regular publisher. And I can move fast and even publish an incomplete "preview edition" of a book to be expanded later (you'll be interested to see what that is going to be). Hang on to your hats!

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Expanding Covington Innovations

One of my long-term consulting projects appears to be scaling down, and for the first time in years, I have some availability for new projects. Please let me know if I can help you. I am happiest when inventing a new computer solution to a problem that has not been solved before. "No job too small; few jobs too weird."

Click for more information

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Preparing books for Amazon self-publishing

I'm about to self-publish several things on Amazon. For the most part, Amazon's KDP page explains the process, but I wasted time on some serious pitfalls, which I want to keep you out of.

If you want to publish only on paper, or if your book is heavily illustrated and you want its e-book to consist of page images:

• Choose the intended page size (trim size) in your word processing software. It's probably not Letter; few books are that big.
• Create the output as a PDF file.
• Include a conventional table of contents (created from section headings), and use the same PDF for the e-book and print editions. (In this situation, people reading the e-book will use the old-style table of contents as a useful outline of the book, more detailed that the e-book's clickable table of contents.)
• If working in Word, use Save As (or Save Copy), PDF, not Print To PDF. Choose the options to optimize image quality and create bookmarks from headings.
• For the print editions, simply upload this PDF. First, use a PDF reader to verify that you got the page size right and everything looks OK.
• For the e-book edition, do not let KDP's online converter take your PDF file. That way lies madness. It will try to make it reflowable and will garble it terribly.
  
  Instead, use Kindle Create (free software) to make your PDF into a KPF. With just a bit of help, Kindle Create will create a clickable table of contents for you in addition to the table of contents page, which I recommend leaving in because people can use it as an outline of the book.
  
  Then use Kindle Previewer (on your PC; not the Kindle for PC reader app) to preview it. Do not trust the online previewer, which will make it look as if you have no clickable table of contents.

If your book consists mostly of a continuous flow of words (stories, essays, etc.) without many illustrations:

• Everything that I just said, except that you will open your Word document in Kindle Create to make a reflowable (variable-line-width) KPF file with table of contents.
• For the print edition it is probably best to output PDF from Word, with the page size carefully chosen.

By the way, both Kindle Create and Kindle Previewer are not high-DPI aware and will need some settings if you have a high-resolution display (click on that link for more).

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A note about telling the truth

Honest communication requires you to anticipate how your audience will understand what you are saying. Language is not private, and you do not get to redefine words yourself. If you did, it would be all right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater if you privately have redefined the word, or if you and a few friends have declared it to be an in-joke.

I have heard something like this claimed in defense of spreading a conspiracy theory. "They should have known it's a joke" — well, should they? It was a conspiracy theory that some people were already believing. When the audience is large, some people are not going to know the context you have in mind, and they will take you at your word, and you should have known that.

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Hire a professor...?

Silicon Valley tends to glamorize people who succeeded without adequate education (e.g., college dropout Bill Gates) or with inept management (almost any computer company). Lesser minds think that inadequate education and bad management lead to success.

I suggest looking somewhere else. On LinkedIn, Grant Lee tells the story of Luis von Ahn, who invented CAPTCHA, went right back to teaching computer science, and later founded Duolingo. His point was that academic virtues became strengths of Duolingo. His main points:

• Professors debate ideas while respecting people.
  
  Academia is a zero-blame culture. You're expected to be wrong some of the time. Ego is no substitute for correctness.
• Teachers break down complex concepts for confused freshmen.
  
  Explaining your work to others is vital. So is keeping good notes to explain it to your future self!
• Academics demand evidence before action.
  
  Duolingo products are tested, not just launched into the world.

Academia is methodical and ego-free. Pompous egos are considered fools, not leaders.

And for 2500 years there have been people among us whose job was developing and spreading new ideas. Most of them have been called professors.

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