YOU GOTTA DO IT 'TIL YOU DO IT, SO YOU'D BETTER GET TO IT: I had work on 11 of the 20 business days in July (though sometimes only four or five hours in a particular day), so I'd say I'm still in a period of transition back toward something like full-time employment. (To be fair, I'd already decided not to seek work on 1 July, so that I could head out to Parsippany and assist in setup for Contata, and on Thursday 14 July, so that I could head out to Newark Airport and pick Ethan up; otherwise, it could have been 13 out of 20.) Later in the month, yet another freelance agency, Adecco, invited me to sign on—it was apparently handling one opening I'd applied for on Monster—so I spent one of my off-days taking a rather intensive proofreading test (an hour and a half long!) and filling out the usual voluminous forms. No gigs offered so far, but then it's only been a week.

     I had an e-mail correspondence with one of the supervising editors at Demand Media Studios, who'd reviewed my work and found it good as far as it went, but was concerned that I wasn't reaching DMS's suggested minimum of 20 articles per week. (In fact, I'd done no work at all for DMS during a couple of weeks of heavy employment, and was barely hitting 10 or 12 the rest of the time. Part, but only part, of the problem is that the flow of work has been unsteady lately; half the time when I log on, there are no articles available for editing.) I told him, politely, that higher-paying office work was more of a priority for me; he understood, and suggested that if I was too busy to commit to DMS's minimum, I could take a leave without prejudice, and resume editing for them when I found myself with more free time. I'm not sure yet what I'll do about that; it will likely depend on how steady the assignments continue to be over the next few weeks.

     The Kid has been back from Cameroon for a couple of weeks, though he'll be on his way there again by the time anyone but me sees this zine. It's been good to see him, but of course the vast majority of his time has been spent with his friends. Africa seems to have agreed with him; he looks healthy and mostly happy.

IT'S TONS O' FUN! AND TECHNICAL STIMULATION!: Communications systems have occupied a fair amount of my time and attention recently. After some 15 years, we have ended our business relationship with Cablevision as of late June and switched to DirecTV. I'd thought about it for a couple of years as rates rose, service packages shrank, and customer service gave us runarounds. Cablevision's unwillingness to offer the BBC America channel at any price, when it's part of the basic package for all the other providers, made a switch seem more and more desirable; but oddly, it was Cablevision's refusal to participate in HBO's HBOGO mobile app that precipitated my calling DirecTV for a quote. ("Oddly," because I hate watching TV on the 4-inch screen of a mobile phone.) But it turned out that DirecTV's basic package plus HBO ran nearly $20 less per month than we were paying Cablevision (even after all the come-on discounts run out) and gave us all the same channels and more. I'm midway through catching up with five years of Doctor Who now.

     Meanwhile, my nine-month-old Samsung Galaxy Vibrant "smart" phone developed an annoying glitch: it was working just fine in all respects, except that it would no longer let me upload/download files to/from my laptop using the micro-USB port. (That port is also used for charging the battery, and that function seemed to be working just fine too). Over the month of July, through half a dozen calls with T-Mobile tech support and two with Samsung tech support, the computer was rebooted, drivers were reinstalled, and the phone was rebooted, placed in USB debug mode, hard-reset, plugged into several other computers, hard-reset again, injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected. Ultimately, a hardware problem was diagnosed. I was pleasantly surprised when T-Mobile agreed that the phone was still under warranty, and sent a replacement for the nominal charge of $20 (which included a prepaid label for shipping the old one back). I tried to back up everything in the phone before the hard resets, but some photos, a few memos, and a phone number or two seem to have vanished permanently. (The music and document files that I'd downloaded from the laptop are also gone, but I can download them again, and likewise all the apps from the Android Market.) If this sort of thing doesn't happen again before October 2012, I'll be doing o.k.

Comments on APA-NYU, Volume 9, #7 (e-APA-NYU #87)

ICONOCLAST (Joel Nelson):

"Which two positive integers, either of which if substituted for n, would make the statement (n) + (n+1) + (n+2) + (n+3) + (n+4) = (n) + (n) + (n+1) + (n+2) + (n+3) + 10 true?" Mathematically, this becomes 5n+10 = 5n+16, or 10=16, which is impossible. But to an omnipotent deity, all things are possible. Is that what you mean by "knowledge of the editor's interests"? (I was trying to do something with ZIP codes, but I don't think you ever lived in 12345—close, but no match—and I'm sure you never lived anywhere near 11234, a mile east of me in Brooklyn). /*/ Though I know you lived in Seattle for a time, I'm unable to guess even a direction of attack for your other "puzzler."

JAMISON, TAKE e-LETTER (Mark L. Blackman):

There are plenty of German words with "e" before "i," but then the vowel pair is pronounced as a long "i"—so that Congressman Weiner's name should indeed be pronounced "Whiner." (Wikipedia says the name means "wheelwright" in an old German dialect, and "wine merchant" in Yiddish.) /*/ I think the silliest thing about the gerrymandered shape of District 9, Weiner's former district, may be that, while the district spans places 20 miles apart in two boroughs, Broad Channel Island (pop. 3000) is split between it and District 6 (and the portion in District 6 appears to be uninhabited!). /*/ (¢APA-NEWS) I can't say for sure why your May zine got flagged as spam by the e-mail protocols at JB's server, since the filters get ever more elaborate in an arms race with the spammers themselves. I did note your mention that some individuals "got bombarded by Viagra/Cialis spam"; it would be ironic, but not totally surprising, if the spam filters seized on that phrase as a tell that your zine was spam. /*/ (¢me) "Back when I was at CARE, I was assigned to write a grant proposal to Dow Chemical...– they made napalm!" I seem to recall a New Yorker cartoon circa 1970 showing a Dow recruiter heading in to a campus building, being told by his buddy, "...and remember, when they start talking napalm, you start talking Saran Wrap." /*/ "Btw, you missed the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel being renamed for Hugh Carey, simultaneous with the vote to rename the 59th St. Bridge for Koch; Carey is also still alive." Oy! Yes, I didn't hear about that either. (Whether I missed it is debatable.) Maybe it's time to auction off naming rights for a few of the other pieces of civil engineering around here; that way, for once, someone will really be able to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. /*/ (¢Nelson) "Waiters are sometimes called servers." Because they also serve who only stand and wait?

DANCE AROUND THE SOLSTICE (Ariel Cinii):

Congratulations on your Pegasus quasi-nominations and on being next year's Songwriter Guest! /*/ And condolences on the rejection of Telepaths' Song.

>Portions of the preceding figure that if Thomas Edison was right,
                                                                   everyone's a genius this summer.<

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