CE Wills

    Hey, y'all. (Thought I'd inject a little Southern flavor.) It is a cool day, here at the green retreat. We arose early and went to a local hamlet for breakfast. As I drove home, I thought about the book business. As most of you know, I have a number of ebooks for sale. I haven't counted them recently, but I think there are around 9 novels, 1 novelette and 20 or more short stories. Toss in about 865 blog posts published and another 115 that I have lounging around unpublished, and you have a load of work. I have been knee-deep in the ebook thing from its inception. It has been interesting, to say the least.        Filled with promise in it's beginnings, slowed by opposition and mistakes, the ebook express train has slowed somewhat. Why? Well, I can give an opinion, I suppose. 1) I think people read less. Especially men. Gaming is more exciting and takes less involvement than reading. It can also be interactive to a degree that readin...

    Hey, everyone, across the globe. Since I have taken a year off from blogging, I felt that I should tell you about my past year in gaming. As you older hands know, I played everything from pong to Intellivision, back in the day. But I became fiercely involved in raising children, building a career and the like. I missed the whole X-Box generation. Once the initial I-Pad came out, I became a gamer again.     When the in-app purchase plague began to raise sores on the buttocks of I-Pad owners, I sought a better experience. I decided that Steam gaming on PC might give me better gaming at a reasonable price by buying at the sales. And so it did for awhile.     What a thrill it was for me to play Tomb Raider, Mordor and Serious Sam! But then I was to learn that many desirable games would not play on my PC. I had a real desire to play Far Cry 4 after playing Far Cry 3 . Alas, it would not play on my machine. I even bought the Game Guide a...

     Hey, everyone. My wife and I, like millions of people, enjoy feeding birds. You can make or buy a feeder, sprinkle in some bird seed, or fruit, or bread crumbs and watch as birds come to snack. Some are attracted to the crowd of other birds, as their nature is to follow a leader. On a cold winter day, the birds stand out against the snow and you can get some cool photos of colorful plumage to show your friends. I know folks who have photos blown up and decorate their homes with these pictures. Others may blog about the richly colored cardinals or even participate in the scientific studies of migratory habits.     Heck, you don't even have to have a feeder. Just sprinkle food on the ground. Of course, ants and other undesirables might invite themselves to supper. Squirrels are the worst interlopers. I have seen these voracious rascals chew through a plastic bucket to get at the bird seed inside. Sort of like a hacker. Ha, ha. They will walk a support...

     Hey, everyone. It is a cold , rainy day at the green retreat. The temperature is in the mid-thirties and there is snow in the mountains just west of me. I always hated this weather when I had to get out and work in it. If it had been colder, the precipitation would have been snow and though inconvenient for traveling, at least I wasn't soaked. Now I don't have to get out in it. But, after all those years, I have become somewhat ambivalent about the weather. I went for a drive and walked a track in the rain. I would have preferred to walk in the woods, but no one was walking but me, which is how I like it. Therefore it was a fine day for a walk on the track.       Though I wasn't walking in the woods, I did see some wildlife during the drive. The first was a woodchuck. He was running up the road on this old, narrow, country lane. His fur seemed very light-colored and I thought, perhaps, that he had tinted it, just a little. I wanted to...

   Talk about odd things to spend a few hours on. Yesterday, for no apparent reason, I studied the quagmire that is the End User License Agreement. As you know, this is the thing you sign for many downloadable games, software and the like. They would have had a tough time inserting this stuff down the throats of Americans many years ago but now most of us are sadly amenable to clicking the "I agree" box.       I read a lot about the agreements over on the terrific site called Wikipedia. The Eula is a device which is intended to form a contract with the user. Its intent is to give the owner of the software more power in copyright than the law allows for. It is many things, including a salve to company insecurities. Many times a court of law will rule them 'unconscionable'. That is, a judge, in good conscious, can't rule for a company that manipulates a customer's young age, ignorance or careless disregard of reading a long boring document, to sc...

        Hey, everyone. I was just thinking about phones. A useful tool with a long history of service. I can remember days when I actually dared to go somewhere without one.      When I was a kid, we didn't have a phone. Most people didn't. Maybe, there was a store nearby that one could go to, in an emergency, to use a phone. Then there were the days when there were"party lines". No, this did not indicate nights of wild revelry with nicely shaped phones. Rather, it meant that a certain number of households would have a common line and number, so that a call would ring perhaps 6 or 7 houses. Believe it or not, some people used this primitive tech to eavesdrop on their neighbors discussions. Today we do this and call it a conference call.      I remember the days when a phone was never carried on one's person. There was a line that attached them to the wall and they were massive and heavy. They were even used to ki...

    Hey, everyone. I stopped by Best Buy the other day and had a nice chat with a rep from Samsung. He was a pleasant bloke and he had his own display there at the store, devoted mostly to tablets. He had a thick piece of magic glass there on the counter and told me that if he hooked an I-Pad to it, that the device would sense the apps contained on the I-Pad and install the Android equivalent on a Samsung tablet, free of charge.     This is brilliant marketing by Samsung, because many people believe themselves locked into the Apple system once they have the gear and the attendant apps, music and games. Apple is King of tablets, but the competition grows more fierce as each day passes.     I walked down the tablet isle at Best Buy and marveled at the variety and prices. There were tablets as low as $47. I started to buy a new tablet myself, just for something new to mess with. My son has been showing me his new tablet ...

  Hey, everyone. You may remember that I had a Cardinal building a nest about a foot or two from where I sit on my porch. She had two eggs in it. This morning as I drank coffee I heard an abundance of tiny chirping noises. Sure enough, the baby birds have come forth into the world and seem abundantly happy about it. They have no feathers. Good thing it was a hot day. Of course, unless she is hunting food, the mother bird sits with them and keeps them warm.      It is hard to be in a bad mood while you listen to baby birds cheeping. It is a feeling like "Hey, the world must be okay after all, or those little rascals wouldn't make all that cute noise. Hopefully, they'll keep it quiet if a cat comes around. Cats are a bit cruel at times and could care less about cuteness.      Hey, maybe Facebook could put the sound of baby birds cheeping on their site and measure the happiness response of their victims customers. Ha, ha. Bizarre to experi...

    Hey, everyone. The other day, Carley and I had an interesting time with her I-Phone 5S. ( Silver, 16 Gig) It is a rather involved mess so I'll try to make it coherent.      It began with me asking her if she wanted me to put a sticker over her rear-facing camera. It had come to my attention that certain hackers with funny initials could remotely turn on your camera and take photos of the owner. In fact, I talked to a blogger who had his picture taken in this way, then placed as the screensaver for his PC. Would that freak you out? Yeah...     Carley said that she would like the sticker on the lense and I put it there. She immediately got a warning notice on her phone that her face time feature was disabled. The funny thing was that I had the feature disabled since day one, when she bought the phone. We have never made a face time call and I don't know anyone who uses the feature. So I went back over to the settings and checked on...

   Hey, everyone. So, what's up? Today is a pretty day with sunshine and a temperature in the forties. I was thinking about raking and burning leaves. I wasn't thinking about it very seriously, just thinking about it. Ha, ha.      I had a cool burger last night. If you ever get a chance to try this one you should consider it. It was a huge rascal, so big that even my mouth had difficulty wrapping around it. It was a bacon and egg burger with all the trimmings. I must say that it was perhaps the best burger I ever ate. The leaky egg made it so moist and tasty. Of course, I like eggs with steak for breakfast on rare occasion and I really like beer with that dish as well, or champagne.     Hey, did you see where they are getting on the James Bond character for his boozing? Yeah. They already made it socially unacceptable for him to smoke. Next will be his womanizing, no doubt. Soon, all literature, games, movies, T.V. and print media will ...

   Hey, everyone. It is a lovely morning here at the green retreat and I have been busy. As I pause to check my stats on blog and books I thought I might tell you a cautionary tale.      As you may know, one of the most wonderful things about choosing the I-Pad as a tablet is its app store. Apple does a nice job of running it and this is not an Apple-bashing post. There are some people that are abusing their apps and the opportunities that they have. Let me be specific.      The other day I was playing one of my favorite games called Iron Man 3. There have been some problems with this game. For instance, they went back and put in ads with an update, failed to give me back my in-apps when I re-downloaded the game and other things. The most recent deal was interesting. I was playing the game and it switched me to a video ad about retirement planning. About the same time there appeared a warning on my screen that stated " Iron Man 3 is r...

Hey, everyone. Let me start by saying that on some of my posts the words are being split up from one line to the other. I haven't changed anything and I don't understand it. Blogger has been acting up for some time, though it seems unreasonable to complain about a free service. I was just over on the Washington Post and read a good article on the XBOX One. It freaked me out a little that the device can read your skeletal structure (or your voice) and monitor who's in the room. I'm not too sure that I'm comfortable with that, although I would like to play some games on it. I do, however, love gaming on my I-Pad and prefer not having a controller; plus the games are so much cheaper. Carley and I did a road trip yesterday, traveling to Nashville to Cool Springs Galleria. They have a big Apple Store there and guess what? They actually have that Tech Unicorn there, known to devotees as the I-Phone 5s (Gold, 16 Gig). I managed to keep my lustful little paws off its s...

   Hey, everyone. As you know, Halloween is approaching and I like to do a spooky post occasionally.( By the way, check out the tab (label) at the bottom of this post that says 'Spooky'. Especially, you should read Campfire Song, The Old Man In the Straw Hat and The White Sign .) Anyway, this is a true story.     The other evening I got a message on my I-Pad that says, "Google Maps has requested access to your microphone." Weird, since I have never even used that app, or at least not recently. No big deal, I like a good joke as much as anybody. So, I push "Don't Allow" and go to the Google Maps app and delete it.      Then today, I had been reading the morning news on different sites and had closed the Padster and placed it on my keyboard (music keyboard). As I walked to the kitchen I heard a soft ding and returned to open the 'smart cover' on the device, thinking I'd gotten an email.    To my surprise the screen was filled ...

     Hey, everyone. After a tough week at work, I decided to just hang around the house all day. After being suitably lazy for much all of the morning, I recovered admirably and did some chores. In this rural area, America guys do this thing called "Hauling off the garbage". I took my garbage to the dump. This involves loading plastic bags full of garbage into a truck, or the trunk of a car and getting it out of your life forever.       I know I have a lot of overseas viewers, which is why I tell about this mundane stuff. If I haul garbage in the trunk of my car, I put it in a big plastic bin so that any leaky fluids will not smell up my car. Obviously, we don't have a garbage service out here in 'the country'. That's okay with me because I don't like for anyone to keep up with my business. I had a friend who worked as a garbage man. He used to try to tell me things about people and I told him I didn't want to hear it. I mean, hauling off...

    Hey, everyone. Yesterday I was at Best Buy and I was looking at the display for the new I-Phones; 5s and 5c. The sales girl was nice and we talked to her a while. She said that they still had the 5s in stock, which surprised me. According to her, they had the 64 Gig model of the 5s in the Silver and the Space Grey. This really surprised me as I'd read all the stories on line about their unavailability. Now, I don't remotely need 64 Gigs of space, grey or otherwise. Ha, ha. So, I didn't buy it.      The sales lady also said that they had plenty of the 5c in stock, except for the yellow one. If I was going to buy one, I'd want the yellow one, I think, because it is a macho color, but I hear that the 5c is basically a 5 with the plastic body. (Insert joke here?)      My phone (I-Phone 4s) is not all that important to me and is not my life as it is with teens. I use it mostly for phone calls and to check e-mail. I think I have t...

   Hey, everyone. Some time ago I was talking about NFL quarterbacks and I said something like this. There are only a very few quarterbacks on earth who can take a team to the Super Bowl, maybe 10 or 12 guys; so if you're serious about winning a championship, find one and pay him what you have to in order to keep him. Tonight I would like to add a bit to that thought.     Lately, when a quarterback has proven himself and sometimes when he hasn't, they land a contract in the range of 20 million a year or maybe 100 million dollars for the contract. Sometimes a fat contract like this can cripple a team payroll to the point where they can't keep enough of their good players (other than the QB) to have a great team. So, it is time for quarterbacks, whether their agents like it or not, to show a little restraint about their own salary. Better still, it may be necessary to put a cap on salaries of quarterbacks, something like this: "No individual's salary can excee...

    Hey, everyone. I have been playing the newest shooter game from Gameloft and it pretty much rocks. Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour is running #4 on the app store against the stiff competition of Angry Birds and Vice City. I have had it for 2 days now but I have just now started to play it. I chose 'no gyroscope' on the controls and 'easy' level of difficulty. The file size is a huge 1.44 Gigs, the biggest game file I've ever downloaded. The price is a healthy $6.99. The in-apps, if you have to have them? They run all the way up to $99 (dollars, not cents). Are they out of their minds? I hope I can play at least most of it without the additional buys. Wouldn't bet on it.      The graphics are superb and it plays okay on my I-Pad 3. Here's how the story goes. A lot of dignitaries are assembled in Hawaii and a guy named Page launches an assault on the hotel and takes a noted captive, utilizing a band of mercenaries. This Page guy has a screw loose in h...

    Hey, everyone. It has been my great pleasure tonight to watch a documentary on T.V. The title of the show was The Untold Story of 007. It was shown on a satellite movie channel called EPIX 1, which is available on Dish Network.     It is the story about the movie-making side of the James Bond series and it was outstanding. I have been a Bond devotee since I was 12 years old and I learned a lot of new things tonight. The film had commentary from several of the Bond actors and several U.S. Presidents, among others. I'll try to share a bit about the film with you.      Ian Fleming was actually in the espionage game during WW 2. He dreamed of buying a beach cottage in Jamaica after retiring and that's what he did. The last time I checked, you could still rent that house for a vacation, something I'd love to do. Fleming started writing the Bond series in that home. He was a bit of a recluse, loved the booze and loved the ladies. When...