Author Archives: Maria Langer

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

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A memoir, a history, by Lewis Buzbee.

The Yellow-Lighted BookshopIn clearing out my reading pile, I stumbled upon The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee. I read this book several months ago, then put it aside with a mental note to write up some comments in my blog.

I’ve been incredibly busy lately and not focused on what I’ve been reading. As a matter of fact, I’ve been having some trouble getting back into reading these days. My “To Read” pile is tall, but for some reason, I’m not impelled to read any of the books on it. And every time I pass a bookstore, I have trouble keeping myself from dropping in.

That’s why this passage from the first chapter of Buzbee’s work really hits home:

For the last several days I’ve had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I’ve stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I’ve looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It’s not as if I don’t have anything to read; there’s a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I’ve been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that’s afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I’ll discover something soon.

In The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Buzbee, a former bookseller, writes about his life with books, taking detours along the way to discuss the history of books, printing, publishing, and and the book selling industry. Chapters cover the business of books — including the surprising (for some) truth about what an author earns on each book sold and the impact that large booksellers (think Barnes and Noble and Borders) and online booksellers (think Amazon.com) have on the industry.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is a look into a life where books are more than just bunches of paper with words on them. Educational, amusing, insightful — the book will appeal to any book lover in a way that few other books can.

I highly recommend it.

Treo Internet Connection Problems Resolved

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But not very satisfactorily.

palm Treo 700p Smartphone (Verizon Wireless)A few days ago, I reported “The Trouble with Treos.” In short, I’d bought a Treo 700p so I could access the Internet from my off-the-grid camping shed on Howard Mesa. Although I’d been told that the Treo would “tether” with my Macintosh for an Internet connection, I later learned that feature wasn’t supported by Palm (maker of the Treo) and Verizon (my wireless provider).

Motorola Q Phone (Verizon Wireless)Today, while running an errand in the Phoenix area, I stopped by the Verizon Wireless store where I bought the phone (Happy Valley, north of Phoenix) and spoke to the woman who sold it to me. I believe her when she says she thought it would work. But I also don’t know why she didn’t tell me about the Motorola Q phone, which definitely would work. Could it be because it cost $150 less?

Could I Love My Phone?

Now, after spending the past week sending photos to my TumbleLog and text messages to Twitter while on a business/vacation trip to California, I’m rather attached to the darn phone. Just the other afternoon, while Mike was driving from the LA area to Santa Barbara, I was stuck in the back seat of the convertible he’d rented. With no chance of participating in the conversation between Mike and his cousin due to wind noise, I amused myself by exchanging a series of photos with my brother in New Jersey who was lounging by his friend’s pool with his friend’s family, his wife, and his dog. I sent him photos I’d taken earlier in the day, as well as a few scenes from the Mustang’s cramped back seat as we made our way up the coast.

That’s something I couldn’t do with my old phone.

I know that other people have been doing stuff like that for years, but I was never into the cell phone thing. Now it’s almost an addiction. And I just don’t want to give up my new phone, even though it doesn’t do everything I want.

But I’m a logical, reasoning person — at least at times — and it makes no sense to be emotionally attracted to a smart phone that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. So what was I to do?

Make it do what I needed it to.

Doing the “Impossible” — Poorly

So I got on the Web and I tracked down a software package called USB Modem. Available in Mac OS, Windows, and Linux flavors, this package includes software for the Treo as well as drivers for my Mac. I installed a few things, configured a few things, plugged in my tether, and connected to the Internet. In other words, I was able to do what Verizon had belatedly told me I couldn’t do: connect to the Internet using the USB tether cable.

But the connection seemed painfully slow. I fired up the Speakeasy Speed Test and tested it out. Sure enough, I had download speeds of only 120Kbps and upload speeds of only 20Kbps. Sheesh! This is broadband?

To be fair, I ran the same test on the Bluetooth DUN connection. I got 135 down and 85 up. Not much better.

Then I ran it on my house connection just for comparison. 524 down and 516 up.

(All these tests were done with the same computer.)

At Least I Have a Reason to Keep the Phone

The only good that comes out of this is that now I have a reason to keep the phone. True, it’ll cost me another $25 to buy the software to do the tethered connection — I was using a demo version to make sure it would work before I coughed up any more hard earned money — but at least it does work.

It just doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Or as well as the salesperson at the Verizon Wireless store said it would. Very disappointing.

I still have three weeks to decide.

Anyone out there use a Q phone with a Mac? Please do use the Comments link or form to share your experiences, good and bad.

One Less Blogger

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A blogger passes on.

The other day, I got the following e-mail message:

I’m one of Fred Mullen’s son’s. He had a blog at www.phredsthoughts.blogspot.com. Dad linked your blog on his front page, and had mentioned it to me before.

I don’t know if you knew Dad, but because he had mentioned yours and linked it on his, I thought I should write and let you know that he passed away from esophageal cancer on May 12. Dad was 66. He was diagnosed just 6 weeks earlier, and death came quickly. I miss him terribly.

His final blog entry was written a week before his death. He planned to journal his walk with cancer. He just didn’t realize that the walk was nearly over.

I had visited Fred’s blog after realizing that he linked to me. It was a typical blog, full of personal thoughts and ideas, well written and mature. His last entry, “Journey Through a Dark Valley,” began the story of his bout with cancer. Dated May 5, 2007, it was written only a week before his death.

It’s interesting to think about what Fred has left behind for the world: his blog. It’s still online and anyone can read it and learn a little about Fred. Nothing lasts forever and someday, when Blogger folds, this public remnant of Fred will also be gone. But until then, we can read it and remember what this particular blogger was about.

Rest in peace, Fred. And thanks for sharing with us.

Vox "Blogger" Copies and Pastes

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Another blatant case of copyright infringement.

I use Google Alerts to find articles that might interest me. Today, while going through a list of articles that came in earlier in the week, I found an article titled “Mac OS X Vs Windows Vista.” I clicked the link and was taken to a page on Vox, yet another blog-based social networking site. The blog entry began with the following brief introduction:

Doing my daily read of the news papers today and I came across a story asking which is the better OS, Windows Vista or Apple’s OS X. me I’m a mac users so I already know which is the better OS lol. Anyhow I’m sure you don’t want to read my one sided thoughts lol.

What followed that was a sloppy paraphrasing of the entire text of an article called “Vista versus Mac OS X” on Blogger.com. The Vox “author” had obviously copied and pasted the entire piece into the Vox-hosted blog, then edited selected sentences and added paragraph breaks to come up with a lengthy summary.

For example, the original says this:

On features alone it’s easy to conclude that Vista and Mac OS X are now on par but this overlooks two important elements. Firstly, the feel of both products is very different. In my opinion Mac OS X is unobtrusive and its interface intuitive and clean. Vista on the other hand makes you work for it. Take for example another new feature for Vista called User Account Control (UAC). UAC presents an intrusive dialogue box that warns you whenever you try to make a system wide change or install a new application. This will annoy most users however and you can just switch it off. But doing so overrides all of the new security measures Microsoft have built into Vista and makes the threat of infection from viruses or malware more likely. In contrast Mac OS X generally still remains virus and malware free.

And the Vox copy says this:

ON FEATURES alone it is easy to conclude that Vista and Mac OSX are on par, but this overlooks two important elements.

First, the feel of both products is different.

In my opinion Mac OSX is unobtrusive and its interface intuitive and clean. Vista, on the other hand, makes you work for it.

Take, for example, another new feature for Vista called User Account Control (UAC).

This presents an intrusive dialogue box that warns you whenever you try to make a system-wide change or install a new application.

This will annoy most users, however, and you can just switch it off. But doing so overrides all of the new security measures Microsoft has built into Vista and makes the threat of infection from viruses or malware more likely.

In contrast, Mac OSX generally still remains virus and malware free.

This is just one example. The entire piece was used this way.

Yes, the Vox blogger did link back to the original article. But why bother going there? All of the important points were already available on Vox.

And yes, the Vox blogger did include the name of the original post’s author. But did he have permission to use the entire article? I seriously doubt it. Was this “fair use”? I don’t think so.

As a writer, copyright infringement pisses me off to no end. A writer takes time to think about and compose an original, well-thought-out work. Who knows? It may have taken the article’s author hours to write the piece. How long did it take this lazy blogger to copy and paste its text into his blog? 15 seconds?

Obviously, I reported it to Vox. And I reported it to the author of the original piece. And then I left a comment for the blogger to think about.

Maybe (lol) he just doesn’t know any better (lol). Maybe (lol) Vox will set things right and teach him a little lesson about copyrights (lol).

It’ll probably put him out of business. As the sample of his writing shown at the beginning of this entry indicates, he obviously doesn’t know how to write anything worth reading.

By the way, the original article, by Danny Gorog, is pretty good. If you’re interested in these matters, I highly recommend it. You can find it here.

May 28 Update: The copy-and-paste blogger has deleted the comment I left on his offending blog post. If he cared about writers rights, he would have deleted the entire post. I’m curious to see what Vox will do about this. Probably nothing.

The Trouble with Treos

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Why my expensive new communications tool is going back to the Verizon store.

If you’ve been following this blog, you may know that I’m hoping to write my next two books at our off-the-grid “camp” on top of Howard Mesa. The place has solar panels that should generate enough electricity to power my computer equipment. But to work, I need an Internet connection — the one thing our place doesn’t have.

I explored my options. Satellite was too expensive. Wireless Internet available by pointing a specialized antenna at the top of Bill Williams Mountain wasn’t going to work because I was out of range. (The Internet guy drove up with test equipment last week to check.) That left the last option: a connection via a cell phone provider.

I’m a Verizon subscriber. I’ve been one for about six years now. Verizon has the best coverage in my area, with a nice strong signal in most places I go. I’m not a phone nut; I buy a new phone every 3 or so years. I’ve been using a Motorola flip phone for 3-1/2 years. No camera, no PDA, no Internet access, no fancy ring tones. It’s a phone, plain and simple. And it works well.

I went down to the Verizon store in the mall at Happy Valley Road in North Phoenix last Friday. (It’s a 41-mile drive from Wickenburg.) I walked in, got myself a sales person, and proceeded to tell her my needs: I need to be able to get any computer on the Internet from my cell phone. Somewhere along the line, I might have mentioned that I was thinking about a PDA. But I definitely told her I’d be connecting to a Macintosh.

Palm Treo 700pShe said the only PDA phone that would work with a Mac for syncing and Internet connection would be a Palm Treo 700p. She assured me that it would sync with my Mac using the included USB “tether.” I’d also be able to connect that tether to any computer with a USB port and, using that, get on the Internet. We talked plans and pricing and although it was going to cost me about $100/month to use the darn thing, Internet was unlimited. And the Treo has all kinds of cool features that would help make me more productive while on the road, including a keyboard for messaging, e-mail, Web browsing, and a camera. (Check out my TumbleLog for some photos I posted online from my phone on Thursday.)

So I bought it. And I bought the case, the Bluetooth headset, and the car charger to go with it.

I was incredibly busy on Friday night, all day Saturday, and on Sunday morning. But I still found time to set up tether and Bluetooth syncing. I didn’t find time to set up the Internet connection stuff for my PowerBook. But I just bundled all the hardware and software and manuals into my luggage and took it with me on my trip to California, figuring I’d have time to figure it out while there.

I didn’t have time until Thursday morning. And that’s when I realized that I didn’t have everything I needed to make it work. I needed software and it wasn’t on the Verizon Welcome disc.

So I used the Palm OS version of GoogleMaps on my phone (highly recommended) to find the Verizon store closest to Torrance Airport. And since we had about an hour and a half to kill, we drove over there. I brought my phone and the cables and the computer. And after some awkward confusion and two trips to the back room to consult with a hidden expert, the service person gave me the bad news: tethering did not work with Macs.

Of course, this is exactly the opposite of what I’d been told by the person who sold me the device. So who was I to believe?

Later on, I was able to get on the Internet and view the Web page with information about tethering. And it confirmed what the Torrance Verizon person had said.

Of course, I could still set up the computer to use dial up networking (DUN) with the cell phone. I was able to get the instructions to set up that from the Palm Web site, which I was able to view with the phone itself. I set it up and it worked. Then I realized that it might be using up my minutes — I only get 450 anytime minutes on my plan because I really don’t use my phone that much for chatting. So I called Verizon and asked. I was assured that the connection time to Verizon’s DUN system was included in my plan.

But DUN is about 1/3 to 1/2 the speed of the broadband connection I thought I was buying. And it can’t seem to hold a connection for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time. And this phone cost a small fortune. So I’m not a happy camper.

And I still haven’t confirmed that it will work at Howard Mesa.

At this point, it’s likely that I’ll be taking advantage of that 30-day trial period Verizon offers to return the phone. With luck, they’ll have something that works correctly with my Mac. Otherwise, I’ll just have them reactivate my old phone and forget about Internet access via cell phone, at least for a while.

[composed in a hotel room while on the road with ecto]