Another fisheye view.
I shot this closeup photo of the cable for the old mine hoist at Monte Cristo Mine near Wickenburg, AZ.
The Monte Cristo is one of two relatively well-preserved mine sites on Constellation Road. This cable can be found in the hoist building beside the mine’s tower.
Photo Info:
Camera: Nikon D80
Focal Length: 10.5mm
Aperture: f/4.0
Shutter Speed: 1/60
Lat/Lon:
34.0646° / -112.5836°
Whoa.
Mike and I flew up to Page, AZ yesterday. We had a few business-related things to do. Among them was to take measurements and photographs of my new hangar.
The hangar is at Page Municipal Airport and overlooks a huge, underused parking area. Beyond that is Lake Powell with Tower Butte and Navajo Mountain. See for yourself:
Not too shabby, huh?
I start flying photo flights out of there in March. I can’t wait.
We give away our chickens.
I’ve had chickens on and off for the past 8 or so years. We had them for fresh eggs; we never ate the chickens.
My first batch was 8 little chicks I raised from 2-days old. They spent the first eight weeks or so in our garage, under a heat lamp. We visited with them and played with them. On warm days, when I was working in the yard, I brought them out to scratch in the dirt. They had names.
We added a chicken coop to a shed near our horse corral and put them in it when it got warm enough. During the day, we’d leave the coop door open and the chickens would come out and scratch around in the dirt and horse poop.
Then one day, three of them were gone.
It was coyotes, of course. They’d discovered the chickens, which were easy prey. Coyotes grab their prey and make off with them. One year, with another batch of chickens, I actually saw a coyote running off with a chicken in its mouth.
No more days on the loose.
A friend and I built a fenced-in yard for them with a ramp from the coop into the yard. That kept the coyotes out — they didn’t seem to want to work at digging under the fence to get at the chickens.
But it didn’t stop the neighbor’s dogs. One Thanksgiving day, the doorbell rang and my neighbors brood of children were standing there. “Our dogs are eating your chickens,” they announced. We ran down to the coop to find the dogs in the yard, chasing the chickens around. They hadn’t gotten any of the chickens yet and they ran off before we could grab them.
We put electric wire around the base of the yard’s fence. The neighborhood dogs got to meet that wire one-by-one and didn’t come back.
Meanwhile, we were going through batches of chickens. They don’t live forever, you know. Sometimes they’d simply disappear. We put bird netting over the top of the yard — no small task, since a few trees grow in there. When we got down to just one chicken, we’d give it away. A few months later, we’d start again with chicks. But I never got too attached to them, since I knew what would eventually happen.
We also started getting roosters, hoping they’d work with the chickens to keep the flock going. We did have one hen get broody and hatch two chicks. She wasn’t a good mom. The other chickens soon killed the babies.
Last time this year, I took delivery of over a dozen chicks. I raised them and set them up in the coop/yard as I do every year. They started producing eggs in the late spring, not long after I went away for my summer job. My husband was soon giving away 3 dozen eggs a week. When I got home in the fall, they were still at it.
But then they started disappearing again. We couldn’t figure out how. Were they getting out, to be killed by dogs or coyotes? Or was something getting in? We checked the coop and yard regularly. We adjusted the bird netting. Each week, we’d lose one or two birds.
We were down to seven when we realized that it could be hawks getting in at the very top of the coop. There was an opening there about 6 inches tall, just under the roof. Small birds used this access way to get into the coop and eat scratch. Mike and I closed it up with chicken wire.
Two more birds disappeared. Now it had to be hawks coming in through the yard. There was no way we could completely cover the yard with bird netting — the trees in there were just too big and bushy. So I cut off access to the yard, limiting the chickens to an 8 x 8 coop that was open on three sides.
That’s when the chickens stopped laying eggs.
It’s also when we started spending a lot more time in Phoenix. Although the chickens can be on their own for up to a week — they have automatic water and their hanging feeder can hold a week or two worth of food (depending on the number of chickens, of course) — it was silly to have to worry about them when they weren’t doing their job. I couldn’t open up the yard again; I’d just start losing them again. So I did the next best thing: I gave them away to a friend who also has chickens.
She lives in Wenden in farm country. Her chickens run lose in her back yard and seem very happy and healthy. Yes, she occasionally does pick one out for a good chicken dinner, but that’s life. I figured that my four hens and one rooster might go back to work for her — especially if they got an inkling of what might happen if they didn’t.
So now we’re chickenless.
Putting Netflix on your TV without a DVD.
My husband and I have a part-time residence in the Phoenix area, affectionately known as “Rear Window.” In putting together this home-away-from-home, we decided to do what we could to cut living expenses there. This meant not getting cable/satelite television or telephone service.
We do have Internet, however. We have to. It’s quite fast, although not as fast as the provider promised. (Bet you’ve heard that one before.) But it’s way faster than at home. And it’s fast enough for viewing Netflix content, as well as Hulu and other streaming video.
I have a Netflix account. After a rocky start, we settled in and I think it’s a great service. Not long ago, Netflix added the ability to view certain titles immediately, on your computer. Although it was very slow in enabling this feature for Mac users, it also added the ability to stream video from the Internet to a computer, provided that you have a Netflix-compatible device. (I wrote a little about this here.)
I bought the Roku Netflix Player. Yesterday, we plugged it in and gave it a whirl.
Setting up the device meant plugging it into a wall outlet (or power strip) and connecting it to the television. It came with all the cables we needed. We have WiFi at Rear Window and Roku had no trouble finding our AirPort Express network and logging in.
All the configuration is menu-driven right on the TV screen, using a remote that comes with the device. It was pretty intuitive. There was one point when it looked as if we were repeating steps we’d already done, but the process was slightly different. The only thing I think people might find baffling is how to get the activation code they need to enter into Netflix to connect their account to the device. I guessed at what to do and got it right. I think a lot of folks probably pick up the phone and call for help at this point.
Once your Roku activation code has been entered into Netflix, the device is connected to your account. Any movies you have listed in your Instant Queue will appear on Roku’s main menu. It takes about 60 seconds for a movie you add to appear on Roku, but you can have any number of movies listed there.
To add a movie to your Instant Queue, you must find a Netflix title that has both an Add and Play button. There are supposed 12,000 of these titles as I write this. One way to zip to the titles that can be viewed immediately is to click the Watch Instantly tab on the Netflix site. This displays only those titles you can watch online or via a Roku-like device. 
To add the title to your Instant Queue, point to the Play button and choose Add to Instant from the menu that appears. You can add a bunch at a time so Roku offers a good selection to choose from if you don’t have a computer handy when it’s time to watch.
When the popcorn has been popped and you’re ready to watch a movie, use your TV’s Input button to switch to the input you assigned to Roku. Then use Roku’s remote to scroll through the movies you’ve added to your queue. Press the Select button to play a movie. There’s about a minute of buffering and then the movie starts.
Quality depends on your Internet connection. Netflix recommends at least 3 Mbps or better for DVD quality. Our speed is supposed to be 9 Mbps, but I clocked it yesterday at about 4.5 Mbps. (You can test your speed for Netflix purposes and learn more about how speed affects quality here.) The movie we watched, Contact, played well with no skipping and very few digital artifacts. If I didn’t know better, I’d think we were watching a DVD.
The TV we used it on is a 25-inch standard television. My husband has his eye on a large HDTV; it will be interesting to see how it works with that if he does buy it.
The Roku device supports all the usual video streaming controls, including pause/play, fast forward, and rewind. We played with this a bit. Each time you change the play point, there’s a bit of buffering before the movie resumes. I don’t think that’s either unexpected or unacceptable.
I’m pleased with my $100 investment in Roku. I think it’ll help us fill a gap in entertainment needs. Although there is a one-time investment in the device, there’s no additional fee through Netflix to watch streaming content. The fact that the device is wireless makes it easy to move from one room to another. The device also supports Amazon Video on Demand (or will do so soon), so if you like to spend extra money on video, that’s an option, too.
Personally, I hope they begin supporting content from other “free” sources such as Hulu and network television Web sites. It would be nice to get my Daily Show fix on a regular TV screen.
It does the whole job.
About a month ago, I was having trouble with my Mac and decided to head off any serious problems by reformatting my hard disk and reinstalling all my software from original program discs. In the old days, before we all had hard drives measured in gigabytes, I did this every single time there was a major system software update. Nowadays, it’s a lot of work and I avoid doing it if I can. My 24″ iMac is just over a year old and shouldn’t have been giving me problems, but I figured I’d try the reformat before bringing it to a genius. (Turns out, it was the swapping out of 2 GB of RAM for 4 GB of RAM that probably fixed the problem.)
For some reason, I didn’t do a typical install of Microsoft Office 2004. I thought I’d save disk space by omitting the proofing tools for the languages I don’t speak — which is every language except English. Word, which I use daily, worked fine — until I noticed that it wasn’t checking spelling as I type. Although my spelling is above average, I count on Word to put red squiggly underlines under my misspellings and typos. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get this feature to start working.
I sent an update to my Twitter account about this as I went about troubleshooting the problem. The result was an outpouring of suggestions from my Twitter friends for replacing Word or Office with other software, ranging from Open Source Word or Office replacements to Google Docs.
Whoa!
I fixed the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling Word. Life went on. But it got me thinking about Office and Word and why so many people go out of their way to avoid both.
I should probably start off by saying that I have been using Microsoft Word since 1989 or 1990. Although I got Microsoft Works with my first Mac, I soon learned Word and began teaching it in a classroom setting. It was Word 4 for the Mac in those days; I don’t know what the corresponding version in Windows was because I didn’t use it or teach it. I’m not even sure if Microsoft Windows was a player back then.
I’ve used every version of Word for the Mac since then.
My first book about Microsoft Word was The Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6. Word 6 sucked. It was a processor hog. I remember working with it in beta as I wrote my book about it. I remember whining to my editor, asking if he thought they’d fix the performance issues before the software went out. They did, but not very well. I disliked Word 6 and the way it handled outlines and “master documents.” Everything seemed to be “embedded.” It seemed as if they’d prettied up Word to look more Mac-like and had done the job by pouring maple syrup all over the inside of my computer, bogging things down.
Word 98 was a vast improvement. From then on, each version of Word was an improvement. The interface remained basically the same but features were added and solidified. Some of the features worked with Microsoft server software, which I didn’t have, didn’t want, and certainly didn’t need. All I cared about was that Word did what I needed it to do, using the same interface I knew from years of experience as a user.
Then Office 2007 for Windows came out with its ridiculous “ribbon” interface. What the hell was Microsoft thinking? Take a standardized interface that your existing user base knows by heart and throw it out the window. Force them to learn a whole new interface. Keep telling them that it’s easier and maybe a handful of morons will believe you.
I had to use Office 2007 for two Excel books. The only good thing I can say about it is that the complete, radical interface change — I’m talking menus vs. ribbon here, not spreadsheet basics — made a book about the software necessary. How else would users figure out how to get the job done? Fortunately (for users, not authors) Office 2007 adoption is slow.
Of course, I’m a Mac user and use the Mac version of Office. I held my breath when Office 2008 came out. Thank heaven they didn’t get rid of the menu bar — although I don’t understand how they could. Office 2008 retains much of the Office 2004 interface. It just adds what Microsoft calls “Element Galleries” and the usual collection of features that 1% of the computing world cares about. Fortunately, you can ignore them and continue using Office applications with the same old menus and shortcut keys we all know.
I would have switched to Office 2008 — I even had it installed on my MacBook Pro — except for two things:
(I wrote about these frustrations extensively in a Maria’s Guides article.)
So I’m apparently stuck with Office 2004 — at least for a while.
But do you know what? I’m perfectly happy with it.
I like Word. I really do. It does everything I need it to do and it does it well.
Sure, it has a bunch of default options that are set stupidly. I wrote about how to set them more intelligently in an article for Informit.com. (Read “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) It certainly includes far more features than the average writer needs or uses. And despite what Microsoft might tell you, it’s probably not the best tool for page layout (I prefer InDesign) or mail merge (I prefer FileMaker Pro). But it does these things if you need to.
I use all of the basic word processing features. I use the spelling checker — both as I type and to correct errors. I like smart cut and paste, although I have the ridiculous Paste Options button turned off. I like AutoComplete and love AutoCorrect (when set up properly). I use all kinds of formatting, including paragraph and character styles, tables, and bulleted lists. I rely on the outlining features when preparing to write a book or script for video training material. I use the thesaurus occasionally when I can’t get my mind around the exact word I’m looking for, although the word I want is usually not listed.
I’ve used some of the advanced features, such as table of contents generation, indexing, and cross-references. These are great document automation features. Trouble is, I don’t usually use Word to create documents that require these features. I use InDesign for laying out my books, which are usually illustrated. (And I admit that I’m looking forward to trying out the new cross-referencing feature in InDesign CS4 for my next book.)
I don’t jump on board with every new Word feature. I prefer the Formatting toolbar over the Formatting Palette. I write in Normal view rather than Page Layout view. I create my own templates but don’t use the ones that come with Word.
I don’t use the grammar checker; I think it’s a piece of crap designed for people who know neither grammar nor writing style. I don’t like URLs formatted as links. (Who the hell wants links underlined in printed documents?) I don’t use any of the Web publishing features; I’d rather code raw HTML than trust Word to do it for me. I very seldom insert images or objects or anything other than text in my documents. I have InDesign for serious layout work. I don’t use wizards. 
I think WordArt is ugly and amateurish. I keep the silly Office Assistant feature turned off.
I admit that I don’t use any of the project features that work with Entourage — although I’d like to. I decided a while back to switch to Apple’s e-mail, calendar, and contact management solutions (Mail, iCal, and Address Book respectively) because they’d synchronize with .Mac (now MobileMe) and my Treo. Entourage probably does this now, but I really don’t feel like switching again. Am still thinking about this.
The point is, I use a bunch of Word features and I completely ignore a bunch of others. The features are there if I need them but, in Word 2004, they’re not in your face, screaming for attention. (Wish I could say the same about Word 2008.)
Lots of people think that just because I’m a Macintosh user — an enthusiast, in fact — I should be using Apple’s business productivity solution: iWork. For a while, I thought so, too.
I own iWork ’08. I just bought iWork ’09. I’ve tried Pages. I’ve really tried Pages. I wanted to use it. I wanted to break free of Microsoft Word.
But old habits are hard to break. No matter how much I tried to use Pages each time I needed to create a document, when I was rushed, I reached for Word. No learning curve — I already know it. After a while, I just stopped trying to use Pages.
I know a bunch of writers who swear by one software program or another for meeting their writing needs. They use special outliners to create outlines. They use special “writing software” that covers the entire screen with a blank writing surface so they’re not distracted by other things on their desktops. They use special software to brainstorm, footnote, and index.
I’ve tried these solutions and do you know what? They don’t make my life easier. Instead, they just give me another piece of software to learn and keep up to date and interface with other software. They make more work for me.
I’m not going to forget my Word skills and Word isn’t going to suddenly disappear off the face of the planet anytime soon. In fact, it’s far more likely for one of these one-trick ponies to disappear than a powerhouse with millions of users worldwide like Microsoft Office.
I remember ThoughtPattern, a program by Bananafish Software. I saw it demoed at a Macworld Expo in the early 1990s and thought it was the greatest thing in the world for organizing my thoughts and ideas. I was sure it would make me a better writer. I was so convinced, I bought it — and it wasn’t cheap. I used it for a while and rather liked it. Evidently, I was one of very few people who’d joined the ThoughtPattern revolution. In April 1993, it was discontinued. I was left with software that wouldn’t work with subsequent versions of the Macintosh system software. Worst of all, the documents I created with ThoughtPattern were in their own proprietary format. When the software stopped working, the contents of those documents were lost. (Do you think it was easy to find a screenshot from software that was discontinued 16 years ago?)
So perhaps you can understand my aversion to one-trick ponies that promise a better writing experience.
Will the same thing happen with Microsoft Word? I don’t think so.
Google Docs was one of the solutions suggested to me by my Twitter friends. I guess they think it’s better to avoid the evil Microsoft empire in favor of the “we’re not evil” Google empire. Along the way, I should give up the interface and features I know from almost 20 years of experience with the software and rely on an online application that could change its interface daily. Oh, yeah — and keep my documents on someone else’s computer.
Yeah. Right. Good idea.
Not.
Until I’m part of a multinational corporation that requires its employees and consultants to keep all their documents on some remote server for collaboration purposes, I will not be computing in the cloud.
One of the things I like about keeping my documents on my own computer — rather than a remote server accessible by the Internet — is that the Internet is not always available. What do I do then? Stop working?
Security is an issue, too. While I don’t usually write much of a confidential nature, I don’t like the idea of not having control over my documents. Servers get hacked. I don’t want my work suddenly accessible to people who I don’t want seeing it.
I will admit that I use MobileMe’s iDisk feature to keep some documents on an Apple server. This makes it a tiny bit easier to access them from my laptop when I’m away from home. But I’ve recently moved to a new strategy. I bought a pocket hard drive that’s bigger than my computer’s Home folder. Before I hit the road with my laptop on a trip for business or pleasure, I sync this portable drive with my Home folder. I then have every single document on my computer with me when I’m away. The added benefit: complete offsite backup.
That’s my defense of Microsoft Word. I rest my case.
Please understand that I’m not trying to convince a non-Word user to switch to Word. If you’re happy with something else, stick with it! That’s the precise reason I’m sticking with Word. I’m happy with it.
I guess the reason I wrote this post was to assure other people like me that there’s no reason to be ashamed of being a Word user. You do what’s right for you. There’s nothing really wrong with Word. If it makes your life easier, why switch?