Mac Cowboys

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Maria Speaks Episode 30: Mac Cowboys.

Join me and a bunch of other Mac geeks for a dude ranch mini-vacation.

Transcript:

Welcome to WickenburgA few months ago, I started thinking about how cool it would be to have a computer conference here in Wickenburg, at my favorite guest ranch: Rancho de los Caballeros. Los Caballeros is not only the nicest dude ranch in this Dude Ranch Capital of Arizona, but it has the most interesting activities and the absolute best restaurant.

The idea was to invite a bunch of authors and let each of them do three or four sessions over a five-day period. The sessions would be in the morning and there would be all kinds of activities in the afternoon, like horseback riding, golf, shopping trips into town, Jeep tours, and, of course, helicopter rides. The people who came would have a lot of fun, learn a lot, and have a great opportunity to network with other Mac users. For some people, it could even be considered a business trip. Best of all, I could introduce people to Wickenburg, the little town I live in and often blog about.

The event would be called Mac Cowboys because of the western dude ranch theme.

Now in case you don’t know, I’m a busy person. It took me nearly forever to talk to the ranch people and crunch the numbers to see what the trip would cost. It looked feasible, so I set a date in early December, before the busy Christmas holidays. Then I got a list of possible author/speakers from one of my editors at Peachpit and invited them to attend.

I guess everyone is just as busy as I am. None of them could attend. I hope that it’s nothing I should be taking personally.

Desert SceneSo rather than give up the whole thing, I decided to restructure the event. I shortened it from five days to four. I cut the speakers from five to one. I cut the sessions from 12 to just two and made them more discussion based, giving all the participants a chance to share what they knew and ask everyone questions. I arranged the activities so all participants could go together, giving everyone an opportunity to network like crazy outside the meeting rooms. Then, with greatly reduced costs, I recalculated the per-person cost. The numbers I came up with were certainly within reason for a 4-day, all inclusive weekend at a luxury dude ranch.

Now I’m taking it public, offering it to the readers of my blog, podcast listeners, and the folks who buy Mac books from Peachpit Press.

Please understand that this isn’t a typical computer conference.

For a moment, think of the last computer conference you attended. You know, the one in the big conference hall with thousands of attendees shuffling around a show floor with shopping bags. The one with overcrowded dark classrooms with bad sound systems and speakers telling you more about whatever it is they’re trying to sell than something you really want to learn about. The one where you paid to get into the conference hall, you paid to sit through seminars, you paid to stay in a hotel, and you paid to eat disappointing meals. The one with uncomfortable free shuttles or long walks from your hotel to the conference hall. The one where your only entertainment were demos on the show floor or sad vendor parties with bad food and expensive alcohol.

Now wipe those ugly thoughts right from your mind.

Wickenburg SunsetMac Cowboys is a mini-vacation first: a four-day, three-night stay with luxury accommodations at a ranch that can only accommodate about a hundred and fifty people at once. You get yourself to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport or Wickenburg and just about everything else is paid for — ground transportation to and from the ranch, hotel room, three meals a day, horseback riding, golf, Jeep tour, helicopter tour, swimming, tennis, nature hikes — all kinds of activities. There’s even free wi-fi access in certain hotspots throughout the ranch. All you pay for is alcoholic beverages and extras like skeet shooting or golf cart or club rental.

I’ve set aside three short hours a day on the two middle days for official business stuff: a pair of conference sessions where you can learn more about using your Mac. One session covers Mac OS X topics. The other covers Web publishing topics. And there will be plenty of informal sessions among participants to pick brains and get burning questions answered.

And if you’re wondering what December is like in Wickenburg, AZ, imagine 60° to 70° F sunny days — often without a cloud in the sky. Weather won’t keep you inside during the day. Sure, at night it gets cold, but it also gets dark. And you have to rest sometime.

Sound good? I think so — and I do this stuff all the time.

This first Mac Cowboys event, which is scheduled for December 7th through 10th, 2006, is a test of my idea. If it works out on this small scale, it should work out on a larger scale with more speakers and more guests. If it ever outgrows Los Cab or I feel like trying someplace new, I can take it on the road to another ranch. I’d like to do it once or twice a year, just to keep life interesting.

So consider this your formal invitation. Come on out to Wickenburg and be a Mac Cowboy for a few days.

Want more information? Check out the Mac Cowboys Web site at maccowboys.com.

The Miracle of Google

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How did we live without it?

We have the power to find virtually anything on the Internet. And that power is called Google Search.

Moments ago, I found a question in my FAQ system (horray!) from a reader of one of my long out-of-print books (darn!). He asked a question about an error message he’d seen (that I’d never encountered) while he was attempting to build additional administrative pages for a FileMaker Pro CDML-published database.

The book he’d bought is called Database Publishing with FileMaker Pro on the Web and it dates back to April 1998. It’s long out of print. If I recall correctly — I’m not at my office so I can’t consult my copy of the book — the book covered FileMaker Pro 3, which was the first version of FileMaker to support Web publishing. FileMaker Pro is now in version 8.5 and no longer supports CDML for Web publishing. CDML was the language and technology that FileMaker, Inc. bought from the Lasso folks to make FileMaker Pro Web publishing work.

So it should come as no surprise that I was unable to answer his question. And unable to replicate it, of course.

But Google has all the answers and it proved it again yesterday. I did a Google search for CDML Error 102 and Google came up with a list of Web pages that discussed the problem. I suggested this as a way for the person with the question to find his answer. (It would be silly for me to repeat what was on those pages when he could just as easily find the same pages himself.)

Google is like this. Have a question? Google it. If you enter the right search phrase, Google will come up with a Web site that answers the question. I think I can report a 90% results rate. And considering some of the questions I come up with sometimes, that’s pretty darn good.

The trick, of course, is to come up with the right search phrase. Googling a single word won’t usually get the results you seek. You need to come up a string of words that succinctly describes what you are searching for. In the example above, if I’d entered FileMaker Error, a much more general search phrase, I seriously doubt whether I’d see any results about the specific CDML error code the reader was getting. If a search phrase doesn’t get desired results, rethink it and try another phrase. In my example, I got the results I was seeking right away, so a second try wasn’t necessary.

With the amount of junk out there on the Web — including, some people might say, sites like this one — we’re very fortunate to have search technology like Google’s available to us. It helps cut through the chaff to get to the important stuff we want (or need) to read.

Oat Muesli

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A recipe from the Westin Bay Shore, Vancouver, BC.

I like cereal for breakfast. But I don’t like heavily processed cereals with a lot of mystery ingredients and sugar.

So when I was staying at the Westin in Vancouver last week, I decided to give the muesli item on their breakfast menu a try. One taste and I was hooked. I had it every morning of my stay. And on the last morning, the waitress offered the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (not instant)
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup raisins (they used golden raisins)
1/4 cup canned peaches, drained and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 cup (or more) half and half or milk
2 cups fresh fruit like bananas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries

Instructions:
Mix the first five ingredients in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, right around breakfast time, the oats should have absorbed all of the half and half or milk. In fact, if the resulting mixture is too dry, you can moisten it up a bit by adding more half and half or milk. The raisins will be plump, too. Dish out the mixture and top with the fresh fruit. Enjoy!

One note here: The recipe I got called for a mixture of cream and whole milk. That’s half and half, isn’t it? The waitress also said you can cut calories and fat by using just milk. If you do this, use whole milk — I don’t think lowfat milk would make the result as creamy and rich.

Summer is Ending

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At least in some parts of Arizona.

Mike and I took the helicopter up to our vacation place at Howard Mesa yesterday. I’d bought some blinds for the windows on the shed there, mostly to keep the sun and prying eyes out. We also had to caulk the windows — one of them leaks terribly when the rain is coming hard from the northwest and the floor and wall there are starting to show water damage. We wanted to bring the dog, but we had so much junk — blinds, tools, etc. — packed into the back of the helicopter that there wasn’t room for him.

We left Wickenburg in t-shirts and shorts. I was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt. It had been cooling off in Wickenburg over the past few days, but it was still in the high 90s every day. And the humidity — which was probably hovering around 30% — was glazing me. We loaded up the helicopter in Jim’s hangar. (Wickenburg airport is temporarily closed so I moved my helicopter to a friend’s home hangar so I could continue flying during the closure). Even with two helicopters in the hangar, there was enough space for Mike to back in his car, enabling us to load in the shade.

It was a nice flight from Wickenburg to Williams, AZ. We stopped there for fuel. It was “only” $3.79/gallon. That may seem high for fuel, but it’s probably one of the lowest prices for avgas in the entire state. They’re currently getting over $5/gallon in Scottsdale and Phoenix Sky Harbor for the same stuff. Sheesh.

The wind was blowing hard at Williams. At least 20 knots out of the south. And when I stepped out to fuel the helicopter, it felt very cool. Almost cold. This at 11 AM on an August morning. I started wondering if I’d need the warmer clothes I had stored in the shed.

We overflew our friends’ house on our way to our property. On the way, we also overflew Howard Lake and a bunch of cattle tanks. The tanks were all full of brown water. That means it had rained rather recently. Everything was green.

On our “helipad” (an area covered with gravel that I try to keep free of weeds), the helicopter cooled down quickly. The wind was still blowing hard and it was still cool. The elevation at our place is 6,700 feet and it’s always 10 to 20°F cooler than it is down in Wickenburg. That day was definitely at least 20° cooler.

We’d brought lunch from Wickenburg and ate it at our picnic table. The sky was full of white, puffy clouds, speeding northeast. The trees around our future homesite at the top of our property seemed to shield us from most of the wind. We weren’t quite cold — the sun is very strong in Arizona — but we certainly weren’t hot.

And that’s when it hit me: summer was over at Howard Mesa. Sure, there would be a few more hot days and, hopefully, plenty more rain. But the seasons were changing as the sun moved south, shortening the days and changing the angle of the sun at the hottest time of the day. The amount of daylight simply wasn’t enough to bake the high desert landscape. Things were cooling down because they weren’t getting enough sunlight to heat up. In another month or two, temperatures would dip below freezing at night.

I think the realization was triggered by an overall feeling I had, though. Like when I was a kid, growing up in New Jersey. School starts in early September there, on the Wednesday after Labor Day. I clearly remember the coolness of the mornings as I dressed for school. And the smell of the air. I had the same feeling at Howard Mesa yesterday as we ate our lunch.

This year, I hope to get up to Howard Mesa during the autumn and winter months. I hope to be there when there’s a snowfall. The snow falls hard and deep up there — I’ve been there twice when there was at least a foot of snow on the ground — and it’s beautiful to see. Best of all, it melts quickly with that hot sun beating down on it during the day, so it never has a chance to get dirty and ugly.

As I write this at home in Wickenburg, it’s a startling 67°F outside at 5:45 AM. That’s wonderful. Normally, in August, the nights just don’t cool down like they do the rest of the year. There’s too much humidity and often some cloud cover to keep the day’s heat close to the earth. But lately it has been cooling down. Is this just a front passing through? Or is the end of monsoon season near?

Time will tell. Summer has to end sooner or later, even in Arizona.

Breaking News?

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Why are certain networks so consumed with the JonBenet Ramsey case?

I had a charter flight to the San Diego area on Thursday. Because there’s currently no fuel available at Wickenburg Airport, I had to make a refueling stop at Yuma, AZ. It was 90+°F at Yuma Airport at 10 AM, so I waited inside for the fueler to finish and to pay my fuel bill.

The Sun Western Flyers FBO at Yuma has a small pilot lounge that included a television tuned into Fox News. They had some kind of breaking news graphic on the screen and it caught my attention. With a recently foiled terrorist plot to blow up airliners still fresh in my mind, I was concerned that something new had developed in the world of terrorism during my 90-minute flight to Yuma.

But no. It was just coverage, from the air, of John Mark Karr’s transportation from one point to another — possibly to court? I didn’t pay attention. I was amazed and completely disgusted that Fox News would have a helicopter with a cameraman follow the confessed killer’s motorcade down the road. As if this were an important news story.

(If you don’t know who John Karr is, you’re a very lucky person. But you really do need to come out of that cave once in a while.)

“Breaking news” coverage of the story was satirized in NPR’s Unger Report.

Since then — two days ago — I’ve been giving the media coverage of the Karr arrest a lot of thought. Don’t confuse that with any effort to get more information about it. I haven’t done a thing to look up the case other than what I did this morning to get the guy’s name spelled right. I don’t need to try. All I have to do is walk past a place with a television on and, if it’s tuned into Fox News — a surprising number of them are these days — I can’t avoid seeing and hearing the latest, whether I like it or not. It was unfortunate for me, because the people I stayed with in the San Diego area like to watch Fox News, so it was pretty much unavoidable for part of my stay.

I have a theory about this. It has to do with the amount of effort required to spin a political news story so that it somehow supports the Fox News message. Simply put, the writers at Fox News needed a rest. Since it was easy enough to manufacture breaking news by following Karr around as he made his way from southeast Asia to a U.S. courthouse — even if it required a helicopter to get the job done dramatically enough for their intended audience — they seized the moment. I think half the Fox news writers are on vacation right now. After all, the hundreds of people dying daily in the Middle East and Africa is old news, right? The Karr story is fresh and just perverted enough to keep loyal Fox viewers tuned in — without adding fuel their doubts about the President, who has nothing to do with this story.

I went to the Fox News Web site to get the spelling of the guy’s name. (Good thing I did — and I never thought I’d say that — because I was spelling it Carr.) They have a graphic image at the very top-right corner of the screen that includes Karr’s beady (and mascara-highlighted?) eyes staring down at visitors. Clicking that brings up something called the Fox Fan Index, which appears to be commentary from viewers about stories on Fox News, along with an index of popular stories. I guess they’re trying to lure people into this area with promises of more Karr coverage. Today, however, two days after the helicopter surveillance of Karr’s transportation, there was little on the page about the story. But there was the same beady-eyed photo beside a link to a story titled “Reporter’s Notebook: Karr a ‘Demon’ Child?” Yes, this tabloid-style headline can be found on the Web site of one of the top news television channels in America. (And no, I won’t dignify the Fox News site by linking to it from this blog. It’s bad enough that I have to acknowledge its existence. I certainly don’t want to send people there.)

The other tabloids, of course, are having a field day with the story. It ended the two-week dearth of JonBenet coverage at the checkout counter. Yes, they’d been covering the story quite faithfully for almost ten years.

These are terrible times we’re living in.

A Slate piece titled, “Stranger Dangers: Why do we care about the Ramsey Murder?” summarizes the reaction to Slate’s “Little Miss Sunshine” piece that appeared earlier in the week. The piece suggested that we’re all a bit perverse in the way we look at children. Am I a minority? I don’t usually think of sex when I look at kids. Sadly, I can’t say “never.” The reason: all the photos of what should have been an innocent six-year-old child made up and dressed up to look like a Vegas showgirl by her parents. A six-year-old with more makeup on than I’ve ever worn in my life, strutting her tiny body around like a whore trying to attract a John. A parent should never do this to a child. But what upsets me even more is that I know parents are still doing it, selfishly exploiting their pretty children in the hopes of winning beauty pageants and talent contests and possibly landing them acting jobs. Making them targets for pedophiles or at least fueling the fantasies of these sick people.

And what ever happened to childhood? Can’t a kid grow up without being under pressure to meet their parents’ unreasonable expectations for competition and success?

And will JonBenet Ramsey ever rest in peace?