Author Archives: Maria Langer

A PC Laptop

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I had to buy a new PC.

Although I’m primarily a Mac person, I also write about Windows. (This was a good thing a few years back when the future of the Mac was in question.) In fact, nearly half my books are either Windows only or cross-platform.

While other writers claim that they can write Windows books while running Windows emulation software on their Mac, I think they’re nuts if they do. PCs aren’t terribly expensive and it isn’t as if you have to buy a new one every year. The Dell Dimension desktop computer I used while working on the WordPress book is at least four years old now. It runs Windows XP and all the current versions of the software I write about — Excel, Word, and Quicken. It also does a fine job with the few Windows-only software packages I actually use, like the software to update my handheld Garmin GPS, the software to update the Garmin GPS in my helicopter, and…uh, I guess that’s it. My Mac really does just about everything I need it to do.

But now I’m gearing up to write about the upcoming version of Microsoft Office. I have at least two titles to update, possibly four. It depends on sales and what the powers-that-be at Peachpit decide.

One thing’s for sure, though: they want the book written about software running on Vista. And my old Dell desktop would roll over and drop dead if I got a Vista beta anywhere near it.

It’s unfortunate. I was hoping to get away with another cheap computer. But because of the processor, memory, and graphics memory demands, I had to buy a “hearty” computer. One that’s above midrange.

And I’d already decided that all of my new test mules — which is what this computer really is — would be laptops. Why? So I could take them on the road and not be tied to my office when I’m working on a book.

Besides, laptops take up less room, usually make less noise, and are easier to keep clean.

I settled on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop, partially loaded. Extra RAM, the faster processor, the better graphics processor, the better monitor. Wireless networking and Bluetooth built in. DVD player/CD writer. Heck, I don’t remember what else it has. It’s way more loaded than I wanted it to be, but I needed it like that. And I paid for it — believe me.

But with luck, I’ll get it to last me five years.

It arrived today and is sitting in a box on a chair by the door. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take it home and fiddle with it over the weekend. I have a Grand Canyon helicopter charter tomorrow and we’re hoping to go up to Howard Mesa to work on the electrical system on Sunday. That doesn’t leave much time for Windows brand frustration.

But maybe I’ll take it home anyway, just so Mike can look at it. He’s a Windows guy and might actually enjoy playing with it.

Now if only Cliff would get those contracts together for me so I can pay for this darn thing.

Dell, laptop, Vista, Windows

“Quiche”

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A side dish that turned into a main course.

We were going to have steak for dinner. Mike had bought two “beautiful” (I haven’t seen them) rib eyes at Albertson’s on his way home on Wednesday. I needed to make something to go with them and I didn’t feel like a trip to the store.

One thing we always have a lot of these days is eggs. With 8 hens, we normally get 5 to 7 eggs a day. Alex eats an egg every morning and sometimes Mike will have 2 or 3 (they’re generally smaller than average). And I’ll have 1 or 2 once in a while. Otherwise, we wind up giving quite a few away. Basically, if you hand us an empty egg carton, you’ll get it back a short time later with a dozen eggs in it.

I thought about that Bisquick quiche I used to make and tracked down the recipe in my stack of clippings. The recipe called for only 3 eggs; I wanted to use more. And the recipe said nothing about vegetables; I had a bunch in the freezer that I wanted to use up. So I improvised. The following is my approximate recipe; it actually turned out quite good. And when Mike got home with a headache, we had the quiche for dinner so he didn’t have to go out in the heat to grill the steaks.

Ingredients

  • 5 eggs. Remember, mine are small; if you buy large or jumbo eggs, 4 would probably be enough.
  • 1/2 cup Bisquick
  • 1/4 cup melted butter. The recipe called for 1/2 cup, but I think that’s too way much. It makes the final product greasy.
  • 1/2 cup milk. The recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, but I wanted to get rid of eggs, not milk.
  • 2-3 cups frozen (or fresh) chopped vegetables. I used asparagus, chopped spinach, and a potato/onion/pepper blend. I let them defrost for about a half hour on the countertop before I mixed them in.
  • 1/2 cup shredded cheese. The recipe calls for a full cup, but I thought that was too much. Also the recipe calls for cheddar, but I didn’t have cheddar so I used Havarti with dill.

The recipe also called for bacon, but since we were going to eat it with steak, I left that out.

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, beat eggs.
  2. Mix in the Bisquick, melted butter, and milk. Stir until blended.
  3. Add the vegetables and stir well.
  4. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased pie pan. (I used olive oil spray to spray the bottom of the pan before I poured the mixture in.)
  5. Sprinkle the cheese over the top of the mixture.
  6. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F. Quiche is done when it begins to brown and crack along the top.
  7. Eat while hot.

The magic of this recipe is that the Bisquick automatically creates its own crust. And, between the olive oil spray and the butter in the mix, it did not stick to my glass pie pan. It made a nice meal.

On the Intelligence of Quotes

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Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

Special CharactersIn Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

AutoFormat as You TypeFortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

Find and ReplaceFirst double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes

Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure, take 2

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I finally make the tour a reality.

A while back, I wrote a post that outlined my ideas for a 9-day helicopter tour to various destinations in the southwest. After writing up the tour, I realized some of the impracticalities of it — for example, booking the hotel rooms and tours in advance and the little FAA rest rule that forbid me to fly part 135 flights more than 7 days in a row (oops).

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the tour. I’ve since shortened it up and devised a more reasonable plan: a 6-day, 5-night excursion that includes Sedona, Grand Canyon, Lake Powell at Page, Monument Valley, and Flagstaff, with excellent accommodations and side trips and tours at each destination.

You can read the finalized description on the Flying M Air Web site’s new Excursions page. I haven’t added the photos yet and I’ve just begun work on the brochure. But I do have 7 sets of dates scheduled and ready to go. With a more approachable price tag of $4,995 per couple, most folks I’ve spoken to seem to think it’ll sell very well. Now all I need to do is get the word out about the trip’s availability.

Are you ready to go on a helicopter adventure? Well, what are you waiting for? Stop by the Flying M Air Web site and get the details. Then give me a call to book your trip.

helicopter, excursion, Sedona, Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, Page, Monument Valley, Flagstaff

Keeping Up to Date with this Site

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A few tips for keeping up to date with what’s new without having to surf over here every day or two.

The other day, Cliff, one of my editors, asked me (in an iChat chat) what the best way was to keep track of the new material on this site. He wanted to read my “pearls of wisdom” (his words, not mine, and I think he was teasing me) regularly.

Cliff uses a newsreader to monitor blogs. I think he was more interested in the how-to stuff I write to support my books than the somewhat boring pieces about my every day life. After all, do people really want to know that as I type this, my bird is barking like a dog in the next room? Or that I hung up on a Republican canvasser who called me in my office today? Or that today’s humidity in Phoenix is only 3%?

I told Cliff there were a few ways to keep up with this site’s new content:

  • Subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire blog. The good thing about doing this is that you won’t miss anything new. The 25 most recent posts are always available in the feed, so if you check in at least once a week, you’ll be all set. The bad thing about that is that you have to use a newsreader (which many people don’t use). And you will get summaries of all 25 most recently posted articles, including the ones about barking birds, being rude to republicans, and Arizona weather. If you want to do this, use my Feedburner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger.
  • Visit my RSS feeds page and subscribe to just the feed(s) that interest you. Just interested in a book or two? Subscribe to just the feeds for those titles. Want to learn more about flying a helicopter for hire? Subscribe to just that topic’s feed. You’ll still need a newsreader, but at least you won’t have to read summaries about posts that you don’t think will interest you. (Of course, you may be surprised by what you miss.)
  • Use the E-mail Notification form in the navigation bar on most (if not all) pages of this site to subscribe to this blog by e-mail. This is a great way to keep up with the site without having to set up or use a newsreader. I subscribed to see how it worked and I’m very pleased with the results. Each day that I post to this blog, an e-mail message is created that provides a brief summary, with links, for all the posts written that day. So if I wrote 10 posts that day, you get one e-mail. If I wrote one post that day, you get one e-mail. If I didn’t write any posts that day, you don’t get an e-mail at all. The e-mail goes out in the middle of the night, so the message is in your in-box in the morning (like the New York Times, delivered, but without the airs). There are no ads and you don’t get spammed. Best of all, when you get sick of reading this drivel, you can cancel your subscription to stop the e-mails.

Of course, you can always make a point of stopping by this site to see what’s new — the old fashioned way. Visitors are always welcome.

And have you read yet about my chicken with the crooked beak?

rss, newsreader, blog, notification