How to avoid accumulating unread books

I only buy books that I am pretty confident I will read (it wasn't always like that!), but I have still been buying more books than I can read.  For example, last year, I read 57 books but bought 69.  As a result, the shelf I reserve for books I haven't yet read contains 62 books of non-fiction and 16 of fiction.

A couple of months ago, I instituted a new rule: I only allow myself to buy one book after reading two of the books I already have.  This means that I should drain my backlog of books in approximately two and a half years, after reading (62 + 16) x 1.5 = 117 books.

But I can always decide that I am not going to read some of the books I already have...   ;-)

The article on The book is dead, by Sherman Young, will be next.

I am a book lover

I started this article with the idea of writing of a book I had just read, but got lost in reminescences.  I found covers of books I read more than 50 (yes, 50!) years ago and got sidetracked.  Very few, if any, could possibly be interested in my book-reading experiences.  But then, who cares?  I don't want to throw away this article simple because I am not a celebrity!  After all, with so much new stuff appearning on the Web every minute, most pages are never read or even accessed.  I'm very happy if somebody reads what I write and finds it either useful or amusing, but, ultimately, I write mainly for myself, because I have the need or simply the pleasure of expressing myself.  The article about the book I originally wanted to write about will come later.

Since when I was a child, not even a teen-ager, one of my favourite pastimes has been reading.  I started with adventure novels by Emilio Salgari.  After that, I read books like The Last of Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, the Tarzan books by Edgard Rice Burroughs, and also the Ruyard Kipling's books.  Or perhaps I should say "L'ultimo dei mohicani" and "Tarzan delle scimmie", because I only understood Italian then.

I remember buying books published by Viglongo and Marzocco.  They were large-format books, sometimes quite thick.  My mother would come with me to the bookshop and chat with the salespersons while I choose the next book to read.  Sometimes, it took me the best part of half an hour because I couldn't decide what I wanted to read next.  Each book would cost 500 Italian Lire, which, at the time (we are talking about the late 1950s or perhaps the first 1960s), were worth less than one American Dollar.

When I was in bed with parotitis, my mother read out to me La città del re lebbroso (256 pages, published by Viglongo in 1956, available online), and she loved it too.

Then, I discovered Science Fiction.  The first book I read was Death's Deputy, By Ron Hubbard, published by Mondadori in 1954 as No. 37 of their SF series I Romanzi di Urania.  I didn't know then that most translations were also arbitrarily shortened to fit into the standard length of the series!  A shame, really.

A bit later, I discovered the crime novels.  In the early 1960s, the most widely known series of crime novels was I Gialli Mondadori, published by "Arnoldo Mondadori Editore" (founded in 1907 and bought by Berlusconi in 1991).  "Giallo" in Italian means "yellow" and, indeed, the book covers were all yellow.  In fact, they were (perhaps, still are) so popular, that in Italy all crime novels are simply called "libri gialli", regardless of who publishes them!  Here is the cover of the very first "Giallo", published from 1929 to 1941:

After the war, in 1946, Mondadory restarted the series with Erle Stanly Gardner's The Case of The Silent Partner (sorry I couldn't find a better image):

In the early 1960s, when I discovered Perry Mason, I bought all the novels I could find (eleven, I believe).  In one week, I read ten of them.  That got me saturated and never touched a Perry Mason novel again till very recently, when I read (obviously in English this time) two of them re-published by Penguin.

In 1963, I started attending high-school and kept reading all sorts of things.  Unfortunately, one day, my mother decided that I wouldn't re-read my adventure books and donated them all to a charity.  I would love to page through them again, but the past is the past.

Years later (in 1978), when I moved to Germany, I left all my stuff with my mother.  Unfortunately, her cellar was very humid and, one day, she indiscriminately tossed away everything I had left to remind me of my youth: books, magazines, pictures, small cameras, memorabilia, and even my school certificates.  If I had been there, I would have tried to salvage something, but I was 1,300km away.  What a loss!

It is true what the Buddhists say: attachment causes suffering.  The more you have, the more you are afraid of losing your possessions.  Eventually, everything will go.  The more you are aware of it, the less you will suffer.

And yet, I am very attached to my books.  Sometimes, I think I should give them all away and be free of that attachment, but I don't think I will ever really do it.  Actually, once, I almost did it.  I think it was in the late 1970s or early 1980s.  I decided I had to give up my possessions, including my books, to detach myself from "having" and fully embrace "being".  But I couldn't separate myself from three books: La venticinquesima ora, by Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu, Siddharta, by Hermann Hesse, and La dottrina del Tao, by Alberto Castellani.  Well, to be entirely correct, I also kept some reference books like a sky atlas and some textbooks.  But you get the idea.

I currently own 1,142 printed books, 143 of which are stored in cartons that fill the bottom level of a couple of wardrobes.  I have several bookshelves in my study, but a non-negligible part of the available space is taken up by DVDs, CDs, and various stacks of papers.

Now, you might wonder how I can possibly know the exact number of books I have...

I know it because I keep a spreadsheet with the full list of them.  Each item includes the following information:

• Category (e.g., Hist);
• Identification code (e.g., ha.01);
  
• Last time read (e.g., 2002_04);
• Language (e.g., E);
• Title (e.g., The Custom of the Sea);
• Author[s] (e.g., Neil Hanson);
• Number of pages (e.g., 458);
• Format (e.g., p);
• Location (e.g., b).
  

In the example, The Custom of the Sea, by Neil Hanson, is a paperback of 458 pages, written in English; I classified it as Hist-ha.01; it was the fourth book I read in 2002, and is to be found in the "big" bookcase.

Yes.  You got it: I keep a list of all the books I read.  Each reading entry also includes the start and end dates and the number of pages I actually read (because sometimes I don't read them from cover to cover).  Unfortunately, I only started in 1991.

After studying the various classification methods used in libraries, I decided to develop my own.  The problem was that I didn't want to have to learn decimal classification (like in the Dewey system) or arbitrary letters (like in the Library of Congress system).  That is, I wanted to group the books in a way that would tell me what the book was about.  Here it is:

I initially placed the books in the proper order, but things got messy over the past couple of years.  I will have to put them back in order and then, perhaps, identify the books I should give away.

I also keep the list of books I read but no longer have, either because I gave them away or because I had borrowed them from libraries or friends.

And then (obviously!), I make all sorts of statistics.  For example, I know for each year since 1991 how many pages I read of books in each category.  It turns out that between 1991 and 2013, I read 45 books/year  and 39 pages/day, but the averages are increasing: in the ten years from 2004 to 2013, I read 49 books/year and 47 pages/day.

Now, eBooks in EPUB format are making my statistics more difficult to keep because their text "flows".  But I can still estimate a number of virtual pages by counting the words in an eBook page, multiplying it by the number of pages in the eBook, and dividing the result by 250...

In any case, although I bought an iPad and a Kindle, I don't really enjoy reading books in digital format.  I love the physicality of printed books.  In other words, although I recognise that the real value of books is in their content, I also love books as objects.

But enough for now.  I will write on the subject of printed books vs. digital books in my next article, when I will talk about The book is dead, by Sherman Young.

Earlobes? Go figure!

A couple of days ago, I checked which ones of the more than 200 articles in this blog had attracted most page views.  Here is what I discovered:

Entry	Labels	Pageviews	Freq
OO - UML Behavior Diagrams (Sep 6, 2010)	Computer Science	3918	98
Fortran and Eclipse on the Mac (Jan 4, 2011)	Computer Science	3319	92
OO - UML Structure Diagrams (Sep 5, 2010)	Computer Science	3280	82
Earlobes (Mar 19, 2012)	Science, Me	3000	140
Sudoku - A Handsome Samurai (Jan 19, 2011)	Computer Science, Games & Puzzles	1075	30
Board Games (Feb 26, 2012)	Games & Puzzles	493	22
GLUT in C with Eclipse on the Mac (Feb 6, 2011)	Computer Science	474	13
KenKen Strategies (Mar 5, 2011)	Games & Puzzles	468	14
Homo Novus (Jul 24, 2010)	Computer Science, AI	420	10
Dismissive people, power, and all that (Jun 4, 2012)	Society	328	16

Computer Science, which actually includes everything concerning programming and software development, seems to be the clear winning subject, with six presences and the first three positions, followed by Games & Puzzles.

But, the longer an article is online, the more opportunities it has to attract viewers.  I have no fun to go through all the articles and divide each number of page views by the corresponding time since publication, but I did it for the top 10.  The column Freq is the approximate result when time is measured in months.

Again, Computer Science, at least in the limited scope of the sample, comes out as the winning subject, but look at Earlobes!

To be completely sure, one should check that there are no very recent articles with proportionately many views.  For example, a two-month-old article with 300 page views would not appear in the top 10 but would still rate 150 page views per month, higher than Earlobes.  Well, I checked out all articles with at least 100 page views, and they were all older than a few weeks.

It could still be that a very recent article will shot to the top, but to determine that we will have to wait.  For example, the article before this one, published two days ago, has been viewed so far 12 times.  Six views per day correspond to 180 views per month, but it is too soon to tell.

In conclusion, for the time being, my most viewed article is a 300-word article on different types of earlobes and how I need sometimes to flatten them up when I lay in bed.   MMmmm...

I know...  You might be thinking "What do I care about what a handful of people like to read in Giulio's blog?"  You are right.  But then, why have you read till here?   :-)

More than one way of reading

I have been reading a little book written by the French psychoanalyst and professor of literature Pierre Bayard.

It is full of interesting ideas.

Bayard convincingly makes the point that “reading” has not a single, universally applicable meaning, and challenges us to admit that sometimes (or often, or always) we talk about books that we haven’t read from cover to cover.

Furthermore, he points out that, inevitably, we only retain a fraction of the information contained in a book. Therefore, even if we have indeed carefully read a book in its entirety, we can only talk about our impressions and interpretations that its content has elicited in us.

And as our memories fade with time, can we knowledgeably talk about books that we read months and years ago?

This last point stroke a chord with me. In a couple of occasions, I even bought a book I had already read, thinking that I hadn’t. It was somewhat bewildering to discover another copy of the same book in my bookcase. If I can completely forget some of the books I read, I have certainly forgotten the content of many of the books I still remember to have read.

What is the length of the reading-forgetting cycle? For me, scaringly short. I used to have a very good memory. I could read a poem a few times and be able to recite it. But, with the passing of years, my short- and medium-term memories have been deteriorating. Sometimes, immediately after reading a novel, I wonder how it begun. And my memory for names, whether they are characters in a story of real people in real life, is simply appalling.

Hopefully, something of what I read is still spread across a number of neurons and influences my thought.

On the basis of these considerations, why should I be more entitled to talk about a book I read long ago than somebody who skimmed it a couple of days ago or recently read an article about it?

It really seems that “reading” is in the eye of the beholder, to paraphrase a well known cliché.

Bayard suggests that we qualify each book with an acronym that indicates its “reading status”:

UB	book unknown to me
SB	book I have skimmed
HB	book I have heard about
FB	book I have forgotten

It seems reasonable, but I contend that UB is totally useless because, as soon as somebody mentions to me a book I didn’t know it existed, that book immediately acquires for me the status HB. Then, what’s the purpose of defining the status UB? Perhaps Bayard reserves UB for books of which he only knows the title, or part of it, but that doesn’t make sense because the title already tells something about the content. UB could only be used for all books of which I don’t even know the titles, but I certainly don’t care about them.

I also have a small issue with FB, because you can only forget what you once knew. So, does FB apply to books that were once SB or HB? And what about the books we actually read (in the strictest sense of reading all words in them)?

Notice that Bayard doesn’t define any acronym for books actually read. This is because he considers “read” too ambiguous to be used (or perhaps because he never really reads any book). But I like to think that if I have actually read more than 50% of the pages of a book, and have not forgotten of its existence, I should be able to use RB. Obviously, with time, many RBs will silently morph into FBs.

I religiously (interesting spontaneous choice of adverb...) maintain a list of all books I own and/or have read. There are books I own and have read, books I own and haven’t read [yet], books I read but don’t own (either because I borrowed them or because I gave them away), and books I don’t own and have never read. The last category only includes a handful of books I want to remember for whatever reasons. Consistently with what I said in the previous paragraph, I flag a book as “read” if I actually read more than 50% of its pages.

All in all, the classification I find most appropriate (if there has to be one) is as follows:

HB	book I have heard of read about but never held in my hands
SB	book I have held in my hands and skimmed
RB	book of which I once read more than 50% of the pages

Whether I have forgotten what I once knew about the book or not, refers to a totally different dimension and applies to all books I came in contact with, regardless of the way in which that happened.

Faith and Buddhism

I’ve started meeting with a Buddhist group. I’m an atheist, and that’s not going to change. But I don’t see Buddhism as a religion, regardless of what Wikipedia says.

I am an atheist because I don’t believe that some God has created the universe and/or has an interest in human affairs. I realise that my non-believing in God is as unjustified as the belief of Catholics, Muslims, and Jews that a God exists. Without any way of scientifically proving or disproving the existence of God (or Gods), the logical position to hold is Agnosticism.

That notwithstanding, I don’t believe that a God exists. This makes me as illogical as any believer. It annoys me a bit at an intellectual level, but I can’t help it. I also believe that it makes sense to speak of being good and virtuous (there you have a word that is completely out of fashion!), and that being good is ultimately associated to being happy or, at the very least, that you cannot be completely happy if you behave badly.

But what is good and what is bad? Or, to see it from the point of view of change, which pervades all our existences, what is better and what is worse? And more dramatically, what is right and what is wrong? I don’t know. I have been asking myself those same questions all my adult life. Does it make sense at all to speak about right and wrong? It sounds so dogmatic...

And yet, as I said, I do believe that it makes sense to distinguish between good actions and bad actions. After all, there is an almost universal agreement that lying, stealing, and killing are not thing that one should normally do.

Logical thinking doesn’t help much in these moral matters. That’s why when somebody asks me why I am a vegetarian, I reply that it feels right to me. And I’m very strict as well (uncompromising, if you like), which is a very illogical position to hold. I became vegetarian when I started looking for ways of becoming a better person. Did it work? I wouldn’t know, but I still think that it is right for me.

I suppose, following such a self-chosen rule helps me keep chaos at bay, whatever that means.

I base all my relationships on respect, and trust comes natural to me, which obviously exposes me to abuse. Like when a friend of a friend asked me to lend him a non-negligible amount of money (more than a month of my pay). I hesitated, because I didn’t really know that person and, actually, I didn’t like him. I thought I might never see my money again. But then, I asked myself: do I want to be the type of person who says no? I’d be just one more selfish bastard. But if I trust this person, I will be better for it, regardless of whether I will one day get my money back or not. Well, you guessed it: I only got back a fraction of what I lent, and that person even accused me of helping him only because I was paternalistic.

I still remember it three and a half decades later, and it still annoys me, but I know I did the right thing.

My father, whom I, regrettably, didn’t appreciate enough when he was alive, also was a trusting man. I remember that he once acted as the guarantor for a loan to a relative, and then found himself in an extremely tight spot when that relative defaulted on the repayments. My father was a good man. I am very sorry I never told him.

But I’m digressing, as usual.

All three major religions I mentioned before have prophets as emissaries of their Gods. Buddha was not a prophet, though, because Buddhism has no God. According to some tradition, some two and a half millennia ago, a man developed over the course of decades a way of reaching complete happiness. On request of others, he taught his method, thereby starting the Buddhist tradition.

I have read a bit about Buddhism, but I don’t really know much about it. What I know is that when I went to Canberra’s centre of Diamond Way Buddhism, I found myself surrounded by great people. Marvellous human beings. Never in my life had I ever met a group of people so open, so ready to welcome me among them, so eager to help without imposing anything in exchange.

Something clicked at once between us.

Theravada Buddhism teaches you techniques; in Mahayana Buddhism, the teachers act as examples; and in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism, to which the Diamond Way belongs, there is more emphasis on the teachers, who are supposed to inspire you.

As one of my newly-found friends said: trust must be earned. You are not expected to believe a teacher upfront. But when you see that his teachings help you again and again, you are bound to listen very carefully to what he says, and expect that a further teaching will also help you. This is what trust means.

Well, I’m new to this, but I do believe that I have in me the capability of being completely happy, and I’m willing to give it a try.

A bit of self-promotion

I know: almost a full month of silence and then only some self-promotion? It’s not so good. But I would like to be sure that you are aware of the other blog I just started.

It’s about Italian POWs held in Australia during WWII who, once repatriated to Italy, returned to Australia as migrants.

I started a PhD on that subject. That’s partly why I neglected this blog. I’ll get back to it. Actually, I’ll write an article immediately after this one.

If you want to know more about my PhD, visit my other blog at ItalianPOW.info.

Yet another book of puzzles

The last thing I would like is to put off readers of this blog by posting too many advertisements for my books. But, after all, I don’t publish things too often, do I?

I have just released a new puzzle book:

For the time being, you can only buy it from Lulu in print for AU$ 9.99 or from Smashwords in various e-book formats for US$ 1.99. It will take a while before you will find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. It always does.

This book contains 100 difficult CalcuDoku puzzles. CalcuDokus, introduced in 004 as KenKen® (a registered trademark of Nextoy LLC), is a 9x9 numeric puzzle similar to Sudoku. But, unlike Sudoku, CalcuDoku doesn’t require you to learn complex strategies.

Each cage contains a target number and a code to indicate one of the four basic operations: “x”, “+”, “-”, and “:”. To solve a CalcuDoku puzzle, you have to solve all its cages; and to solve each cage you must write in its cells the digits that give you the cage target when you apply to them the cage operation.

Unless a cage consists of a single cell (in which case there is no operation and its solution coincides with its target), you can solve it in several ways. For example, a 2-cell cage marked “7+” admits six solutions: 61, 16, 52, 25, 43, and 34. But only one of those solutions is correct and will let you solve the whole puzzle.

You can discard the wrong solutions of all cages by repeatedly applying the rule that each digit between 1 and 9 can only appear once in each row and column.

The first sixty puzzles of this book consist of randomly generated cages, like the following one:

They are difficult, but I limited their difficulty by setting to 2 the maximum number of cages admitting more than 200 combinations. Therefore, although I haven’t tried them all, I’m pretty confident that they can be solved analytically. That is, without having to guess.

To create the other forty puzzles, I used a different strategy: instead of generating random cages, I arranged them in fixed patterns and only generated random digits, targets, and op-codes. Here is the type of puzzle you can expect:

These puzzles are in most (but not all) cases more difficult than the random ones. In fact some of them are quite diabolical. The first couple of patterned puzzles are easier than those that follow. Otherwise, the difficulty of the puzzles varies in no particular order.

Of the pattern-puzzles, I solved those numbered from 61 to 98. I haven't solved puzzle 99 but I believe it should be possible to complete it without having to guess (which I never do). Puzzle 100 is a different type of challenge: it admits two solutions, which differ in three cages. I could have removed the ambiguity by splitting one of affected cages, but I thought you might like to check it out, just for fun.

In case you are wondering, the shading of patterned CalcuDokus serves no practical purpose. It’s only there because it makes them prettier.

Be in control of your poo

Since time unmemorable, human beings have done their best to control their surroundings.  More control means fewer risks.  And fewer risks mean more safety and less stress.  Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to attempt to avoid surprises.

One way in which parents of small children attempt to be in control is by encouraging/forcing their little boys and girls to pee before they leave the house.  This amounts to a veritable conditioning that in many cases persists for the rest of our lives.

This emphasis on urine is probably due to the fact that most people need to urinate several times a day, but I find that the passing of solid waste has been neglected for too long.

I personally hate to have to sit on “alien” toilets.  Especially public toilets tend to be less hygienic than what I would like them to be.  The ladies, who, because of their anatomy, are forced to sit even just to pass some water, have all my sympathy.  Although, I am told that ladies public toilets are usually cleaner than those for so-called gents.

The paper in public toilets (when provided!) is usually of low quality and often not much stronger than two layers of spider web.  And remember the disgusting smell that often lingers in such places.  There is also the issue of touching cabinet locks, taps, and door handles that are indubitably receptacle of who knows how many microbes.  Think twice before holding that piece of pizza after using public facilities.

And what about having sometimes to endure the promiscuity of sitting one metre away from people doing their business in neighbouring cabinets, with associated smells and noises.  Don’t forget that smelling something means that tiny particles of “that something” enter your nose and are absorbed by it...

If what I said resonates with you, rejoice!  There is a simple way to avoid having to defecate in public toilets.  I discovered it at the beginning of the year and have never looked back at darker times.

I simply go to the toilet before going to bed, regardless of whether I feel the need for it or not.  You can obviously choose another time of the day.  For example, after getting up in the morning or when you arrive back home from work.  The important thing is that you do it every day more or less at the same time.

If nothing seems to happen when you sit down, give it a couple of minutes.

The first time, you might be disappointed by your meagre production, but stick to the method and you will be rewarded.  Think about it: if your body produces on average enough waste for a daily session, by initially forcing a time, you automatically synchronise on a 24-hours cycle.  It makes sense, doesn’t it?

This method also works for people who need to go more than once.  They only need to set two appropriately spaced times instead of one.

Perhaps, many before me discovered my solution but have never mentioned it because of the taboo surrounding faeces and bodily functions in general.  No matter.  Now you know!

Buying a Chinese book

As the translators didn't reply (see my previous article), I decided to seek help elsewhere. I sent a message to one of the Yahoo groups I belong to: the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (also see the CSFG website csfg.wordpress.com/).

The CSFG Yahoo group consists of more than 200 people interested in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and/or Horror. It is a bunch of enthusiastic and active people and, although the group is based in Canberra, Australia, it attracts members from everywhere.

I thought: the book I'm trying to buy in Chinese has nothing to do with Speculative Fiction, but some of the CSFGers might be able to help. They are always very available.

And it worked! Robin Shortt sent me all the information I needed. Robin, if you are reading this, thanks again.

And here is how you can buy a book in Chinese without understanding a word of it:

1. Use the web browser Chrome, which you can download from google.com/chrome. The reason for this is that it can automatically translate web pages from Chinese (simplified Han) to English. It doesn't translate the text inside buttons, but sometimes you can see the corresponding URL by placing the cursor over them.
   
2. Go to amazon.cn. It offered my book cheaper than the other five online bookshops I could find. This was also a tip from Robin.
   
3. Create a user ID. You will not be able to use your "Western" user ID that is valid with amazon UK, US, DE, FR, etc.
   
4. When you order a book, to be able to enter your address outside China, you will have to click on the link that is above the form to enter a Chinese address. It looks like this: 海外地址
   
5. Pay with a credit card.

I paid ￥41.30 for the book and ￥110.00 for shipping.  More or less AUD 23.30.

My Book in Chinese

For a couple of years my attempts to obtain a copy of the Chinese version of my book "Beginning JSP,JSF, and Tomcat Web Development"  has been completely unsuccessful.

A few days ago, I decided I had to find a way. It took me some inventive "googling" to find the name of the publisher, but I finally found it: product.china-pub.com/195967.

I discovered that the Chinese edition only became available in September 2009, almost two years after the original.

Here is an image of the front cover:

It costs AUD 9.00, much less than the original. I expected that.

Thanks to Google Translate, I was able to send a message to the publisher via the contact page on their website. I quickly received a reply (in Chinese). They told me that I have to buy it through their website and that they only ship domestically.

I sent another email. I cannot give up so quickly, can I?

The book was translated by Shi Xiaohui and Yuan Yong Kay and I believe I have found them. I send them emails and asked them whether they can halp me in getting a copy of the book. But, to be on the safe side, I also send a message to three more people named Shi Xiaohui, two of whom are on FaceBook.

I know: it's desperate...

I just discovered that I can buy the book from Biblio. But it would cost me AUD84. MMmmm... Quite a markup from the AUD9 dollars the Chinese pay domestically...

Thank You!

Dear visitor from Montana,

Thanks to you, I have had visitors from all 50 USA and Washington DC.

OK. The next post will be more interesting (at least for some :-).  I promise.

Earlobes

There are two types of earlobes: attached and free, as shown in the following picture I found in BasicGenetics – Examples of Dominant and Recessive Traits.

Apparently, attached earlobes are a recessive character, although it is not always clear whether a particular earlobe is attached or not, and several genes seem to be involved.

The only study I found about the frequency of the two types of earlobes was conducted on a sample of 1600 unrelated individuals in Lagos (Nigeria). It stated: the population frequency of attached is 25.37%, a value within the range for Caucasoids but lower than for Mongoloids. OK. One in four.

In any case, my earlobes are free. I got interested in earlobes after noticing that, while turning in bed, the lobe of the ear resting on the pillow was folded up. I used my index finger to unfold it because it made me feel more comfortable. No big deal. But I wonder for how many years I had done it without realising it.

Now, as earlobes (like noses) tend to grow with old age, perhaps this action of unfolding earlobes when lying on my side only became necessary in recent years. But perhaps I have always done it automatically, without becoming aware of doing it. It might have happened all my life.

This makes me wonder how many other actions I perform without being aware of them.

And is it only me or other people do it as well? Further, if they don't, is it because their earlobes don't fold or because they don't notice it?

Perhaps most people with free earlobes need to unfold them every now and then. If this were the case, I like to think that this article will make some of you aware of it!

End-of-year Cleanup

I should have published this story on January 1st, but better late than never.

As you perhaps know, I grew up in Rome (Italy).  On the last day of each year, the busses stopped running a few hours before midnight and retreated to their depots.  But it wasn't simply to give to drivers and conductors the opportunity to celebrate the coming of the new year with their families.  It was to ensure their safety.

Yes.  Their safety, because when I was a boy, it was a Roman tradition to dispose of unwanted stuff by throwing it out of the window.  Literally.

Why bring junk to the tip when you can simply throw it out?  Beside being simpler and more economical, at a time when the majority of people could not afford to buy a car, it was fun!

Can you imagine the impact of an old easy chair when it hits the sidewalk after a "jump" from the fourth or the sixth floor?

You could throw out everything, including old sinks and toilet bowls, with seat and all.  A walk in the early hours of the new year, before the teams of garbage collectors started the thankless task of cleaning up the streets, was a unique experience.  In some quarters you literally had to walk in the middle of the street in order to negotiate your way through.  At least, with all the broken glass and empty cans littering the streets, there was no chance that a car would be around to hit you.

I lived with my parents, sister, and grandmother, on the third floor of Via Alessandria 119, just outside the high wall that the Romans built around the city some two thousand years ago.  It was quite central, and very near the place where the troops of the Kingdom of Italy breached the wall on 20 September 1870 to "liberate" Rome from the Vatican.

Anyhow, here is a nice snapshot of the street "borrowed" from Google's street view.  You can see the entrance door and the windows.

From one of those windows, my family and I enjoyed the view of the "new-year dumping" and, sometimes, threw something away ourselves, although I don't remember that we ever got rid of very bulky items.

One year, when I was between four and seven years old, we had a carton of persimmons who had become a bit too ripe.  Who knows why we had it, but I remember that at midnight of December 31st we used them to bombard a car that somebody, very imprudently, had left parked on the other side of our street.  The fruits were very soft, and I am sure that we didn't do any damage to the car, but I can only imagine what its owner must have thought when he saw it completely covered by a orangey sticky goo.

I wouldn't do it now, and I cannot imagine (but don't know it) that Romans still throw rubbish out of the window on the last night of the year.  Still, at a time when very few families had a TV set or money to spend on fireworks, it was of great entertainment.

Italy is much more civilised these days...

Montana, where are you?

This blog gave me two nice surprises for Christmas: the first visitor from Algeria and the first visitor from North Dakota.

Now, I am only missing visitors from one of the United States: Montana.

If any of you knows somebody who lives in Montana or happens to make a trip to the headwaters state and connects to the Internet, it would be nice to have the remaining US-state flag...

A Puzzling year indeed

In yesterday's article, I forgot to say that in 2011 I also developed a CalcuDoku-solving game for the iPad (search iTunes for CalcuDokus and you'll find it in your local iTunes store).

I first made a $0.99 version with 100 puzzles, and then a free version with 17 puzzles and advertisements.

Despite my attempts at getting some review sites to look at it, the results were quite disappointing.  Apple's AppStore is saturated with applications, and it has become very difficult to get noted.  Big games-developing companies systematically hit jackpots, but nanodevelopers like me have close to no chance.

Far from me the idea that my application is exceptionally good and overlooked.  But I am pretty sure that a couple of years ago, it would have sold reasonably well.  So, why did I wait for 2011 and a saturated market before developing for the iPhone/iPad?  Because I am stupid.  That's why.  I did the same with the Web: in the early nineties, instead of being one of the first web developers on the market, I developed an application for the Mac (MacDOS) that went nowhere.

Another missed opportunity...

A Puzzling Year

This has been a year during which I have concentrated on developing puzzles and writing about it.  I had always been interested more in developing programs to generate and solved numeric puzzles than to solve the puzzles themselves.  Towards the end of 2010, I finally dedicated myself to it.

The first thing I did was to write two programs to generate and solve Sudoku Classic puzzles.  I also added to the Generator the code necessary to create pattern Sudokus (i.e., puzzles in which the initial clues are arranged in a pre-determined way).  Once I was done with Sudoku Classics, I wrote a program to combine five pattern Sudokus into a Samurai Sudoku puzzle.

This work on Sudoku resulted in my first puzzle book, Sudoku Programming, which I self published at the beginning of April.  365 pages of strategy explanations, walk-throughs of "C" code, and examples.

Shortly after that, I thought that a book describing in detail the strategies to solve Sudoku Classic puzzles could be useful, and wrote Sudoku Explained, a booklet of 94 pages that I published at the end of May.  I offered it to the game shop Mind Games, that has since sold some copies.  Forget what they say about eBooks.  In terms of satisfaction, nothing compares with seeing your printed books on the shelves of a physical, old fashion, shop.

I had designed the head with the "Sudoku Brain" for my first book, and had the idea of placing small heads on the two sides of my name.  But, after flipping the small head to place on the right-hand side of the cover, given my perfectionism, I flipped each digit inside the brain back to its original direction, so that they could be read.  The devil is indeed in the details...

At that point, I decided that "C", after all, was less popular than Java, and decided to rewrite all my Sudoku programs in Java. This took a few months during the middle of the year.  After that, it seemed natural to rewrite "Sudoku Programming" for Java.  This time, I chose the more catchy title How to Create Your Own Sudokus with Java.  I contacted some publishers and also some agents, but nobody was interested in publishing it.  They all claimed that it was a very difficult book to place.  As a result, once more, I decided to publish it myself.

But while I was looking for a publisher for my Java book, I started working on another puzzle: CalcuDoku (see several recent articles in this blog).
I developed a program to generate and solve CalcuDokus, but this time I decided not to write books that explain how the programs work.  Similarly to what I had done with Sudokus, I wrote a program to compose CalcuDokus into larger puzzles.

Over the past couple of months, I have published three books of puzzles: 200 Puzzling Hearts, with 200 heart-patterned easy Sudokus, 200 Puzzling Shamrocks, with 200 difficult Sudokus patterned like four-leafed clover, and 100 Double CalcuDokus.

     

I am currently publishing what is going to be my last puzzle book (at least, that's what I am thinking now): 50 Samurai CalcuDokus.  This book has a larger format because the samurai puzzles are LARGE!

Next year, I will have to work on something else.  I confess that I feel a bit saturated with puzzle programming.  Perhaps, I will resume writing my historical novel Ciao Biondina.  But also a crime novel or an alternate history might inspire me.  We shall see...

Catholic Church? No Thanks!

I just published with Smashwords a short book titled Catholic Church? No Thanks!.

It collects a series of short pieces about the Catholic Church that I wrote over a period of time. They describe some events that occurred to me and some of my reflections on how the Church operates. I was never a fervent Catholic, but this booklet explains some of the events that contributed to my Atheism.

The CalcuDoku application for the iPad is ready

I have just uploaded the CalcuDoku application for the iPad to Apple’s application store.  They could still find something I didn’t do right and reject it, but I think (and hope) that everything will go smoothly.  I don’t know how long it will take before it will appear in the AppStore, though...

Unfortunately, I am also not sure that it will be available in the Australian Apple store.  The problem is that I am not registered for GST (for the non-Australians: GST stands for Goods and Services Tax and is Australia’s 10% value-added tax).  It is only compulsory to register for GST if your Australian business revenue exceeds 75 kAUD, and it is such a bureaucracy that you don’t really want to get into it unless you do have such an income and/or incur significant GST-deductible expenses.

It is not clear to me whether Apple will simply not pay me when they sell my application in Australia or (more likely) the Australian residents will be unable to buy the application locally.  In any case, they should still be able to buy it from the US store for USD 0.99 instead AUD 0.99 (actually a cent or two cheaper).  We shall see.

Now that this application is done, I will go back writing fiction.  I confess I am a bit fed up with programming.  As I said in a previous article, Apple’s development environment is great, but not bug-free.  In a couple of occasions, I had to find some workarounds to get done what I needed.

I cannot get over it

This story of Patrizio Galli (see the posting of the 6th) is affecting me more than I would have thought.

Patrizio Galli