I’m posting this not because many of you care but in hopes that it’ll help the topic show up in Google for someone who does.

I’m working on publishing my kids’ novel, My Hundred Million Dollar Secret, at Lulu.com. There’s lots to like about Lulu, but not their instructions for how to use an ISBN number (well, technically “number” is redundant in the phrase “ISBN number) with their Global Distribution package. The problem is that it seems like you have to submit your finished book and cover in order to get an ISBN, which means that you can’t include the ISBN in your finished book and cover. So, I posted on the lulu forums and Elmore Hammes, a Lulu power poster, replied. Here’s what he said:

[NOTE: I just went through the process and have posted my own step-by-step guide – July 27, 2006]

There is quite a bit of information on this in the HELP pages and the Forums, and it can be confusing. Here’s a sort-of-lucid summary for using Global with a wraparound cover:

1. Go through publish process, uploading your interior document and your wraparound cover.
2. After reviewing the press-ready PDFs for the interior and exterior to your satisfaction, go to the PUBLISH tab and click on the Global Distribution link next to your title.
3. Complete check out. Your book should now have an ISBN number assigned to it when you look at it in the project list.
4. Edit your interior document to add the ISBN to the copyright page.
5. Edit your cover art to add an ISBN box.
6. Step back through the publish process for your book (I think you might have to hit the “DENY” button on the first page to put it in a status where you can edit it) and upload the new interior document and the new cover art with ISBN numbers
7. Carefully review the press-ready PDF and Cover art files to your satisfaction.
8. When ready, order a proof copy.
9. Even MORE carefully review proof. If happy, click APPROVE and wait 6-8 weeks for it to get to all the booksellers’ databases. Future changes will cost you a $79 revision fee.

Hope that helps.

It does indeed. Thanks, Elmore!

[Tags: lulu isbn]

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Gutenkarte mashes together the public domain literature at Project Gutenberg and MetaCarta’s geolocator that scans the text and plots the place references on a map. Pretty durn cool. It’s even AJAX-y. There are some other projects of a similar Web 2.0 ilk over at MetaCarta Labs. (Disclosure: I did some consulting work for MetaCarta a while ago.) [Tags: project_gutenberg maps gis metacarta web2.0 gutenkarte]

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(Disclosure: I am just not a Las Vegas sort of person.)

I’m at a resort at Las Vegas Lake for the day to give a talk at a company’s annual user meeting. LV Lake, about half an hour from LV, is a built around a long, skinny lake. The place seems to be patterned on Florence, complete with a Ponte Vecchio spanning the lake. Nothing that 400 years and a Renaissance wouldn’t make interesting.

At every intersection in the “village” there are small water fountains, about half the size of a kid’s wading pool, with little spritzes of water shooting up from them. At least they architects didn’t go into full Trevi Emulation Mode when designing them. The amazing thing to me is that into every one of these pools visitors have thrown some coins. So, we can now add to the table of equivalences: Gambling in a Las Vegas casino = Walking through a Las Vegas casino with a hole in your pocket = Leaving a tip for a mobster = Losing your wallet = Throwing money into a Las Vegas fountain.

Actually, I’m assuming the coins in these fountains came from tourists. Maybe they’re seed coins placed there by the casinos. But if they’re real, they’re a form of meta-gambling: Toss money into the water so that hyou’ll have better luck tossing money into slot machines. In fact, as the world turns more meta, here’s a meta-gambling ploy I’m surprised the casinos haven’t hit on yet:

The only place I could get breakfast agt 6am this morning was in a casino. On the way out, I tried to find a slot machine into which I could put a quarter, because the reptilian portion of my brain responded to the twinkling lights. But the machines only take bills or vouchers. And since they pay out only in a voucher you redeem for money — bring back the analog cash! — they let you bet uneven increments. Anyway, let’s say you buy a $100 voucher. Why not have some slot machines next to the cashier that don’t pay out in money but instead increase your odds at the other machines? Meta-gambling!

(Someone please inform Captain Copyright and his good friend Reichsmarschall Patent that I own this idea. Thank you.)

[Tags: whines las_vegas gambling casinos florence]

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Ian Reardon is taking Craigslist RSS feeds and populating a GoogleMap of Boston with apartment listings.

Nice. [Tags: craigslist mashup google_maps web2.0 ian_reardon]

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In this new theory, which is from that used on modern “stealth” bombers, which bounce radar off their surfaces so they cannot be seen, an object would be encased in a shell of metamaterials and they would create an illusion akin to a mirage, said David Schurig of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on a second report, which also appears in the latest Science journal.

“Think of space as a woven cloth,” Schurig said. “Imagine making a hole in the cloth by inserting a pointed object between the threads without tearing them.”

The light, or microwaves, or radar would travel along the threads of the cloth, ending up behind the object without having touched it. – Xinhuanet

So, boring turns out to be the secret to invisibility in both the material and online worlds…

Unfortunately, being interesting does not guarantee visibility in the online one.

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The print-only journal for crazed logophiles, WordWays, has a new issue out. In it are such delights as:

Jeff Grant updates the explanations of some of the words in his 10×10 word square, which includes the “word” “Alan Browne,” an American Bank consultant listed in the 1988-89 Who’s Who in America. Sorry, Jeff, it still seems like cheating to me.

Eric Chaikin finds a sentence in Entertainment Weekly that inadvertently contains all the letters of the alphabet in just 61 letters. Thank goodness for Joaquin Phoenix!

Anil invents anacrograms: “Take the initial letter of each word in a common phrase, saying or longer quote, rearrange them and form a word or phrase that summarises or relates to it.” He calculates the fequencies of first letters in Dickens, Melville, Twain and Ian Watson.

Mike Keith reports on the results of a program he wrote to arrange the 100 tiles in Scrabble into four 5×5 double word squares (i.e., different words going across and down), using only words accepted in Scrabble. In twenty hours, his computer found 121.

Rex Gooch invents and finds antidextrous words, i.e., a word whose first half contains letters only from the second half of the alphabet, and whose second half contains letters only from the first half. E.g., unsuppliable, unoutspeakable, pronunciable, and sunnyside egg. Examples of ambidextrous words include bladder-snout and ambidextrous itself.

Jeremy Morse analyzes the frequency with which letters are not included in the 25,000 crosswords run in the London Daily Telegraph since 1925.

A Ross Eckler, the editor, has a fun piece on books about words we need or words we don’t need. “Blurb” comes from a 1914 book on words we need. “Ucalegon” — “a neighbor whose house is on fire” — is a word from Webster’s Second Unabridged that we could probably replace with “Hey, get out of your freaking house! It’s on fire!”

WordWays so needs to be a blog! [Tags: wordways linguistics puzzles]

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In a remarkably sad story, Camp Jabberwocky (posts here here and here) — the Martha’s Vineyard miracle of a camp for the severely disabled — has been split in two. Most of the campers and counselors are going to a new camp on Nantucket. The issue that split the camp sounds hardly worth it: Whether counselors can have a beer or a glass of wine after hours. But it was just the proxy for far deeper, Shakespearean conflicts.

May both their houses flourish, although I suspect the magic has moved to Nantucket. [Tags: jabberwocky cp]

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I had my first colonoscopy today. They didn’t find anything, except a piece of fruitcake I ate in 1978. But I figured if Katie Couric can show her colon on national TV to encourage people to get checked, then I can talk about mine.

In colonoscopy, they stick a garden hose up your ass and take a peek. Your are narcotized into an odd and enjoyable state of semi-awareness. The after-effects of the procedure are gassiness — one of the benefits is that for a couple of hours you can claim your farts are therapeutic — and wooziness from the anesthesia. Your butt is surprisingly unsore.

If they find polyps, they’ll biopsy them on the spot and make you wait at home for 7-10 days to find out if you have colon cancer. You probably don’t. The biopsies can cause a little bleeding, apparently. (I was polyp free.)

The difficult part of the procedure is the prep. They gave me an early morning appointment because I’m diabetic. So, I stopped eating on Monday night. Through Tuesday, I could only have clear liquids, jello, etc. (Because of the diabetes, I didn’t eat anything with sugar. Non-diabetics can have sugary liquids.) Tuesday afternoon, I started drinking a gallon of electrolytes flavored with CountryTime Lemonade. It tastes like lemony sweat. You drink a glass every ten minutes for about four hours. Not a lot of fun. But it does flush you clean. By the end, you’re pooping lemonade.

By midnight of the night before, you stop drinking even water. So, by the time you show up for the procedure, you haven’t eaten in 36 hours.

The prep in the hospital is much like what happens before you go in for surgery: You sign a form allowing doctors to do whatever they want to you, including use you for BB gun practice. You get an IV inserted, chat with the exceptionally pleasant staff at Harvard Pilgrim in Kenmore, Boston, and make the same really bad poop ‘n’ tush jokes that everyone before you has made. (They ought to just print them up and save us the trouble.) The whole process really isn’t that bad. In fact, the anesthetic is sort of fun.

So, if your doctor recommends a colonoscopy, and if your health plan pays for one, do it. Except for the fasting, it’s not a big deal. And it sure beats colon cancer.

Violating the principle of Gut Neutrality,
a Disney bit elbows aside amateur bits.

(By the way, the background of that shot is just a random colon snapshot I found on the Web.) [Tags: colonoscopy healthy net_neutrality too_much_information] (On march 11, I did a little cleanup of this post which I’d written while groggy from anesthetics.)

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Nicholas Carr at RoughType sorts through the Dyson/Cerf exchange on how much economy is in the attention economy. [Tags: attention nicholars_carr esther_dyson vint_cerf]

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Bill K is starting a discussion of connected health care, prompted by a presentation hosted by the MIT Enterprise Foundation. [Tags: healthcare bill_koslosky]

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