John McCain’s Miracle Fence

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McCain uses his vast ignorance to mislead the public.

Lately, the radio here in Arizona has been full of commercials for John McCain. You know. That Senator from Arizona who gave Sarah Palin her ticket to wealth and fame? The man with the creepy smile who lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election? The man who’s trying hard to stay in the public eye by speaking out against everything our President is in favor of, even when the President’s plan would benefit his constituents?

John McCain: Angry Old ManYeah. That guy.

Although I usually switch channels when a McCain commercial comes on, I actually listened to one yesterday. It was old Johnny, talking about his immigration plan. And what pissed me off was his promises to “build a fence” along the Arizona – Mexico border.

I’ve flown the Arizona border in a helicopter 300 feet off the ground from Yuma to Nogales — a distance of 230 statute miles. (There’s another 100 miles of border beyond that before you get to New Mexico.) Although the first bunch of miles are flat and already have some sort of fence, there are long stretches of mountainous terrain where the erection of a fence would be downright impossible. The landscape is rocky and rugged with towering cliffs and tall peaks. Other than white markers positioned more than a mile apart, the border is impossible to see. (I actually slipped over to the Mexican side during the flight because I couldn’t see the next marker.) It’s Sonoran desert, home to cactus, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. There are few roads on the U.S. side. It would take a miracle to build a fence there — and if one were constructed, it would be a crime against nature.

Arizona-Mexico Border

Yet John McCain continuously promises to build this miracle fence, leading people who haven’t seen the border first hand — 99+% of the population, including, no doubt, John McCain himself — to believe that such a task is not only possible, but it’s reasonable.

It’s neither.

In fact, even attempting such a feat would be a blatant misuse of public funds. Arizona’s own “Bridge to Nowhere.”

I believe that the Arizona-Mexico border is impossible to fully secure. Even if fences were built, they’d be cut, tunneled under, or torn down — as they already are. Illegals will get into the country from Mexico. That’s a fact of life in Arizona. Don’t get the idea that it’s easy to get it; it’s not. But it is possible and it will always be so — just as it’s possible to get across the Canadian border. Building a fence will not deter those who are serious about crossing the border.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

But I do know that I’m sick of listening to John McCain mislead the American public into thinking that the solution is as easy as putting up a fence.

iPad: First Impressions

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First thoughts on Apple’s “magical” device.

iPadLast week, while I was away in Ventura, CA, recording a revision to my Twitter course for Lynda.com, I took the plunge and bought an iPad. I bought the 32 GB WiFi version. I already pay for Internet in three places and am not willing to add a fourth monthly Internet bill.

Because I had a lot of work to do all day in the recording booth and a lot of work to do in the evening to prepare for the next day in the recording booth, I didn’t open my new toy for over 24 hours. This was particularly difficult on the last day of recording when I could see the bag containing my new iPad right outside my booth, just beyond where my producer sat.

@Miraz commented on Twitter that I have iron willpower. She may be right, at least as far as this goes.

So later that day, when the course was in the can (dig my movie lingo), I finally got a chance to break my iPad out of its box and play with it.

Very First Impressions

My immediate impression on power up: disappointment.

The trouble is, if you don’t have an Internet connection when you first power up, there’s not much of interest to play with. So the “right out of the box” experience isn’t too thrilling. Perhaps Apple should have included some sort of video tour? Or sample content? Something to give you a gee whiz, this is fun feeling?

I didn’t have Internet when I first fired it up. I was staying in a hotel that had WiFi but it was kind of flakey. I’d connect with my MacBook Pro and maybe be able to access a page or two and then it would throw up a page forcing me to log in for free. It did this at least once a day. When my iPad reported that too many people were connected (?), I thought it was this weird hotel Internet.

Similarly, I had trouble connecting my iPad to my MacBook Pro with the provided cable. I kept getting weird error messages on the iPad. I kept doing what I thought — intuitively, mind you — would fix the problem. Eventually, it did. I made the connection to my MacBook Pro and, moments later, the weird hotel login screen appeared in Safari on my iPad. I connected to the world.

Suddenly, the iPad wasn’t so disappointing anymore.

The Good

I’ll tackle the list of what’s good about my first experience first.

  • Included Apps. The iPad comes with a number of applications and most of them are good, well designed, and useful. I’m constantly surprised by how well thought out some of them are. I’m especially impressed with the implementation of Address Book and the way Mail makes it very easy to add a sender as a contact. (More on apps — specifically, interface — in “The Bad” section below.)
  • iPad CaseApple Case. Frankly, I can’t understand why so many third party vendors are creating and selling cases for this device. The plain black case Apple offers (at a whopping $49) is excellent. It provides the protection you need for your iPad investment without making a slim, portable device unnecessarily bulky. And since the cover can be used to prop up the iPad at an angle in landscape view, it does double duty. Now that I’ve slipped my iPad into it, I can’t imagine the need for anything else.

Just two good things? Yes. For now. After all, these are my first impressions.

The Bad

Here’s what I didn’t like about the iPad. Remember these are first impressions. I’ve organized these by how nit-picky they are. The first ones are minor whines; the last ones are what I consider serious drawbacks.

  • Packaging. There’s too much. The box is beautiful, as most Apple product boxes are, but it’s about twice as big as it needs to be. As a result, I had to leave it behind in my hotel garbage pail. Couldn’t fit it in my luggage. And let’s be real here: Aren’t big boxes a bit wasteful?
  • Documentation. There is none. Well, there is a small card with a picture of the iPad and callouts to what its few buttons do. Beyond than that and a few brief instructions on the back of the card, you’re pretty much on your own until you can get on the Internet. That’s where you can download a 154-page iPad User Guide available as a PDF. As @JeffCarlson pointed out, there’s a link to this manual in Safari’s bookmarks. Sadly, I replaced Safari’s bookmarks before seeing that link. I had to stumble upon the documentation on Apple’s Web site. You can find it on the Manuals page.
  • Interface. While I’m sure the iPad’s interface is completely intuitive to someone who has been using an iPhone or an iPod Touch for years, it was very unintuitive to me. (I’ve never owned an iPhone or iPod Touch.) I didn’t immediately (or intuitively) know how to go back to a previous screen or perform some functions. I kept looking for Mac OS type interface elements that I needed to get a job done and coming up empty. Instead, there was some other element II’d never seen before that did the job. Yeah, I know I’m not a genius, but I make my living figuring out how things like this work and I still struggled a bit with it. I think that putting this in the hands of someone who has always used the same kind of computer and operating system his/her entire life will stoke up a lot of frustration. It’s very interesting to me how individuals who have no computer experience — very young children, older folks, and cats — seem to be able to use the iPad without much problem. I think it’s because they don’t have to “relearn” anything to do so.
  • Keyboard. In general, the keyboard is pretty good and very easy to use. But it’s definitely not one a writer would depend on to write a long piece. I started this blog post on my iPad (in the WordPress app, no less) and wound up sending it to my iMac to finish. (I got as far as the second bullet point in this list and added the images later.) I would go nuts if I had to write more than a few paragraphs with that keyboard. My main gripe? The apostrophe key. It’s in a weird place. I do need to mention, however, that since I learned how to use the dictionary assistant feature that’s part of text entry — I had to look it up in the User’s Guide, for Pete’s sake! — typing is a lot better, although not much faster. Using a wireless keyboard helps tremendously. The Keyboard Dock that Apple offers, by the way, is obviously not designed for travel. The Dock part doesn’t detach, making it extremely bulky. I’m surprised at Apple. They can do better design that that.
  • KindleKindle vs. iBooks. I think Apple missed the boat on this one. The Kindle app (see screenshot) has iBooks beat. Why? Because the Kindle app is available for iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac OS, Windows, etc. iBooks is available on iPad. So I go to Amazon.com and I buy a book. That book is automatically available on all of my registered devices. My bookmarks and last page read are automatically synchronized among them. So I can read a book in bed on my iPad and then, the next day, when I’m stuck waiting in line at the Motor Vehicle office, I can whip out my BlackBerry and continue reading where I left off. Theoretically, I can also register my husband’s Windows laptop so he can read my books, too. The only thing that would make this better is the ability to loan books to other Amazon.com account holders like Barnes and Noble’s Nook. (By the way, I named my iPad “Not Nook” because I cancelled my Nook order in January, expecting to buy an iPad instead. B&N dropped the ball when they couldn’t fulfill orders in a timely manner. Not having a problem doing that anymore, I bet.)
  • iTunes. The iTunes app is really the iTunes store. It’s embarrassing to admit that it took several frustrating sessions with my iPad to figure out that I had to use the iPod app to access my iTunes music. Hello, Apple? You had to include two store applications? You couldn’t just make one? This really illustrates what some blogger — wish I could remember who! — said about the iPad: it’s just a vehicle for selling content.
  • No FlashFlash. Okay, so the iPad doesn’t support Flash. I don’t care very much because I hate Flash. I hate the way it’s overused on the Web, I hate the way it takes so damn long to load on the shitty slow Internet connection in my Wickenburg office, I hate the way when it finally loads that it wastes time and bandwidth with idiotic content. Take, for example, the crappy design of Stingray Sushi’s Web site. Like I need to see dancing Sumo wrestlers? Hear loud music? I couldn’t see or hear it on my iPad, but even when my husband connected with his laptop, he still couldn’t figure out how to view a menu. Web designers lean too hard on Flash to make Web sites they think will impress clients. They don’t consider the user experience. If not having Flash on my iPad means I’ll miss experiencing crap like Stingray’s site (see iPad screenshot), I consider that a positive feature of the iPad. Right now, it’s just a drawback because I occasionally can’t see something I might need to see.
  • Tethering for Internet Access. I knew this would be an issue when I bought it, but it still bugs me: I cannot use Bluetooth to tether my iPad to my BlackBerry Storm for Internet access. I can do so with my MacBook Pros, my iMac, my old PowerBook, and even my Dell laptop when I need to. But this capability is unsupported on iPad and is likely to remain so. I resent this. The only reason Apple has locked up the tethering feature is so force encourage people to buy a more expensive device and sign up for Internet access with Apple-approved providers. And even a long-time Apple user like me — it’s been 21 years since I bought my first Mac — should be able to look at the situation objectively enough to realize that it sucks.

Overall, I Like it

After reading all this, it may sound like I hate my iPad. I don’t. I rather like it.

The challenge is to understand what the device is and isn’t — and how it can be part of my life. I already see a bright future for it as a take-everywhere device. I even bought a new purse that it will fit comfortably inside. (I was long overdue for a new purse anyway.)

Testing has shown that it handles my multiple IMAP e-mail accounts extremely well. Browsing is quite acceptable. The e-book reader (Kindle is my choice) is magnificent. Syncing through MobileMe puts my calendar, address book, and Safari bookmarks at my fingertips. (Literally.) Twitterrific’s iPad app is an excellent choice for accessing Twitter and Instapaper gives me the ability to read Web content I’ve saved for later reading, even when I’m offline. The Netflix app gives me access to movies available for immediate playing through my Netflix account. I’ve even tested the iPad with my merchant account and found that have no trouble processing credit card transactions.

Of course, these aren’t first impressions. These are the things I’ve learned since Wednesday evening at about 8 PM. Less than four days.

As I learn more, I’ll likely start churning out how-to pieces and tips on Maria’s Guides. I’ll be sharing more overall impressions — good and bad — here.

But don’t worry. I do have a life beyond my iPad.

My Morning Cup of Joe

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It has to be just right.

I start each morning with a cup of coffee. That’s not unusual in the United States. Coffee is a pretty standard breakfast beverage. It’s why we drink coffee and the kind of coffee we drink that varies from person to person.

And my morning cup is special.

First of all, I don’t drink coffee because I rely on that jolt of caffeine to jump start my day. If all I wanted was caffeine, I’d get it from a double espresso at the local Starbucks or allow myself to become addicted to one of those idiotic “energy drinks” that young guys like to get hopped up on.

Instead, I drink coffee because I actually like coffee. I like the flavor. I like the aroma. I like the way it feels going down my throat when it’s just the right temperature: good and hot.

The trouble is, I don’t like just any old coffee. I like a certain kind of coffee the way I like it made.

And that’s the rub.

The Ingredients

Coffee ingredients are very basic, right? Well, to many folks, they are. But to someone as picky as me about coffee, they’re special.

  • Coffee. This is the main ingredient in a cup of coffee and, for me, it needs to meet several requirements:
    • Freshness. I buy coffee beans so I can grind them myself at home. The beans never come out of a hopper in a supermarket, where they may have been sitting for who knows how long. They always come in a vacuum-sealed package.
    • Bean type. This is where I differ from many self-proclaimed coffee connoisseurs. I don’t like Columbian coffee. To be fair, it may be the way it’s normally roasted: dark. I prefer Arabica beans with a light to medium roast. I also like Kona from Hawaii. These are smooth, mellow beans, roasted in a way where the roasting process doesn’t impart a bitter or burnt taste.
    • Roast. As mentioned, light to medium roast is my preference. Dark roast coffee tastes bitter or burnt to me. This is my big gripe against Starbucks and other “high end” coffee shops.
    • Eight O'Clock CoffeeBrand. The brand of coffee isn’t nearly as important to me as the other criteria. These days, my coffee of choice is Eight O’Clock coffee. I tend to buy it in bulk — 4 to 6 12-oz bags at a time — when it’s on sale at the local Supermarket. I store the unopened (very important) bags in the freezer. (They say that freezing coffee doesn’t do anything to maintain its freshness, but I do it anyway, just in case.) I’ll also buy any brand of light to medium roast pure Kona (not a “blend” — whatever the hell that means) and, in a pinch, Starbucks Breakfast Blend. I should mention here that a recent “coffee snob” house guest turned her nose up at my coffee choice and would make a special trip to Starbucks every morning for her cup. I guess if you’re not spending at least $1/ounce for coffee, you just can’t make some people happy.
    • Caffeine content. I drink caffeinated coffee. While I’m not in it just to get the caffeine, I don’t see any reason to drink coffee that has been tampered with in a lab to remove a naturally occurring ingredient. The resulting buzz I get if I drink two cups of coffee is what keeps me from drinking a third.
  • Water. I’m fortunate enough to live in a home with excellent and tasty well water. When I’m at our Phoenix place, however, I will use the tap water, which tastes like chlorine to me. The way I brew my coffee, the taste of the water is usually not a factor.
  • Milk. Yes, I put a small amount — about 1-1/2 tablespoons, if you were to measure — of milk in my coffee. Not cream, not half and half, and certainly not some powered crap with ingredients I can’t pronounce. I prefer 2% milk but can use 1% or whole milk. Skim milk is pushing things a bit.
  • Sugar. I also put about 1/2 teaspoon of sugar in my coffee. I like plain granulated sugar or evaporated cane juice sugar (often touted as “organic”). I don’t like Sugar in the Raw, a popular product that has a distinct molasses flavor. Ick. I also won’t use artificial sweeteners. There are 16 calories in a teaspoon of sugar and I’m using only half of that. Surely I can put another 8 calories into my body each day?

The Daily Grind

Before I got a decent grinder, I’d buy one or two bags of coffee at a time and grind them using the supermarket’s grinder. It was important to shake out any trace of the hopper coffee that the previous user might have left in the machine. I once ruined a package of coffee by letting it mingle with what some flavored crap.

Krups Burr GrinderBut now I have a nice Krups Burr grinder which I like. It got mixed reviews on Amazon.com and I do agree with some of the points brought up by negative reviewers — for example, it can be a bit messy — but, in general it’s perfectly suited to my needs.

Almost perfectly. The least coffee it’ll grind is for two cups — even though the setting says it’s for one cup. But that’s okay. I usually do drink two cups of coffee a day. If I don’t drink the second cup, I don’t mind using coffee ground the day before. I’m not that picky.

I grind my coffee more finely than what’s recommended for drip coffee makers. Not quite an espresso grind, but certainly more fine than a basket or cone drip. That could be why the darn grinder gets messy.

The Coffee Preparation Device

A year or three ago, the big chatter on Twitter was about an $11,000 coffee maker. It brewed one cup at a time. At least they got that part right.

Brew and GoMy coffee maker of choice is a Black & Decker Brew ‘N Go. Designed for people who want to grab their cup of coffee as they head out the door on their morning commute, it comes with an insulated thermal plastic travel mug. I don’t use the mug unless I’m heading out to the car, too. I use a large ceramic coffee mug. It probably holds about 14 ounces.

I don’t use the reusable “gold” filter that came with the coffee pot. Because I prefer my coffee ground finely, the coffee grinds make their way though those gold filters and get in my cup. So I use #2 cone filters in the filter basket of the machine. I’m not picky about brand or paper bleaching. (Sheesh.) Because I go through so many of these things, I like to buy them cheap. I’ve actually found them very cheap in the coffee maker area of WalMart. So on the rare occasion that I’m in there, I stock up. And yes, when I’m at home, I compost the filters and coffee after brewing.

The Brewing Process

To brew a cup of coffee, I go through this routine.

  1. Fill a coffee cup with cold water and pour it into the coffee maker’s well.
  2. Refill the coffee cup with hot water to prewarm the cup. If I can’t get hot water from the tap right away, 2 minutes in the microwave warms whatever water I can get.
  3. Put a clean coffee filter in the filter holder.
  4. If necessary, grind enough coffee for a cup.
  5. Using a measuring spoon, measure out enough coffee for that size cup.
  6. Tamp the coffee down into the filter paper and close the lid.
  7. Dump the hot water out of the cup and put it on the coffee machine’s cup shelf.
  8. Push the button.

What comes out about 2 minutes later is a steaming hot, fresh cup of very strong coffee. This is what I like.

The Coffee I Don’t Like

I don’t like bad coffee and won’t drink it. What’s bad coffee? This:

  • Weak coffee. If I can see my spoon while I’m stirring, it’s too weak for me.
  • Coffee brewed from inferior ingredients. Yeah, I know the 3-pound plastic tub of Savarin was on sale at Costco last month. But don’t think I’m going to drink it.
  • Coffee that has sat in a pot on a warmer for more than 10 minutes. Yes, just 10 minutes. I have experimented with this at home using our bigger coffee maker. I’ll use that to make enough coffee for a group of people and the first cup is usually fine for me. But the second cup from the same pot ten minutes later? Keep it.
  • Columbian or dark roasted (or both) coffee. If it’s brewed right and fresh, I can drink it. But it’s normally not brewed strong enough or not fresh enough for me.
  • Most restaurant coffee. It usually falls into one or more of the above categories. Occasionally, you’ll get a good cup of coffee at a good restaurant, but I won’t even consider ordering coffee at a diner or cheap restaurant.
  • Flavored coffee. Are you serious?
  • Instant coffee. I stopped drinking instant coffee about 20 years ago and have seen no real reason to go back. And no, the new Starbucks instant coffee does not impress me. At all.

I prefer to drink no coffee than any of the above. In fact, I have. If I’m traveling and need a hot beverage and can’t track down a place to get a latte — freshly brewed, with enough milk to cut the bitterness of the dark roast — I’ll order tea. Or iced tea. Or juice.

Picky, yes. Snobbish? I don’t think so. If I were snobbish about my coffee, I’d buy expensive coffee, brew it in some fancy gadget, and turn my nose up at everything else. Instead, I buy relatively cheap coffee and brew it in a cheap machine the way I like it: hot, strong, and fresh.

What’s in your cup?

Outdoor Photography: It’s All about Timing

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What a difference two days and one hour makes.

Although I was very pleased with the “Desert Still Life” life photo I shot the other day, I wasn’t 100% happy with it. It seemed to me that when viewed at 100%, the photo was grainy. I decided to head back out to the same spot at roughly the same time of day to shoot it again.

I couldn’t do it the next day, however, so it was two days later when I pointed the Jeep down that ATV road, pulled out onto the ridge, and followed the dirt road there to the same site. When I arrived, it was a full hour later in the day than the previous shoot.

This is an amazing example of how important timing is in photography. These two photos show roughly the same image, but with a mere 49 hours of time between them. The one on the left is my original image; the one on the right is the later image.

Good Shot Bad Shot

Now I know what you’re going to say. The exposure is off on the second shot. It is. I exposed for the cactus flowers, which were in the shade — remember, it’s one hour later. And although I probably could have fixed this shot up a bit in Photoshop, I didn’t bother. Frankly, when I saw the condition of the flowers, I didn’t try very hard to get a good shot. I just tried for the same angle. The only reason I made the photo on the right at all was to show it in this blog post as an example of how things change from day to day.

The biggest change was in the flowers themselves. Those bright magenta blooms had mostly closed up. I don’t think this had much to do with the time of day. I just think that they were 2 days past their peak. I’d just happened to arrive on point to make the first shot when they were at their peak.

The point of this post is to clearly demonstrate that outdoor photography is all about timing. You need to get there at the right time of day when your subject matter is at its peak. If this means multiple trips to the same spot, so be it. If you’re serious, you’ll do it. You’ll go out every single morning or afternoon during the wildflower season, toting your camera and your tripod along with you just for the possibility of making the one photo that will make all the work worthwhile.

Think photography is easy? Think again.

DocStoc Sells Your Personal Documents

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Your privacy is obviously not their concern.

This morning, when going through the Google Alerts set up for my name — one of the tools I use to track down copyright infringement — I found a link on a company called DocStoc. The link was to a copy of my resume, created back in 2004, that included a variety of personal information about me, including my name; my city, state, and zip; my old e-mail address at my domain name; and my job history up to that point. The document was listed as “public domain,” but a Download link required you to have an account with DocStoc to download the document.

Needless to say, I was outraged.

I e-mailed the company and filled out a DMCA takedown notice on their site. I also demanded to know who had uploaded the document so I could take legal action against him/her.

If you have any sort of Internet or Web presence, I highly recommend that you go to DocStoc, perform a search on your name, and use their online DMCA Notification form to get whatever personal documents that are found removed.

Do not support this organization by buying documents that could be stolen from their sources.