Author Archives: Maria Langer

Print From Any Room

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I can’t pass up a deal on a cheap laser printer.

Earlier this week, I was having serious, frustrating problems with my old LaserJet 2100TN printer.

The 2100TN is the third laser printer I’ve owned since jumping into the world of computers back in 1989. The first was an Apple LaserWriter IISC. The SC evidently stood for SCSI, which is how the printer connected to my computer. To my knowledge, it was the only SCSI printer in the world. It was also very expensive — at about $2,000, it was the cheapest laser printer available, with the alternative being dot matrix (inkjet had not yet been invented) — with toner cartridges costing about $110 apiece. Ouch. It wasn’t PostScript-compatible — a big deal in those days — and there were a few tricks you had to know to get it to print good quality text. I learned the tricks and used the printer for years. Then I found myself needing grayscale printing (oh, I didn’t mention that the printer was simple black and white?) and I had to buy a new printer.

The HP LaserJet 4MP came next. It was networkable, via AppleShare (using PhoneNet connectors), and I had a real use for that when I began writing and realized I needed a dedicated computer to run the software I wrote about. The 4MP was smaller and cheaper — I think I “only” spent about $1,000 on it. It lasted for years but, after a while, I started producing documents that were just too darn complex for it. To print these documents I had to save them as PostScript files and then download the files to the printer. It took 1-5 minutes to print each page. (Fortunately, simpler documents, like the ones that came from Word, printed the usual way and a normal print rate.) Around this time, my husband needed a decent printer, so I passed it on to him. He’s still using it and it prints fine. (He doesn’t print from PageMaker like I was doing back then.)

I replaced it with the LaserJet 2100TN I have now. This printer has a network card, so I could plug it into my Ethernet network. (I’d used an adapter to get the old 4MP on Ethernet when I abandoned AppleShare.) I didn’t realize how long I’d had it until I called HP for help the other day. My one-year warranty had run out in 2000. Not bad, considering this was the first real problem I’d had with the printer in all those years.

The problem was ghosting. I’d print a document, perhaps one with the Flying M logo on it. When the document came out, the logo would be at the top of the page, right where I’d put it, but it would be repeated 3-3/4 inches further down the page as a pale ghostly image. Of course, it wasn’t just the logo being repeated. It was everything on the page. The result: the page looked downright dirty.

I used HP’s Web site to look up support documents. The problem wasn’t really addressed much. I pressed magic key combinations to use built-in utilities to clean various parts of the printer. I ran print jobs with lower resolution (600 and 300 dpi vs. 1200) and with the HP resolution feature turned on and off. Nothing helped.

Now I use my printer for correspondence as well as to print off the occasional e-mail or PDF. I have nice, watermarked bond paper with my company logo and contact information in raised red lettering at the top of the page. (Evidently raised lettering is losing popularity on a daily basis, as people go for cheaper printed letterheads.) I have matching envelopes and business cards. What good is having all this nice paper for correspondence when the contents of the letter looks like crap?

I was at the end of my rope when I called HP. While on hold, I started browsing HP’s site for a new printer. I learned that they had a trade-in program that would get me $100 back if I sent them my old printer. No problem there; I didn’t want a printer that printed like that. Then I learned that there had been quite a few developments in the world of printing since I’d bought the 2100TN. I could now buy a color laser printer that could automatically print on both sides of a page for less than I’d spent on the 2100TN. Holy cow! Of course, the color cartridges cost more than $100 each and you had to buy four of them. (Ah, consumables!) For less than $500, I could get an excellent black and white printer that did the duplex thing and could attach to my network. I was trying to figure out how one model differed from another when the tech support person answered the phone.

Her name was Lori and she was a Mac person. How nice. We went through some troubleshooting steps that were not on the Web site and, after about 15 minutes, determined that the toner cartridge was to blame. I don’t know why — it had plenty of toner in it — but it had simply gone bad in the middle of its life. I always have a spare toner cartridge on hand — you never know when you’ll need one and it’s not like they sell them here, at the edge of nowhere. I popped it in, printed a test page, and ta-da! The problem was gone.

Best of all, Lori said she’d send me a new toner cartridge. It arrived the next day.

So my 6-year-old printer is working fine again. My call to HP’s technical support had saved me about $500, which is what I would have spent on a replacement printer. And I continue to be sold on HP printer products.

But the idea of a color laser printer had been firmly planted in my brain. I started thinking about getting an inexpensive one that I could use just for color jobs. Heck, it’s not like you’re limited to one printer. My only problem was that I wasn’t prepared to buy a color printer without seeing an example of its output.

On Wednesday, I had to take Zero-Mike-Lima up to Prescott for its 100-hour inspection. (Can you believe I’ve already flown it 98.7 hours since January 6?) My old 1987 Toyota MR-2 lives up in Prescott, at the airport, so when I dropped off the helicopter, I hopped in the car for a day of shopping.

I arrived in Prescott at 7:15 AM and Zero-Mike-Lima wouldn’t be ready until 3 PM at the earliest. That meant I had to kill eight hours.

Sure, I could have driven home. Wickenburg is only 90 minutes away by car. But why waste three hours of my day driving?

I did a lot of shopping that day. Unfortunately, I had the valet key for the Toyota, so I couldn’t open the tiny rear trunk. (The trunk release had broken years ago.) That meant I had to pile all my purchases up on the passenger seat. The car got fuller and fuller as I made my way around Prescott. Home Depot, Office Max, Michael’s, Linens and Things, Pier One, PetSmart — I was a woman on a mission. The mission was to see all I could see and buy whatever I wanted, provided that it that would fit in the car (and later, in the helicopter).

I’ll discuss the concept of information overload and how it applies to people living on the edge of nowhere in another entry.

I wound up hitting the Best Buy store in Prescott, which is pretty new. They put it on a pad outside the Prescott Gateway mall. It’s isn’t a big store — not like the Fry’s down on Thunderbird near I-17 — but it has a nice selection. I browsed the printers. I saw sample output from a color LaserJet. I was relatively impressed. Fortunately, they didn’t have the networkable model in stock.

I also tried three times to get an oil change for my faithful Toyota. It had been about a year and maybe 2,000 miles since I got the oil changed and it was time. But I soon discovered (and was shown) a huge dent in the car’s oil pan. No one wanted to pull the drain plug because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to get it back in. They let me look at it from the pit where the oil change guys work. I was just amazed that the pan hadn’t burst. I knew the culprit: me, of course, speeding down the roads at Howard Mesa last summer. Oh well. Looks like I’ll be bringing the MR-2 back to Wickenburg after all. My mechanic, Dan, is the only one I trust with that car.

On the way back to the airport, I hit the Staples store near downtown Prescott. I wanted to buy a notebook. I’m picky about notebooks. They need to be spiral bound with the spiral on top and each page has to be perforated so you can tear it off cleanly if you need to. The cover should be plastic (not cardboard).

Staples had printers, too. And that’s when I saw it: a Brother laser printer for only $119 (after rebate). Holy cow! This was a far cry from my first printer, which had cost 16 times as much. The printer had a USB connection and was both Mac and Windows compatible. My brain made a cosmic leap. This would be an excellent printer for the house.

Unlike many other writers, I don’t work at home. I moved my office out of the house about four years ago and now work out of a condo in downtown Wickenburg. It’s about a five mile drive from my house. Too far to drive if I’ve created a document on my PowerBook and need hard copy. On those occasions, I’d hook up the computer to a phone line and fax the document to the fax machine at the house. Not the best quality, but it did work. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have a laser printer instead?

Of course it would.

I’ll admit it: I’m a laser printer snob. I don’t like inkjet printers. There are two reasons: 1) you usually need special paper to get a good image from an inkjet and 2) the desert environment in which I live is so dry that the inkjets get clogged up if you don’t use the printer every day. (My Epson photo printer has this problem and it requires that I clean the nozzles several times each time I use it. That wastes time and ink.) In addition, the space I wanted to put the printer (on a bookshelf that was already pretty full) had no room for those stupid vertical paper feed trays that inkjet printers seem to like. (Bad enough the fax machine, on the next shelf down, has one.) This Brother printer was very small and would require less than a foot of vertical space.

And the price! Sheesh! It’s a no-brainer.

So that’s how I went into a Staples store for a notebook and emerged with a laser printer. It was the last thing I managed to squeeze into the car. I had to put a few things in the car’s front trunk to make it fit.

I hooked it all up the next day. I was very angry to learn that the printer was preowned — someone had bought it, printed 20 pages, and returned it. Staples sold it to me as new. I had a talk with the store manager about that and was assured that they’d take it back for replacement if anything went wrong with it within the next year. He also said I could bring it back the next time I was in Prescott, but the way I see it is that if it works, there’s no reason to bring it back. It just bugs me that I bought an opened box after being assured by the sales guy that it had not been opened.

I connected it via USB to the Airport Extreme base station I have at home in the room we call the library. (It has a futon, a desk, and a lot of books. Oddly enough, not a single book is mine.) Then I installed the driver on the iBook I keep in the library and, within minutes, was printing a sample page. I installed the driver on my PowerBook, in the kitchen, and printed out an outline I’d been working on. The print quality isn’t as good as my 2100TN, but it’s certainly acceptable. Sure beats faxing it to myself.

And I can print from any room in the house. Or even from outside on the patio, where I’m writing and publishing this.

Isn’t technology great?

The Flying Cowgirl

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I work with a couple of cowboys on a roundup.

The call came over the weekend. A local rancher wanted to know if he could hire me to take him and his son — the cow boss — to look for some stray cattle. I laid down the rules: I can help you look for them, but I can’t move them. No problem, I was assured. We set a date for Tuesday at 6 AM.

I got to the airport at 5:30. I’d left Zero-Mike-Lima out overnight so getting ready for the flight was easy. A quick preflight, remove the pilot door, stow the charts under a seat. The cowboys — Pat and his son Patrick — arrived ten minutes early, but I was ready for them. I gave them a preflight briefing and we decided who would sit where: Patrick beside me and Pat behind me. When I told them I’d stow their hats under the seats, they seemed to pale. “We’ll put them in the truck,” Pat said. Cowboys are very protective of their hats.

I got the whole story from them as I warmed up Zero-Mike-Lima. They’d spent the previous week working on a round up, moving the cattle over to some grazing land near ranch headquarters. This was the OX Ranch (pronounced oh-ex, not ox), which grazes north and south of the Date Creek Mountains, from the town of Congress to Date Creek. Headquarters is on Date Creek, accessible via the unpaved Hillside Road out of Congress. They’d counted up the cattle and thought they might be short some. They knew they were missing three bulls, one of which was crippled. (I think they had another cowboy working on him.) They figured that they could fly the 160,000+ acres of their range and see if they could spot any cattle they’d missed.

We left Wickenburg at about 5:55 AM and headed due north to Congress. Both men commented about the view and how much they could see from the windows. Then, as we flew over the west end of Congress, Patrick started directing me. We were about 200-300 feet up, cruising at around 70-80 knots. Patrick immediately spotted two black heads of cattle. He asked me to circle around so he could see what sex they were and both men agreed they were bulls. (I think it had something to do with the color of their ear tags more than anything dangling in the vicinity of the animals’ back legs.) I continued on a standard search pattern in the area between route 71 and the Date Creek Mountains. Patrick spotted another group of cattle and we circled to get a count: four cows and four calfs. The bulls were obviously doing a good job. A few minutes later, I spotted a bigger group of about a dozen cows and calfs.

Pat, sitting in the back, was thrilled. We’d already found more cattle than they thought they were missing — probably because of all those extra calves.

We kept flying. We saw some more cattle, but they were on the other side of a fence that separates the OX Ranch land from a neighbor’s. By this time, we’d pretty much finished combing the flat area and now needed to search the Date Creek Mountains themselves. It was the north side of the mountains that they were most interested in, and not quite all the way to the top. The Date Creek Mountains aren’t very tall — they rise perhaps 500-1000 feet above the desert floor — but they are very rugged, with huge boulders scattered all over them. We flew along the north side of the ridgeline, passing cattle tanks, windmills, and old mining trails. We didn’t see any more cattle, but we did see some javelina, frightened away by the sound of the helicopter. Then we searched the north slope of the mountains, all the way down to Date Creek. I could see the cattle they’d already rounded up, all penned inside a big field. But no more stray cattle.

Satisfied that we’d found all there was to find, Pat told me to head back to Wickenburg. They could now form a plan to retrieve the cattle we’d found. I imagined them saddling up horses and trailering them out to the Congress area, then mounting up and heading out with their dogs. All the cattle we’d seen were within a few miles of each other, so it probably wouldn’t take more than a day to get them all.

When we landed, Pat told me how pleased he was with what we’d done. In 1.1 hours, we’d accomplished what it would have taken over a week to do on horseback. He assured me that he’d call me again, and asked if I ever did work in Flagstaff, where they had a summer ranch. I told him I wouldn’t be far from there in July and August, at my place at Howard Mesa. I gave him a bunch of cards and told him to tell his friends.

I’d enjoyed the assignment and look forward to doing it again.

Where Would YOU Rather Be?

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A quick comparison of temperatures.

I’m a Mac OS X 10.4 user. Dashboard, a new feature of the operating system, enables me to display, with a push of a key, “widgets” that look up information on the ‘Net. I’m a weather nut, so I have the Weather widgets set up to display when I press the F12 key to display Dashboard.

Here’s what two of my Weather widgets look like right now: Now can you see why I prefer to spend my summer at Howard Mesa, just 35 miles south of the Grand Canyon, than in Wickenburg?

Weather

Yarnell Daze — Another Success for Flying M Air

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We fly up to Yarnell and spend the day giving helicopter rides.

A while back, I wrote an entry that mentioned Yarnell Daze and the good feelings I got from the folks who wanted me to do helicopter rides there. This is an update.

We flew up at 7:30 AM yesterday. Mike and Alex came with me. (No, not Alex the Bird. Alex, my new ground crew kid.) We brought everything we needed except shade.

Wendy at the Buzzard’s Roost had presold 11 tickets. Not exactly enough to get me excited, but enough to get me up there for the event.

The day started off beautiful: cool and calm. The skies were clear — and stayed clear all day. I did a bunch of rides before taking a break for the parade. My last ride before the parade actually flew over town as the parade was starting, so I did a low, slow fly-by with passengers aboard. They were two teenaged girls and I told them that they could tell their friends they’d been in the parade.

We were set up about 3/4 mile north of town, in a field alongside the road. It was a tricky landing zone because it was surrounded on three sides by wires. That made only one safe way in and out, and there was a mountain in that direction. I’d lift off, make a 180¬? pedal turn, and take off toward the mountain, gaining speed until I went through ETL (effective translational lift), give the cyclic a harder push forward, and then bank to the left toward Peeples Valley. I’d go as far as Hiddens Springs Ranch (a thoroughbred horse ranch), then turn to the left back toward Yarnell. We’d fly over Yarnell and then over the cliff there, so there was suddenly 2000 feet of empty air beneath us. (Very dramatic; the passengers loved it.) Then another right turn, back over town, and back to the landing zone. I’d approach it from the north, making a tight right turn as I slowed and descended to land on my spot. Time elapsed: 8 to 10 minutes.

I shut down during the parade (10 AM) and walked into town with Alex to get lunch. The Buzzard’s Roost had a BBQ lunch special. It was a little skimpy on the meat, but it did include chips and a drink for $5. We bought three and walked back to the LZ. By that time, it was getting hot and the only shade was inside the helicopter. We climbed aboard and ate.

The flying started up again as soon as we dumped the 10 gallons of fuel we’d brought into the ship and took off my door. And it didn’t stop. The people just kept coming. It was a good flow of people because they didn’t all come at once, so no one had to wait more than about 15 minutes. Finally, I got to the point where I needed to fuel up again. I made a trip down to Wickenburg with three passengers aboard. The woman at the FBO, who isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, took nearly 20 minutes to screw up my fuel order. I took another 3 minutes to add 10 more gallons of fuel, then brought my passengers back to Yarnell and kept on flying.

The heat was definitely affecting performance. By noon, I didn’t feel comfortable flying with three full-sized passengers on board. It wasn’t the flight that concerned me. It was take off. The wind had picked up and I was taking off with a tail wind. At times, it may have been as much as 10 knots. Great for landing into, but tough for taking off with at your back. So I gave Mike definite instructions about total passenger weights and told him to use the scale we’d brought. One 255-lb guy got pissed when we wouldn’t let him on board — my legal per seat weight limit is 250 — but I didn’t care. Safety first. We just gave him his money back. At least his daughter got to fly with me.

We did two freebie flights for folks that work for the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce. I still owe Wendy a flight for all the work she did selling the tickets.

It was about 2 PM when we called it quits. I shut down to stretch my legs and help the guys load up. Another potential passenger showed up, but we told her we were done for the day. Done isn’t the word. I was well done, like a roast left in the oven too long.

We flew back down to Wickenburg and I landed in one of the helispots. I shut down while Mike fetched his car and cranked the air conditioner. Then I just locked up the helicopter — with all our gear in there — and we went home, stopping to drop off Alex the Ground Crew Kid at home and pick up Alex the Bird at work.

I figure we flew about 50 people — our second best event ever. And it was a real pleasure to help contribute to the success of the event.

Thanks very much to the folks at the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce. I hope I can do this again next year!

It’s 103°F. In the shade.

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The “indoor season” begins in Wickenburg.

In most places, winter is the “indoor season,” the time of year when you want to spend most of your time indoors. But not in Arizona’s Sonoran desert.

I remember my first New Year’s Day in Arizona, back in 1997. I’d gone “down the hill” from Wickenburg to a K-Mart in Glendale to buy a pair of cheap bar stools for the apartment I was living in. I wore a T-shirt that day without a jacket and wasn’t the least bit cold. This is great, I remember thinking, conjuring images of the folks back home.

Cold winters were the reason I left New Jersey all those years ago.

Will hot summers be the reason I leave Arizona?

It’s a dry heat. Sure. But it’s still heat. 103.8°F (that’s about 40°C for you metric folks out there) at 2:35 in the afternoon is killer, no matter how dry it is.

And — for Pete’s sake! — it’s still only May.

I don’t remember the heat affecting me this badly years ago. Back in 1997, in May, we were just starting our house hunt. We’d finally sold our home in New Jersey early in the month and Mike and Spot (now deceased) had joined me in Wickenburg. The other half of our belonging arrived by moving van and we rented a second apartment in the Palm Drive complex to store it and set up our offices. Then we started making the rounds with Connie, our Realtor, who spent the entire summer showing us every home available for sale, no matter how poorly it matched our list of requirements.

I still remember walking up driveways and walkways and around houses in the summer heat, getting more and more depressed with every outing, but not really feeling the heat. Was that a mild summer? Or had my thin blood welcomed the warmth after so many fickle East Coast summers?

To give you an idea of the mindset of people where we’d come from, when we told people back home that we’d bought a new house, their first question was, “Does it have air conditioning?”

What the hell do you think? I felt like replying. Do you think we’re idiots? That we’d buy a brand new house without air conditioning in a town where summer temperatures routinely get into the triple digits?

Phoenix temperatures make big news in New York. New Yorkers love to hear about how hot it is in the summer here, the same way people in Arizona love to hear about how cold and miserable it is in New York in January. Of course, I’ll take a 103.8°F on a May day in Wickenburg long before I take an 80/80 day in New York. (That’s 80°F with 80% humidity.) A typical forecast on a summer day in New York would be the “3 H’s” — that’s hazy, hot, and humid. Ick.

But if that first summer wasn’t bad, things changed. It seemed as if every summer became hotter than the one before it. We bought blinds for the three big 8 x 4 windows on our second floor and they stayed closed every morning (and most of the afternoon) from equinox to equinox, just to give our air conditioning units a fair chance at keeping up. I made the fatal error of leaving my purse on the dashboard of my car one day while it was parked in the driveway. My credit cards, slipped into their individual slots in my wallet, melted flat and would no longer make an impression at the store. Thank heaven the magnetic stripe still worked.

Two years ago, it was unbearable to me. That’s when I realized that any outdoor activity had to be completed by 8 AM (at the latest) and the rest of the day had to be spent in air-conditioned comfort. Air conditioned house to air conditioned car to air conditioned office to air conditioned car to air conditioned store to air conditioned car to air conditioned house. Get the idea? The windows go back on the Jeep in mid May and it’s sealed up tight, just so the air conditioning worked better. Better yet, don’t go out at all. After all, it takes at least ten minutes for the air conditioning to cool down a hot vehicle. And heaven help you if you have black leather seats or fail to shade the steering wheel when you run into the grocery store.

Last summer, I had some relief. I worked as a pilot up at the Grand Canyon. My schedule was 7 days on and 7 days off, although I normally worked a 6 on/8 off schedule. I lived at our Howard Mesa property while working. It’s about 15 miles north of Williams (as the helicopter flies) at an elevation of 6700 feet. The heliport at the Canyon was at 6300 feet. High altitudes make a big difference. I don’t think I experienced a day above 95°F while I was up there. And when I came home for my week off, I spent every day in my office, cranking out the books that pay the bills. The summer seemed to fly by (no pun intended).

This summer, I’m going back to Howard Mesa. I have one more book to write and it’s due on June 15. With luck, by June 20, I’ll be up there with my camper and my horses and my bird and my helicopter. I have a big project to work on this summer — converting a 12 x 20 shed to a cabin with a bathroom and kitchen — and a book project to work on in the evenings. I think this is going to be a killer summer and there’s no air conditioning at Howard Mesa, but I think (and hope) I’ll be able to deal with it for the two and half months I plan to be away.

I’ll cheat Wickenburg’s indoor season the right way this year, using the same cop-out the snowbirds use: I’ll just leave town.