I guess everyone has noticed that the world has changed. I am not very political. I look for points of agreement rather than disagreement and find them often. The 2016 presidential election marked a change, the digital disruption of politics, that I don’t think anyone understands yet. How the current president won the election is more important than the politics he espoused in order to effect his win. I suspect professional politicians, as we know them now, are an endangered species because digital communications have empowered non-politicians in ways we still don’t fully comprehend. My next book will address the expansion of communications and the effect on governance.
At the Vine Maple Studio, I often write about the non-technical aspects of the transformation of our society that is driven by technical change.
A book for IT professionals to hand to their users when there are just to many questions to address. I wrote this book for people who use computers everyday, but are not technicians. A group that includes just about everyone today.
Cyber crime is in the news all the time and it can be daunting. Millions of credit cards are stolen in a single heist and marketed on the sinister dark web where anything and everything is for sale. Viruses, worms, and trojans creep into personal laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones. We are phished, driven by, and pwned. A hacker on the other side of the world grabs your personal laptop and holds photos of your wedding, your children’s birthdays, and family picnics for ransom.
The industry woke up a few years ago and became serious about computer security, but it has a long way to go. Law enforcement is getting better, but it is often ineffective against crimes that do not involve six-figure thefts, even though smaller crimes are often catastrophes for ordinary citizens.
Personal Cybersecurity explains what is happening in cyber crime and security and how it all works, then offers practical advice on avoiding crime and recovery for victims.
Cloud service management is challenging. This book brings ITIL service management practices into the cloud era and explains the central role of clouds in managing IT today.
Cloud computing would not exist without standards. This compendium is a primer on the technology that goes into building a cloud and a reference for anyone who needs to know what the standards cover and how to get to the original standards documents.
Mysteries
I also write mysteries. They feature a blind master detective and his not quite hard-boiled assistant. I owe a great deal to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Rex Stout. Put me in a room filled with the works of that trio and I might never come out. I think I have read several times everything that those three ever wrote (including Rex Stout’s pre-Nero Wolfe writings, which are not so easy to appreciate.)
I’ve been working for several years now on my first mystery. It’s getting close. My loyal and hard working beta readers say I’m improving. I may start the arduous (and, I fear, boring) task of finding an agent. I’ve looked into self-publishing and decided that although it is a viable path for some authors, it’s not for me. I’ve worked enough with publishing and marketing software to know that.
In the mean time, I am also in the midst of writing another book with the same characters. I call the book I am writing now Blind!. It suffers from the same limitations as the previous, but I’m getting better…
