EyeOnTechnology

Port engine out of commission, Damifino sits helplessly in Pekin, Ill., only 100 miles from her departure point in Seneca. Yes, that's my wife making out with the dog, Jack. Jack would like it if I moved out, so he could have her all to himself.

I thought we made mediocre to poor progress Tuesday, but Wednesday was even worse!

Some 25 miles across Lake Peoria, Damifino's port (left for you lubbers) engine started acting up. Thinking that the points had slipped closed, as they had on another occasion, we pulled in at the Pekin Access Point -- a public boat ramp with some easy-to-negotiate floating docks extending into fairly deep water -- to have lunch, let the engines cool down, then assess the situation.

No problem with the points. The rest of the distributor system looked good, too. Carburetor accelerator pump was shooting fuel, so fuel is getting to the carburetor. Those are the easy, obvious things.

Getting a little deeper in, I checked the stutter switch. A stutter switch is a little device that robs the engine of ignition spark, and thus power, to make it easier to shift into neutral while the engine is running. Obviously, if the switch shorts out, or is maladjusted, it can make it stall. Since the problem is stalling at idle, the stutter switch is a prime candidate for blame.

You test the stutter switch via the simple expedient of disconnecting it so the engine thinks its contacts are always open. If it is the problem, disconnecting the stutter switch will make the problem go away. I tried it, and the problem didn't go away, so now what?

We're left with fuel issues. I fueled up Wednesday morning, so I might have gotten a load of bad gasoline. The way to test that is to change the fuel filter. So, I commandeered the dog's aluminum water dish to catch the inevitable spillage, and changed the fuel filter. Still no difference.

They were working on a speedboat engine at the next dock, so I went over to seek help. One fellow was obviously the boat owner -- he confined his mechanical activities to blipping the throttle, and looking both confused and concerned. The other, who turned out to be Larry, watched carefully while listening to what noises the engine made.

Larry was the mechanic.

I asked Larry if, after he'd sorted out the speedboat, he'd stop by and take a look at my port engine. He promised to do so, and I got out of their way.

The speedboat sounded as if it had a modified V-6 with a nearly full-race cam, and no muffler. That made it impossible to idle when cold, and sound really rough when warmed up. Perhaps the owner wasn't familiar with the intricacies of tuning a high-performance engine, and wanted it to idle like a passenger car engine. No F--ing way!

Anyway, a few minutes later Larry wandered over to where the Damifino was docked. I explained the situation, and he suggested that the carburetor float valves might be sticking. That sounded like a possibility, so we discussed it. To solve the problem, I'd have to rebuild the carburetors.

That I can do, providing I can find a carburetor rebuilding kit, but it's a big job and not to be jumped into until all other possibilites are exhausted. Don't want to spend a bunch of dollars and a couple of hours only to find that wasn't the problem!

Larry offered to give me a ride to the local Marine equipment dealer. There, the mechanics were all away, but would be back the next day. No, they didn't stock the correct points and condenser to replace what's in there, so no luck with them. I bought a fender adjuster that had caught my eye on a classic Owens yacht the other day -- thought I'd try one out, myself -- and took the store's card to call again if I couldn't solve the problem otherwise.

By this time, it was 3:00 and the day was pretty much shot. With both the temperature and humidity hovering around 95, I decided to give up on solving the problem for the day, and look for a place to tie up for the night.

Larry suggested hiking along the access road a few hundred yards to the Pekin Boat Club, where we could rent a slip for the night.

I'll try again in the morning.

Changing gambling laws have made riverboat casinos superfluous. We spent the night in riverboat ghost town.

This is the second in the ongoing series following our effort to move the Damifino to Naples, Florida.

We only made 74 miles yesterday, which is actually decent progress on the upper Illinois River, with its locks spaced only a few miles. Considering that we didn't start out until after noontime, and passed three locks before giving up the fight at about 6:00 pm, we did okay. It normally takes 1-2 hours to pass through a lock, so getting three hours travel time out of six hours isn't half bad. That's averaging an hour per lock and 25 mph in between.

Twenty five miles per hour doesn't sound like much to people used to burning up the road at 70-80 mph, but on a boat it's moderately fast for a cruiser. Damifino gets up on plane at 12-18 kt (that's nautical miles per hour -- about 15% faster than the same number in mph). Below that speed, the hull pushes laboriously through the water. Above that speed, it skips over the water like a thrown stone. Planing is much more efficient. In between, the hull is constantly trying to climb the hill of water it pushes up as it tries to plow through.

There are two roughly equivalent ways to think of the process of getting up on plane. Sailors think of it as the hull trying to climb up on its own bow wave. Another way to think of it is the hull trying to climb out of the hole in the water (A boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by fiberglass, into which you throw money.) that Archimedes said it must create to get bouyant force to hold the boat up  against gravity. To a hydrodynamicist, the displacement regime is when bouyant forces support the boat, and planing is when the hydrodynamic lift supports the hull. In between is a transitional regime where the hull rises out of the water, so bouyant force is lower, and hydrodynamic lift does the rest.

The best fuel economy -- miles covered per gallon burned -- comes when the hull moves fast enough to be fully up on plane, but not much faster. It's easy to tell when that happens: when running as a displacement hull, the boat runs flat through the water. As hydrodynamic forces come into play, the nose rises dramatically. When fully on plane, the nose drops back to run nearly horizontally again. At that point, you have to throttle back to avoid running really fast. That's when you get best fuel economy. On Damifino that's between 22 and 25 knots.

In any case, the 74 miles we made yesterday brought us to Hamm's Holiday Harbor Marina in Peoria, Ill. I actually passed the place because all I could see was a bunch of riverboat casinos. Clearly, some were, shall we say, "derelict," being drawn up on dry land. One, however, looked like it could be in operation. I figured that didn't look like the marina we were looking for. I was wrong.

When we sailed in, (boats still "sail," even powerboats without sails) we found a deep pool with floating docks presenting dozens of slips big enough to dock the Damifino. With no better directions, we pulled into the easiest slip to reach, and tied up.

The riverboats are a side business for the marina owner. In the past, shore-based casinos were illegal in Illinois, and a number of midwestern states. There was a loophole, however, that allowed casino gambling on floating platforms -- hence the launching of a slew of riverboat casinos.

That's all changed, now. The states realized how much revenue they were missing, and changed the laws to allow shore-based casino operations. That made the riverboats superfluous. Hamm's marina owner (Mr. Hamm?) has made a tidy business of taking these white elephants off the casino owners' hands, and cutting them up for scrap. Those in and around the marina pool are awaiting the gentle ministrations of low-wage workers bearing cutting torches.

This en

View of the Damifino docked in Seneca, Ill. prior to departure.

This entry breaks, once again, from the stated theme of this blog, which is to look at repurcussions of technological developments for society. We'll get back to that theme when we get back to that theme. In the meantime, take a trip with me down the Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Tombigbee rivers, thence around the Gulf of Mexico to the southern tip of Florida.

Some 40-plus years ago, my then bride-to-be asked: "Hey, could we live on a boat?"

She'd seen my parents spending weeks at a time aboard their 36-foot cabin cruiser during the summer, and it looked like a fun, romantic (and cheap) lifestyle. We were at the time firmly rooted in the Boston, Mass. area, however, so the full-time live-aboard lifestyle was impractical. Yet, the idea persisted, resurfacing from time to time.

Another persistent theme became the "I've never been to Florida. Could we go there?" question. Having visited my grandparents at their winter home near Orlando (long before Disney Corp. turned the place into Mickey's Corporate Office), my impression of Florida was of a gigantic sand spit with bugs, and rain every afternoon. It was never top of my list of places to go, so that idea didn't get very far, either.

More recently, when the school failed to pick up Bonnie's teaching contract for the forthcoming year, we finally decided to chuck it all, and abandon the Chicago-area winters for year-round live-aboard boating at the southern tip of Florida.

In the decades since getting married, we'd developed into gypsies, anyway; we'd picked up our own cabin cruiser; and learned the advantages of avoiding the annual butt-freezing season. It was time to live out Bonnie's particular fantasies.

The first step was, of course, a reconnaissance trip. Borrowing the temporarily empty house of a friend in Marco Island, Florida, we spent a week sampling the fleshpots (which, unlike Las Vegas, means beaches, not night clubs), and scrutinizing marinas.

Destination in hand, we returned to refit the Damifino (pronounced "Damn if I know!" We didn't name her. The previous owner did.) for indefinite occupancy, and move her through the western half of the Great Loop cruise track down through the river system and the Inland Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, thence around to Florida's southern tip.

Lest this entry be completely without technological interest, let me note that I'm writing this on the upper deck (under that blue awning in the picture) using my laptop computer, which is wirelessly linked to a WiFi router attached to one of the bulkheads below, and running on ship's 12 VDC. Also on the wireless LAN are a printer, and Bonnie's laptop. The router ties into the Internet through a cellphone link.

The text editor I'm using does not run on my laptop. It's an example of thin-client technology in which I type into text boxes in a web page provided by the blogging section of my website, which runs in rented space on my ISP's server. Since the ISP's hardware is a server farm distributed over much of the U.S., it's also an example of cloud computing at its best.

Ain't tecknollogie wunnerfull!

We're now ready -- or as ready as we ever will be. Today, we drop the lines and blow a kiss and a wave to Illinois. In the words of the Paul Simon song: "We're on our way. We don't know where we're goin'!"

We'll know when we get there.

I'm writing this post to thank all the visitors and commenters to this website, and to answer a few of the many questions I get constantly. As you've probably figured out, I almost never answer comments to this site. I've enough to do to vet comments as they come in, which I try to do every day, attempting to separate real comments from spam. I publish what appear to be legitimate comments to blog entries, and delete what looks like spam.

Many commenters ask for link exchanges, which I do not do. The purpose of link exchanges is to pump up external links for websites, but search engines know all about that strategy, notice it immediately, and automatically mark down sites who use it. Thus, instead of boosting a site's ranking, link exchanges can actually downgrade it.

On the other hand, we do like to have other sites use quotations from our site. There's no need to ask permission. The correct way to handle the situation is to separate direct quotes off between quotation marks, and provide a link to the blog entry. The best way to get the correct link information is to go to the page containing the quote, then copy the text that appears in your browser's address window. Then, paste it into the URL field in your blog software's link dialog box. This covers you with regard to copyright issues, proves to your readers that you didn't just pull the quote out of thin air, and gives me credit for the information. If you look back over my posts, you can see how it's done, as most posts include references to online research that went into the entry.

If you really need to contact me directly for some reason, feel free to use the link provided on the blog page to reach my website. There you will find my email address, which you can use to contact me directly.

A few commenters have asked about my providing guest posts, or writing other copy for their publications. The answer is, "yes." It's what I do, and have been doing professionally for 25 years. For more information go to my website, where you'll see the services I provide. Basically, I provide written content for print and online publications, and ghostwrite material to be published under the client's byline.

Those are the main questions I'm asked by commenters to this blog's postings. Thanks for taking an interest.

Author C.G. Masi's forthcoming novel looks at how technology developers go about their business in a corporate environment.

Many thanks to the loyal readers of this blog, who have put up with a low posting frequency over the past few months. My excuse is that I've been trying to get my next book into production. It's nearly there, so I should be able to provide more frequent posts to this blog.

Readers who enjoy my commentaries on how technological advances affect current events will have a lot to interest them in the book, which should be in bookstores around mid-summer. Entitled Red, it is a novel whose main characters work in a private applied-physics research company. The title comes from the nickname for the central character, Judith McKenna, who is a tall, athletic, young mathematician, who tosses everything away to search for her missing father after the authorities have exhausted all conventional means of finding him. Her faltering quest is saved by Doc, her mentor and sometime lover, who shows her how to organize the scientific and technical resources she didn't even realize were available to solve the mystery.

To reach her goal, she needs to learn techniques of organization, resource allocation, team building, and decision making under uncertain conditions. If you thought such issues were dry and academic, it's because you haven't seen them played out in the emotionally charged, risk-filled environments where real-life technology developers live and work, where millions of dollars, careers, and even lives are often at stake, and any mistake can lead to disaster.

If you think that's hyperbole, take a look at what's happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico.

We're now doing the final polish edit on Red. The schedule calls for that to be done before the end of June, at which time the book will go directly into production.

Most of the work is now in the hands of others, so I will have more time to devote to looking at how technology interacts with society, which is the focus of this blog. I plan to start by sorting through the issues surrounding the Gulf oil disaster. What actually happened? Who should really be pointing fingers at whom? Are the actions contemplated by the Obama Administration likely to help the situation, or make it worse?

Hopefully, I can help make sense of it all.

Apologies to Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens). The original quote was "... the report of my death was an exaggeration" in a short note written in 1897. Source: University of Sydney

In the roughly quarter century since Al Gore supposedly invented the Internet, pundits have repeatedly posited the impending death of print publishing to a gullible public. So pervasive has been this story, and so credulous the audience, that many publications have, in fact, woken up with stakes through their hearts.

Recently, however, reports to the opposite effect - a resurgence of advertising support for traditional (as opposed to Web based) - publications has been spotted in the business news. Most recently, an article appeared in Editors Only that concluded: "Contrary to all the buzz, online will not obliterate every print edition. Some publications will be online, some in print, some in both. In the end, success will lie in the coexistence of print and online. That's the real

future. That's the end of the rainbow."

This trend squares with apocryphal reports we've been receiving that advertising support for print-based trade magazines, specifically, is stabilizing, although at a diminished level. According to one marketing executive at a major vendor of measurement and control equipment, "Online advertising is effective for generating leads for sales of specific products, but print advertising is necessary to build brand awareness."

We do know that, aside from search engines, the most successful websites are online catalogs, such as Amazon.com, through which visitors can comparison shop, and purchase actual products online. But, that's not what traditional print magazines do best. Advertisers supported print magazines based on their percieved positions as authoritative suppliers of information readers seek. The theory was that when a reader saw an ad in a respected magazine, they tended to view the advertiser as a leader in their field, and their products as more desirable than those of vendors. That theory held up well for several hundred years.

The Internet, however, has not developed the same kind of respect. With the proliferation of social media, which visitors know perfectly well does not adhere to the same kind of journalistic standards we expect from print publications. In fact, everyone knows that Internet content is replete with misinformation, disinformation, and out-and-out lies, in addition to well researched and thought out reports and analysis. The doctrine of caveat emptor, literally "buyer beware" is the order of the day when viewing online material.

Under those conditions, it is much more difficult for a vendor to build brand awareness, and respect through advertising. Print magazines spent a great deal of effort to earn reputations as reliable suppliers of information. Online publications have, generally, not. In fact, social networking media seem to go to great lengths to earn the opposite reputation: that anyone can say anything, whether it has basis in truth, or not.

We suggest that a new model for magazine publishing - which a number of publications have been developing - is the blueprint for the future. These publications combine printed and online content. The print versions provide in-depth analysis that provides an authoritative backdrop for display advertisements that promote vendor company brands. The online versions provide rapidly updated news, reviews, and trends information that provide a compelling backdrop for product-related advertisements. Advertising in these publications is not an either/or proposition. Advertisers are encouraged to purchase combined programs that place image-building ads in print, and ads for specific products in online outlets. Perhaps this, or something very much like it, is what's really at the end of the rainbow.

Graphing historic DJIA prices on a semi-log plot shows that our financial markets experience a price wave with a 20 year period superposed on a steady long-term growth trend.

Yesterday was the first day that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) managed to close above 11,000 in a long time. It had been flirting with that level for almost a week, now, and had crossed that level several times intraday, but never held it through the close of trading.

The media, of course, made a significant bit of noise about it - enough that my wife asked me, after reading the headlines in the local newspaper, whether it really was a good thing. Now, my lady is quite bright (she's working on her second Master's degree), but, as a humanities major, her long suit is not the kind of quantitative analysis necessary to interpret what moves in various economic metrics, such as the DJIA, mean to actual people trying to get by.

"Is the Dow over 11,000 a good thing?" she asked.

"Yes, but it doesn't really mean much," I replied. "I predicted it'd spike over 11,000 a month or so ago, then slide back. But, things are pretty much on track."

Analysis I did last fall (see image above) indicates that the DJIA is just about exactly on its long-term track. It should be just peeking above 10,000 right about now. Since we've just experienced a short spike down (You do remember we've experienced a recession over the last year and a half, don't you?). We can expect an overshoot on the recovery, then settling back to the long term trend modified by a chaotic wave with a period of about 20 years.

In the future, we can expect to see a slow rise with a long term trend of zero to a few percent for about the next five years. The trend should steepen thereafter, reaching a maximum about 2020. In the meantime, expect the DJIA to be in a trading range between 9,000 and 11,000.

The important thing to understand is that the huge price swings that many of us capitalized on over the past 18 months are unlikely to repeat, barring exigencies. Since stock traders make money by cleverly exploiting stock volatility, they won't do quite as well as they have over the past 20 years. Expect the real money to be made by investing in dividend-paying stocks. Expect portfolio returns in the 5-15% per annum range to be the norm. A good model for this investing environment would be the rather boring period from about 1965 through 1980, when the DJIA stayed essentially flat, with only short term ups, and downs.

Sorry, folks.

Ice cliff, Barne Glacier, Antarctica Source: University of Washington

This entry's title is a line from Roadhouse Blues, sung by Doors lead vocalist Jim Morrison. I think of it every time I find someone making important decisions about what to do now based on what they think is going to happen in the future. Of course, such behavior is the closest there is in Zen Buddhism to a sin. Non-buddhists, in general, don't have any idea what a horrible thing it is to sacrifice what you have today in order to secure some reward in an imagined future, so they do it, and even feel proud of it.

Eeeyyyeewww!

A case in point is the perenially stalled movement to curb carbon emissions to avoid global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 claimed: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal ... ." It goes on to detail a raft of dire consequences if we don't heed their warning, and make drastic changes to our lifestyles and energy infrastructure.

So, let's hypothesize a future in which governments of the world gang together, and force their citizens (remember, this is just an hypothesis) to conserve energy by, for example, installing gadgets that won't let you dry your clothes before 10:00 pm, drop your thermostats to, say, 65 degrees in winter and raise them to 80 degrees in summer. They mandate use of electric vehicles that won't go over 55 mph, and can't go farther than 30 miles before recharging (thus limiting personal travel to a radius of 15 miles), and many other good ideas.

Let's say that this goes on for two generations, or about 40 years, at which time the sky is clear and blue, and it's damn cold by anyone's standards. So, roughly 5 billion people have been miserable for forty years (that's one year for each of Ali Babba's thieves) in order to avoid a climate catastrophe that nobody knows would have happened, anyway.

Then, an asteroid falls on 'em and wipes 'em all out.

Is this good planning? Is it based on good science?

The answer to both questions is "No."

I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to figure out why it's bad planning. It is, and that's why the "Green" movement has been stillborn all these years. While everyone is willing to go along with the ideas that global warming is "unequivocal," that it's bad, and that something must be done. Nobody believes it enough to take action based on it.

It's bad science because of the use of the word "unequivocal" in the report summary.

No scientist worthy of the title would use the word "unequivocal." Any sentence containing the word, without a counterbalancing negative (such as in "No scientific theory is unequivocal."), is prima facie not a scientific statement.

On July 5, 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a three-volume book that was the seminal work for the science of physics. Nearly three centuries later, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which, among other things, showed that Newton had, after all, gotten it wrong. He followed that up ten years later, in 1915 with his general relativity theory, which pointed out how Newton got it wrong.

It's now 95 years later, and we're still trying to figure out what's wrong with Einstein's theory. We know he got it wrong, we just don't know what's wrong with it. So far, it's the second most successful scientific theory of all time.

The honor of being the single most successful theory ever elucidated goes to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin turned the discipline of life science on its head by publishing a little tome entitled On the Origin of Species. It's now over 150 years later, and we still call it the "theory of evolution" despite its proven success. Scientists (the real scientists, not the pseudoscientists that creationists like to quote) realize that there's probably something wrong with it, but so far nobody's been able to get a whiff of what that might be.

In science, no statement is ever unequivocal. It's only the best idea we have at the time. So, if it's unequivocal, it's not science.

Signs of global warming

A flurry (pun intended) of articles in today's issue of The Wall Street Journal prompted me to drop another post about the controversy surrounding climate change research and efforts to curb global warming. Readers who have followed my posts here and in the Ask Charlie blog I wrote for Control Engineering know that I'm no fan of the IPCC report upon which most of the current nonsense is based. It's not that I think that there's anything wrong with the basic thesis that dumping loads of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will likely ratchet up global temperatures, my problem is that so much of the so-called research, and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom, are prima facie so much politically motivated dreck (or to use the proper Yiddish spelling drek).

As I see it, there are two basic problems. First, the conclusions are based on a sophmoric physical model. Second, who ever said that higher global temperatures would be a bad thing, anyway?

The theory of global warming is based on a simple physical model - the greenhouse model - which is, in turn, based on the solid physics of radiative heat transfer. Specifically, it starts with the observation that the opacity of most atmospheric gasses is wavelength dependent. That is, while most of these gasses appear transparent to visible light, they are more opaque (sometimes very opaque) to infrared wavelengths.

So, the radiative power flux of sunlight, a large fraction of which comes at visible wavelengths, gets through the atmosphere to warm the ground. The warm ground tries to radiate that power back out at lower wavelengths (basically, the color temperature of sunlight is about 6,000 K, while that of radiation from the ground is about 300 K). The infrared, however, is absorbed by the dense lower atmosphere. Ergo, the ground and lower atmosphere, which are roughly in thermal equilibrium, get warmer. Increasing the density of the more infrared-absorbtive gasses, especially carbon dioxide, (so the theory goes) will necessarily increase the infrared absorbtion, and lead to higher temperatures.

We teach this model as an example in second-semester freshman physics. It's simple, easy to understand, and illustrates the mathematics of radiative heat transfer (which is what we're trying to do in freshman physics). The only problem is that the model is dead wrong. The real world is vastly more complicated. The difference is so extreme that any conclusions drawn from the greenhouse model are unlikely to correspond to anything in the real world.

One of the biggest problems is that meteorologists have known for decades that the weather system is chaotic. Weather patterns cannot be reliably predicted for a time scale longer than about a week. Weather, of course, is critical to radiative heat transfer, so asking a climate model that uses radiative heat transfer to predict anything beyond about a week is simply stupid. Other parts of the climate system are similarly chaotic, such as solar flux variability, making the prediction of future climate via computer models an exercise in futility. It is of academic interest, but of academic interest only.

Moving on to the second problem, who says global warming is a bad thing, anyway? The medieval warm period (look it up) ushered in an age of prosperity, cultural advancement, and generally really good times. It was followed by the the Little Ice Age, which brought with it famine, plague, and death. Who th' heck wants that?

Lessons from history, and prehistory uniformly lead to the syllogism:

cooler = bad;

warmer = good.

You do the math.

First, I want to thank the large number of readers who have taken the time to add comments to my blog. I've been blogging for about three years now, and this is the highest volume of comments, and the kindest words in them, that I've ever encountered. It's very encouraging.

Second, I should apologize for being lazy about adding new posts. I've been busy with books. The third edition of my How-To book entitled How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop is coming out momentarily (it was supposed to be out in mid-January, but the publisher warned me it would be delayed at the printer). I have a collection of short stories entitled Shakedown Blues, which is just out. I'm also hammering hard and heavy on the keyboard with my first full novel, provisionally entitled Red. I hope to have Red out sometime in the second quarter of 2010. I'll have more to say about these books later in this post.

The main subject of this posting, however, is blogging itself. I've received multiple requests for advice about blogging. Now, I do not consider myself an expert. Lots of other folks have blogs that generate a lot more traffic than mine. But, I've been at it awhile, so here goes.

Blogging is basically another in a long list of publishing methods. It fills a niche between social networking, and professionally produced news websites. Professional journalists treat blogging as the online equivalent of newspaper or magazine editorial writing. That is, they commit to a regular deadline schedule, and write more-or-less to a set length. Usually, they draft the copy for their postings using a word processor (WP), such as Microsoft Word (I use the Open Source equivalent: OpenOffice Writer). They revise and polish articles extensively in their WP, and transfer them to the blogging software for publication. I do a final polish in the blogging software, where I can see what the final result will look like, and then hit the "publish" button.

Blogging software was developed a few years ago to make it easier for journalists, who are generally not web experts, to create copy for Internet publication. I believe the original idea was to make it possible for journalists to bang out short, highly formatted articles quickly. The folks who wrote the software imagined that writers would type their articles directly into the blogging software, skipping the word processing step.

That goes to show that blogging software developers had no clue as to how professional writers work. Professional writers start by spending a pile of time researching what they're going to write, so they know what facts they'll use, and have organized and checked them beforehand. By the time they pull out the electronic equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, they already have a clear idea of what the article will be about, what facts they will include, what will be their "lead" (which is the first few sentences designed to pique the reader's interest). They also have a pretty clear outline in their heads.

They then bang out copy based on that plan. The idea is to avoid writer's block by typing whatever comes into their heads, no matter how inane, confused, or inappropriate. Then, they go back and revise the article to make sure it's clear, concise, interesting, and complete. They especially try to weed out extraneous material that shouldn't have been included, anyway. Finally, they go back to check for typos, spelling errors, bad sentence structures, and so forth. All this work is best done using fully functional word processing software. Blogging software just isn't up to the task.

Once the writer is happy with his or her manuscript in Word format, he or she can transfer it to the blogging software. The blogging software provides, usually, a window for entering the title, and another for entering the text. It also provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view of the posting as it will appear on the website, and some means of adding images.

Professional writers are all familiar with the effect that text seems different when seen in its final form. It's a strange phenomenon where, when you look at the final copy in a letter, magazine, book, or whatever, you always see things that you wish you'd done differently. Typos appear out of nowhere. Sentences that looked great in the manuscript seem clumsy in the final form, and so forth. So, professionals always look at a final proof of their articles as the readers will see them before releasing them on an unsuspecting world. Blogging software provides that opportunity.

Another thing blogging software does is pre-format the article. The writer doesn't have to think about where to put the ads, where to put the navigation bar, what type face to use for the title, and so forth. That's all done ahead of time by a layout designer (who might be the author some time in the past), and enforced by the software itself. The author only has to worry about the words.

Don't agonize over what blogging software to use. All the blogging software I've used, and I've used four different systems, does pretty much the same thing, can be used pretty much the same way, and produces pretty much the same result. For this blog, I chose MoveableType for its compatibility with Google AdSense. I wanted to run Google ads, so I made sure the blogging software worked well with them.

I do not, generally, design my own layout, or set up the software. I hired a professional team through my Internet service provider (ISP) to set it all up and make sure it worked. I then did some minor tweaking to the blog's look and feel. I could do that because forty years ago I made the commitment to learn computer programming, and fifteen years ago I made the effort to learn how to build websites using HTML (the programming language of websites), and seven or eight years ago I taught myself how to write PHP (a language folks use to control all the fancy databases and such needed for interactive websites). Tweaking blog formats is a dawdle after that.

Most bloggers, who don't have the programming background, just use the templates the blogging software provides. That's what it's for, anyway.

So, that's a rundown on what it takes to write a blog. To be successful, you should post at least two entries a week. More is better. The most successful bloggers post every day. Some even post more than once a day.

I find that my readers prefer longer posts. I know bloggers, however, who post a few lines once or twice a day. I feel they'd be better off on Facebook or Twitter, but that's just my opinion.

Changing the subject, I promised to provide a little more information about my books for those readers who might be interested.

For some reason, the third edition of How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop was delayed. It was supposed to come off the printing press by 15 January, but still isn't out. You can, however, preorder it on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers. A few collector copies of the first and second editions are also available online for exhorbitant prices. Most motorcycle hobbyists are familiar with the book, but I think it might be of interest to more general readers who just like reading my stuff.

Shakedown Blues is a collection of motorcycle touring stories written originally for enthusiast magazines. I think they'd also be interesting to more general readers who like reading about road trips. Stealing an idea from Herman Melville, I've embedded the stories themselves in explanatory chapters that would be of interest to general readers, and to folks interested in some of what goes on behind the scenes at national magazine editorial departments.

The novel I'm working on now, Red, involves a transcontinental motorcycle trip; a six-foot three-inch red head with a chip on her shoulder; a mysterious biker with apparently limitless resources and a Zen attitude; an evil step father; and a lost gold mine. The title refers to our heroine's nickname, which she got for the color of her hair, and those cute little freckles she has all over ... . The story includes elements of science fiction, a murder mystery, sex, a love story (or four), more sex, eastern philosophy, a look behind the scenes at the biker lifestyle, a peek into how engineers develop advanced technology, and some hair-raising adventure. Did I mention the sex?

It'll be out in a few months, if I ever finish writing the thing.