i-Fusion

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I buy a new iPod accessory.

It isn’t the iPod that’s costly. It’s the accessories.

Anyway, one of the things I like to do with my iPod is listen to podcasts. The only problem is that I don’t listen to my iPod often enough to keep up with all the podcasts I like to follow.

I decided that a good time to listen to podcasts was in the afternoon, when I got home from work and was doing things around the kitchen. You know: emptying the dishwasher, making dinner, cleaning up after Alex the Bird.

I used to plug the iPod into my Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which has a great sound system. But the other day the darn thing just stopped working. (My third Mac hardware problem in 6 months. They say bad things come in threes.) I have to decide whether I want to find someone to fix it or just leave it in the living room as a nonfunctioning conversation piece.

I tried plugging the iPod into my 12″ PowerBook, which spends a lot of time in the kitchen. The PowerBook’s hard drive is too full to keep the podcasts on it. But I couldn’t get the volume up loud enough to hear over Alex the Bird or the water running in the sink.

What I needed, I decided, was a set of portable speaker that I could use in the kitchen or take up to Howard Mesa or bring along on road trips. Something that had decent sound and was very portable.

i-FusionI did some research. I found i-Fusion.

I read the reviews on the Apple Store Web site. Everyone absolutely raved about the sound quality. I was a little skeptical. These speakers were small. I don’t care what the case is made of. They can only be so good. Fortunately, I didn’t need Bose quality sound. I just needed something that would sound okay and not distort if I turned up the volume a bit.

One reviewer whined that there wasn’t a place to store the power adapter. There is, however, a place to store the iPod and the earbuds. (I normally keep both in my purse when I travel.)

The price was a bit higher than I was willing to spend. My budget was about $100. This was $149. But I found it on the Tiger Direct Web site for $129 plus shipping for a total of about $135. And I felt as if I needed a treat, so I bought it.

It came today.

I must be spoiled when it comes to sound quality. Maybe it’s because Mike used to sell stereo systems and he buys good stuff for the house. Not expensive stuff, but good stuff. Stuff that sounds good. Really good.

i-Fusion does not sound really good. It sounds fine, but not really good. Those reviewers at the Apple Store Web site really need to spend some time in a stereo shop’s sound booth. Heck, I have a Sony boom box in my hangar that sounds better than this. But I’m not complaining. It’s certainly listenable and it can be turned up quite loud.

The case seems sturdy, the storage spaces are a bit silly but functional. I agree about the power adapter. It seems that they could have built the DC converter into the box (perhaps where the earbuds are supposed to go?) and made a retractable cord. That would have been a better design decision. But I can certainly imagine taking this little bugger on the road. With its built-in, rechargable litium-ion battery, it’ll be great for Howard Mesa, which doesn’t have electricity (yet).

Happy with my purchase? I think so.

I’ll let you know when I catch up on all those podcasts.

Sunset Over Alamo Lake

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I do a custom photo flight at the lake in the middle of nowhere.

The call came on Friday. Could I fly over Alamo Lake for some pictures around sunset?

I asked the logical questions. How many people? Three. Are any of them really big? One big, one medium, one small. Doors on or off? On. Then I told him I couldn’t fly low over the water or anywhere where there were a lot of people. I could get him there and back in about an hour — from Wickenburg. Where was he calling from?

Universal Studios in California, came the surprising answer. But he’d be in Mesa on Saturday and would drive up to Wickenburg. He then proceeded to tell me what he wanted the pictures for and ask a bunch of questions about whether Alamo Lake was a good choice.

“Lake Pleasant is nicer,” I told him. “And closer, too. Alamo Lake is in the middle of nowhere. Not much going on out there.”

“Perfect!”

He agreed to meet me at Wickenburg Airport at 6 PM. It was my understanding that sunset was at about 6:30 in Wickenburg. That would give us plenty of time to get to the lake. The moon would be up and filling out. Even if it started to get dark on the way back, there would be plenty of moonlight for the 30-minute flight over empty desert.

Saturday came. Mike and I decided to take a motorcycle ride up to Prescott. If I get time, I’ll write about that in another blog entry. It was a nice trip. My passenger called at 3 PM while Mike and I were having dessert at a restaurant at the mall. They were on their way. From Mesa.

I’d told him the day before that it was only a 90-minute drive, but I guess he wanted to make sure he got there on time.

I got to the airport at 5 PM. Mike helped me bring the helicopter out and fuel up. I preflighted. My passengers showed up at 5:50 PM. The guy who’d booked the flight, along with his brother and his son. I gave them their prefligtht briefing and we boarded. I was warming up the engine when Mike rode away on his motorcycle. He’d be back in a little over an hour to get me. (My motorcycles live at the airport in the hangar so I had no way to get home.)

I won’t get into details about what the photos were for. Let’s just say that my passenger was writing a work of fiction with an illustrator and needed some photos of what was in his imagination so his illustrator could create the accompanying artwork. He told me a great deal of the plotline as we headed west toward Alamo Lake. He asked a lot of questions, especially about the weather.

He told me he had three data cards for his camera and each of them could take 130 pictures. I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the prospect of flying around Alamo Lake long enough for him to take 390 photos of it. I could spend a lifetime there and not find that much to take pictures of.

As we flew west, the sun was sinking low and the streaks of dirt really showed up on my bubble. It not only embarrassed me, but it kind of pissed me off, since I’d cleaned the bubble while I was waiting for them. I wondered whether my passengers would comment on it (“Don’t you ever clean this thing?”) but they didn’t.

We flew over the lake. My passengers were happy to see it. They started snapping photos. I tried to find one of my stock photos for this piece but couldn’t track one down. Imagine a rather broad valley where three water sources converge: the Big Sandy River, the Santa Maria River, and Date Creek (usually dry). They come together to form the Bill Williams River, which cuts through a canyon as it heads west to join the Colorado River. But Arizona dammed up the mouth of the canyon to form a lake. (Rumor has it that they created the lake to prevent California from getting the water from those three sources.) The lake is roughly round with very few of the flooded canyons that makes Lake Powell or even Lake Pleasant so attractive. Mike and I had camped out there twice and although it was a nice place to get away from it all, there wasn’t much to get away to there.

I remarked at the number of campers in the two main campgrounds. The place seemed packed. They must have had some kind of fishing competition going on. That was the only thing that could ever get that many people out to Alamo Lake. Hell, it was a two hour drive from Wickenburg. Add another hour and a half from Phoenix and you have a long drive. But if you’ve ever been to the Wayside Inn, you know there are fish in that lake.

We flew relatively low to the southwest of the lake and beyond the dam. My passenger wanted to get specific views of the lake and it was my job to deliver him to the exact location where he’d get those shots. I wouldn’t fly low over the lake (no floatation devices on board) or over the campground (no desire to get complaints from the rangers stationed there).

Then we climbed in a spiral over the lake. “As high as you can go,” my passenger told me. I figured that would be about 9000 feet before the vibrations started weirding me out. The lake was at 2000 feet elevation (or thereabouts). The higher we flew, the cooler it got. It started at about 80° by the lake and wound up at about 51° 5000 feet above it. That’s as high as I got. Although the helicopter was behaving nicely, it felt really weird being that high over all that open desert.

The view was bigger up there, although there was a lot of haze. I could see the Bill Williams River winding its way West and the Colorado River and Lake Havasu out there to meet it. I could see the edge of the huge leach field out by Bagdad mine. I could see the mountain ranges lined up in every direction, each range a slightly different shade of color than the one before it. This is the kind of view my passenger wanted, so he was happy. And that’s what counts.

The was one thing that would have made my passenger happier, but it was something I couldn’t provide: clouds. He wanted to see clouds over the lake. But there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky as far as the eye could see. It was a perfectly clear Arizona April day. The kind an east coast girl like me can get sick of when there are too many in a row.

Of course, the higher we got, the higher the sun appeared to get. Sunset was quite a way off at this elevation. I suggested that we descend to hurry things along. My passengers agreed and I started a spiraling descent back down toward the lake. We were about a thousand feet over the lake at 7:00 PM when the sun finally slipped beneath the horizon. It was a typical attractive yet rather boring sunset. A big orange globe sinks. No clouds to turn beautiful colors, no contrails to glow in the sky. The air temperature immediately started to drop.

We headed back to Wickenburg, making one stop to get a shot down the road toward the lake. The darker it go, the higher I flew. It was technically night when I landed at the airport. We’d been up for 1.7 hours, according to the Hobbs meter.

Mike was there waiting for us. My passengers settled up their bill and we went our separate ways.

It had been an interesting flight — mostly because my passengers were city folks from Los Angeles who were unaccustomed to empty desert landscapes. The assignment was interesting, too — not because of what we had to take pictures of but what the pictures were for. It was satisfying to me, as a writer, to see another writer going through the legwork of researching his subject matter. He didn’t just imagine what Alamo Lake was all about based on what he saw on a map or Web site. He’d driven out there once and had gone the extra step (and expense) to fly out there. It was important to him to get it right.

And I was pleased to help him.

Major Hurricane “Expected” in Northeast

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Another typical media attempt to breed fear.

Stories like this really piss me off. It’s like someone said, “Hey, I think we could get more hits to our Web site it we published a story that said the Northeast was likely to get hit by a hurricane this season.”

So they wrote the story: “Threat of Major Hurricane Strike Grows for Northeast”, complete with the subtitle, “AccuWeather.com Warns That ‘Weather Disaster of Historic Proportions’ Could Strike as Early as This Year.”

They go on to say:

“The Northeast is staring down the barrel of a gun,” said Joe Bastardi, Chief Forecaster of the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center. “The Northeast coast is long overdue for a powerful hurricane, and with the weather patterns and hydrology we’re seeing in the oceans, the likelihood of a major hurricane making landfall in the Northeast is not a question of if but when.”

They then discuss the last major hurricane to hit the northeast, which was in 1938, leaving me with the impression that someone had done a statistical analysis on the odds of it happening again this year.

Heck, I haven’t won $7 on a lottery ticket in months. Statistically speaking, it looks like I’m due to win again soon!

Just more evidence that the U.S. media’s main marketing strategy is to keep the U.S. public in fear.

On Mailing Lists

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Talk about junk e-mail!

Whew! I just unsubscribed myself to the last e-mail list I was subscribed to.

An e-mail list, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a topic based mailbox that list subscribers can send messages to. When you send a message to the list, it’s automatically sent in e-mail to everyone on the list. The idea is that you can use a list to get information about a topic from people who might have answers.

The operative word here is “might.” A lot of times, subscribers won’t have an answer but they won’t hestitate to say “I don’t know the answer but wish I did” or “this might be the answer” or “that question is off-topic” or “you should ask that question in this other list, too” or “I just read the answer to that in this other list” or “why the hell do you want to know that?” Then the topic starts expanding in every direction, sprouting more questions and answers, only some of which are vaguely related to the original. Arguments develop with differences of opinion sometimes getting nasty. So one question can generate dozens of e-mail messages that may or may not have any value to the questioner. And if you didn’t ask the question in the first place and don’t care about the answer, it’s even more junk to wade through.

Of course, you can always take a list in “digest” format. That’s when they put a whole day’s worth of messages into one big, fat e-mail. I think it’s worse because you can’t even use a message’s subject line to determine whether it’s something you want to read (or delete).

One of the mail lists I was subscribed to didn’t have a specific topic. It was a strangely quiet list, with no messages for days on end. Once, I thought I’d unsubscribed to it — it was that dead. Then, suddenly, someone would send a message and twenty people would respond to it. Like they were all lurking out there, waiting for someone to make the first move so they could join in the fray.

The really weird thing to me is the amount of time that passes between the original message and the responses. Sometimes it’s as litle as a few minutes! Even in the middle of the night! Like people are sitting at their computer, watching every e-mail delivery, ready to dive in with a response when a message appears. Egads! Get a life!

Another list I belonged to briefly prevented me from posting questions or answers. Even though I was a subscriber, my messages were considered spam. Wow. Hard not to take that personally. I think I lasted about a week. Very frustrating when every time you try to chip in with a little assistance your message gets bounced back at you with a spammer accusation.

Why did I join these lists in the first place? Well, for a while I was feeling a bit isolated. I live in my own little world here in Wickenburg, one that’s very light on high-tech people. Very light. Lighter than the hot air the local “computer experts” spout while they’re pretending to their customers that they know what they’re talking about. I started feeling as if I were missing out on new developments in computer technology. That I lacked a reliable forum for getting answers to computer-related questions. That I had no place to turn to when I needed help.

I heard about a list from a friend and got mildly interested. When one of my editors praised it, I thought I was missing out on something really valuable. I jumped in. With both feet. And the barrage of e-mail began.

I’ve made worse mistakes. But not many lately.

So now I’m off the lists. All of them. My mailboxes are feeling much lighter these days.

I’m back to doing what I’ve been doing for the past few years. When I have a question, I hop on the Web and Google to get the answer.

E-Mail Addresses on Web Sites

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Why you shouldn’t include a link to your e-mail address on your Web site.

Many people — including me! — use their Web sites as a kind of global calling card, a way to share information about themselves or their companies with others all over the world. It’s common to want to share your contact information with site visitors — particularly potential customers — so they can contact you. This is often done through the use of a mailto tag. For example, e-mail me! which appears as a clickable e-mail link.

Unfortunately there are people out there who want your e-mail address, people who want to scam you into sending money to Nigeria, advertise their online casinos, sell you prescription drugs, show you their porn sites — the list goes on and on. If you have your e-mail address on any Web site, you probably already get a lot of this spam. That’s because of computer programs that crawl through Web sites and harvest e-mail addresses that are included in the otherwise innocent mailto tag. Heck, they even harvest addresses that aren’t part of a mailto tag, so just including your e-mail address on a Web page without a link can get you on a bulk e-mail list.

So what’s the solution? There are a few.

One popular and easy-to-implement solution is to turn your e-mail address into a text phrase that a site visitor must see and manually type in to use. For example, me@domain.com becomes me at domain dot com or meATdomainDOTcom. You get the idea. Someone who wanted to send you an e-mail message, would be able to figure that out — if he couldn’t, he really shouldn’t be surfing the ‘Net anyway — and manually enter the correct translation in his e-mail program. But e-mail harvesters supposedly can’t figure this out (which I find hard to believe) so the e-mail address isn’t harvested.

Another solution is to use an e-mail obfuscation program. These programs take e-mail addresses and change or insert characters to make them impossible to read. The e-mail addresses look okay on the site — to a person viewing them — and work fine in a mailto link — when used from the Web site. WordPress plugins are available to do this. I don’t use any of them, so I can’t comment on how well they work. But they must be at least a little helpful if they’re available. You can find a few here, on the WordPress Codex.

The solution I use is form-based e-mail. I created a Contact Form with fields for the site visitor to fill out. When the form is submitted, a program processes it and sends it to my e-mail address. Because that address is not on the Web page that includes the form — or on any other Web page, for that matter — e-mail harvesters cannot see it. As a result, I’m able to provide a means of contacting me via e-mail that keeps my e-mail address safe from spammers.

The program I use is called NateMail from MindPalette Software. it’s a free PHP tool that’s easy to install and configure. But what I like best about it is that you can set it up with multiple e-mail addresses. Use a corresponding drop-down list in your form to allow the site visitor to choose the person the e-mail should go to. NateMail directs the message to the correct person. You can see this in action on my other WordPress-based site, wickenburg-az.com, in its Contact Form. If you want a few more features, such as the ability to attach files to an e-mail message, MindPalette offers ProcessForm for only $15.

Other WordPress users are likely to have their own favorite methods of protecting their e-mail addresses from spammers. With luck, a few of them who read this will share their thoughts in the Comments for this post.

One more thing…this doesn’t just apply to WordPress-based sites. It applies to all Web sites. And a contact form tool like NateMail will work with any PHP-compatible Web server.

If you’re already getting spam, using one of these methods won’t stop it. It’ll just keep the situation from getting much worse. Your best bet is to change your e-mail address and protect the new one. In my case, that’s a big pain in the butt — so many people I need to be in touch with have my e-mail address and, worse yet, I often use it as a login for Web sites I visit (which does indeed make the spam situation worse). I’m working on a plan to phase out the bad addresses and replace them with ones that I protect. Until then, I have to rely on the spam-catching features of my ISP and my e-mail software to sort out the bad stuff — currently about 20-40 messages a day — so I don’t have to.