Computers, A Piece Of Cake

I, John Cowart, by the Grace of God, King of Geriatric Geeks, do hereby issue the following proclamation concerning computers in general and Google Books in particular:

%&(*##!!!

Well, other Royals hardly ever use that kind of language—except maybe the first Queen Elizabeth when she saw the sails of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel.

Yes, yesterday I braved the intricacies of Google Books’ perimeters trying to format about 20 books I’ve written or edited for inclusion. I flat gave up on the ones in other languages. The folks in Germany, Indonesia and the Philippines, if they want my books listed on Google Book Search, will just have to register the texts themselves.

But, with my books in English, all I had to do was reformat the Word documents, scan in new photos of the book covers, rename scads of files, create pdf documents, resize and transfer stuff to new, renamed (in 13 or so digits without spaces) folders.

Challenging work considering my level of computer skills.

I know how to cut.

I know how to paste.

I know that if you click on a thumbnail photo of a bikini girl, her attributes grow large enough to fill the screen.

Nevertheless, armed with this knowledge, a prayer, and a blissful, confident attitude, I undertook to prepare my books for wider distribution via the Google Books simple 82-step process.

Worked fine till I got to book # 17. I prepared that file in exactly the same way I’d done the previous 16 files, but an error message appeared. It said, “Failed For An Unknown Reason”. Then a little box appeared which said I could click “OK”.

Nothing else. Just OK.

Why OK? What unknown reason? If the computer could not figure out what went wrong with that file, how am I supposed to?

A Scripture came to mind—from St Paul’s first letter to the people of Corinth, Chapter 14, where he said:

“God is not the author of confusion, but of peace,… But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant….Let all things be done decently and in order”.

That’s one Scripture I can obey—the part about staying ignorant.

I’m good at that.

If God is not the author of confusion, then just who do you think it was that set up the Google Books system?

Answer me that.

But, I press ahead.

I think I can solve the problem. Piece of cake.

Like that high-tech bakery that utilizes a computer/ cum laser/ cum inkjet thingy to decorate and letter their cakes with precision…

Precision that is if you type in the right Hyper Tense Markup Language.

If I don’t, my books may come out looking like Aunt Elsa’s Birthday Cake:

This photo comes from the Cake Wreck Blog at http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/ ; they are worth a visit.

Meanwhile, I join with that other king, the one who wrote the Psalms, in praying, “In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion”.

Er, make that more confusion.

Piece of cake.