A Trip to Sedona

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I spend the day in Sedona, waiting for some passengers.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of flying two very nice people from Canada from Wickenburg to Sedona for the day. We arrived at Sedona Airport, after a scenic flight around Wickenburg, Prescott, and Sedona’s red rocks, around 11:30 AM — just in time for the Pink Jeep Tour shuttle to pick us up and bring us down to the town. My passengers were taking a Jeep Tour; I planned on just hanging around downtown until they were ready to return at 3 or 4 PM. I escorted them to the Jeep Tour desk, reminded them that they could change their reservation, and watched them reserve a Jeep and driver all to themselves for departure at 1 PM. Then I left them to walk around town on my own.

The Pink Jeep Tour company’s offices are in “uptown” Sedona. That’s the heart of the tourist district in the northwest corner of town at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon. The tourist shops that line both sides of the street there are dwarfed by the massive red rock formations behind them. But all attention in uptown Sedona is concentrated on those shops. I admit that mine was, too.

I hadn’t been to the town of Sedona for years. I’ve been flying in quite regularly with passengers, but I seldom come down off the mesa where the airport is located. There’s a restaurant up there and I usually have breakfast or lunch or whatever while my passengers explore the town on their own. They’re usually gone about 2 hours at the most, so I busy myself with a book while I’m waiting. It’s a nice, relaxing place.

But yesterday, my passengers wanted a longer stay in town. And since the Pink Jeep people offered me a lift in the shuttle, too, I went down the hill with them.

I walked the few blocks of uptown Sedona at a leisurely pace. I saw lots of T-shirt shops and lots of souvenir shops. The usual collection of real and fake Indian crafts and jewelry. Imported Mexican rugs. Jeep tour companies. Reservation centers. The wonderful map and bookstore that had been in one of the shopping areas was gone and I was sorely disappointed. I’d depended on that shop for reading material while I waited and it didn’t appear, at first, as if there were another bookstore in town. I finally found one across the street from the Pink Jeep storefront, the last shop on my walking tour.

My Sedona passengers from last week’s flight had spent only 90 minutes in town before returning to the airport. They called Sedona a “tourist trap.” And frankly, as I walked the streets, I couldn’t argue with them. But I hadn’t really expected it to be any different. I don’t know what they expected. After all, take a beautiful place, make its beauty well-known, and people will flock there. When enough people flock there, the tourist shops will start springing up like mold on old bread. After a while, those shops (like mold) completely cover the area, masking what people found so beautiful in the first place.

Now I don’t want to give you the idea that Sedona is “ruined.” It isn’t. There are still plenty of beautiful sights around town. Sadly, there are so many people there to view those sites, you’re always part of a crowd. You need to come to Sedona with your own Jeep and a trail map to get away from the herd. Bring a picnic lunch and your camera. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t come on a weekend!

I ran into my passengers on the street just before they went to lunch. They invited me to join them, but I felt as if I would be intruding, so I declined. I had lunch at a tea shop across from the Pink Jeep place and sat outside on a narrow balcony to eat and read the book I’d bought in the bookstore down below. It was windy and rather cold up there, so I didn’t last long.

Afterwards, I went for a walk back the way I’d come. That’s when I saw the Hummer tour sign. They had a 1-hour tour leaving immediately. It was the “Jeep Eater” Tour. Supposedly, this tour took passengers places were Jeeps couldn’t go. I pulled out my credit card and, minutes later, was seated in the front passenger seat of a Hummer, about 6 feet away from its driver. (Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that wide, but it sure seemed like it.) There were two passengers, a couple from Baton Rouge, in the open-air seating behind us. That was it.

The road that Jeeps can’t drive on isn’t in Sedona. It’s halfway back to Cottonwood, off of 89A. It’s a power line road — that’s a road built to maintain a power line — and frankly, there were only about 4 places on the whole ride that I would have been uncomfortable about taking my Jeep. That’s not to say that my Jeep couldn’t have done it. But I’m not sure that it could have done it with me at the wheel. During the whole ride, the driver kept pointing out other roads that the couple from Baton Rouge could explore on their own with the ATV’s they’d trailered up from home. The driver was obviously working hard to add value to the ride and maximize his tip potential. Whatever. It managed to stretch the tour out to 90 minutes, bringing us back to Sedona just when my passengers were due back. In case couldn’t read between the lines in this paragraph, I don’t recommend this tour. It wasn’t worth the $100 I spent on the tour plus tip. But at least I know what it’s like to ride in a real Hummer.

I hurried back toward the Pink Jeep place and found one of my passengers outside a gift shop. His wife was inside, shopping. They’d had a great time and had looked for me to join them before they left. I didn’t tell them about the Hummer.

I left them for a short while to pick up a gift for a friend of mine and a piece of apple pie that was really good. Then we got back on the shuttle, rode up to the airport, and flew home.

I’m glad I got to go to Sedona for the day. I feel all caught up with things down there. And I’m sure I’ll be back soon — not only by helicopter, but perhaps by Jeep to see just what my Jeep can do.

Snagged the Server!

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Another eBay success.

I managed to win an auction for a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. Apple sells this for $995; I got it for $449 including shipping. According to the seller, it’s in an unopened box, so it sounds legal to me.

I’m excited about this. I’ve been sitting on the fence about switching to Mac OS X server for about two years now, but my recent dealings with the folks who sell WebSTAR made me decide to take the big step up. I run a bunch of Web sites on the G4 in my office. I also run a FileMaker Pro database Web publishing server, Webcam software, and audio streaming software.

I used to run e-mail there, too, but the IP address I had was somehow linked to a spam account and all my e-mail was getting bounced from the sender as spam. What a hassle that was. So I moved my theflyingm.com domain name to a GoDaddy.com server and use that for e-mail and hosting my podcasting files. Although I now have a different IP address, I think I’ll keep theflyingm.com on GoDaddy’s server. They offer a ton of bandwidth for a very affordable price.

Now, I need to come up with a plan of attack for the new server. I want to take my time about setting it up, so I’ll probably start by moving all the Web sites I host over to GoDaddy.com for a month. Then I’ll set up my new server’s features, step-by-step, and get the Web sites all in place. I’ll “flick the switch” back to my server and, with luck, there won’t be any service interruption at all.

Those of you reading this who don’t know about GoDaddy.com and have a need for domain name registration or Web site hosting should really check them out. They’re affordable and reliable and have excellent free technical support by phone. (E-mail tech support stinks.) They also have a lot of how-to documents on the site to answer the easy questions.

Speaking of how-to documents, I got an answer to my MIME Mapping question that pointed me to a file named .htaccess. A Google search got me the information I needed from the JavaScriptKit Web site’s Web Building Tutorials pages. I think this will be a gold mine of information for me as I work directly with a Unix-based Web server for the first time.

As I work my way through this project, I’ll probably report my progress here and provide detailed how-to information in the companion Web site for my Mac OS books — that’s where most readers interested in this kind of stuff are mostly likely to look for how-to information from me.

Oddly enough, I haven’t felt this excited about a computer project for a long time. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and to learning the new things that’ll make it all work.

Oh, and the good news is that I didn’t win the other hard disk auction.

Flight Planning

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A quick review of my Part 135 Flight Planning Routine

My company, Flying M Air, is an FAA Part 135 operator. What that means is that I had to go through a lot of paperwork and testing with the FAA to be allowed to take paying passengers more than 25 miles from my starting point or to land with paying passengers on board.

As a Part 135 operator, I have the FAA looking over my shoulder to make sure I do everything “by the book.” The book, in this case, is my Statement of Compliance, a 50+ page document I wrote that explains how I’ll follow the Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs) that pertain to my Part 135 operations. The FAA reviewed this document in painstaking detail and it took about three months to fine-tune it to the FAA’s satisfaction. Of course, the FAA also conducts surprise and scheduled inspections of my aircraft and my base of operations (my hangar) to make sure everything is just right. And because I’m required to be on a drug testing program, I’ve been told that I can expect a visit from the FAA’s “drug-testing police” one day in the future.

For the record, I have no problem following FAA’s requirements for my operation. They’re not asking for anything unreasonable and everything they require is in the interest of safety for me, my passengers, and my aircraft.

Anyway, one of the requirements for Part 135 operations is flight planning. And, at this point, I have it down to a science.

I start by getting the names and approximate weights of the passengers I’ll be carrying, along with our destination, expected time on the ground, and any special route requests.

Today’s a good example. My two passengers want to fly from Wickenburg to Sedona and back. They want a scenic route both ways so they can see as much of the area as possible. At Sedona, they want to take a Jeep tour at least 2 hours long. I’ll have to line that up for them so the Jeep folks meet them at Sedona Airport when we arrive. With lunch and other activities on the ground, I expect to be there 4-5 hours. I expect to depart Wickenburg at 10 AM and depart Sedona by about 4 PM. My route will take them past some of the area’s mining areas, over Prescott, near Sycamore Canyon, and past Sedona’s red rocks before landing. On departure, we’ll swing past Jerome and follow the Bradshaws down to Lake Pleasant, where I can show them some Indian ruins and the house on Sheep Mountain. A final swing around Vulture Peak and over the ranch where they’re staying will get us back to Wickenburg. Total time enroute: about an hour each way.

With this information in mind, I fire up my Web browser and visit the Duats Web site. Duats is a free flight planning service for pilots. I log in and enter my flight plan for a weather briefing that includes current conditions at airports on or near my route (Prescott and Flagstaff) as well as NOTAMs. Today I learned that we’ll have typically clear Arizona weather with the possibility of some high cirrus clouds. It’s windy right now in Flagstaff, with gusts up to 34 knots, but the wind is expected to calm a little bit as the day wears on. Still, I can expect some very light turbulence as the winds pass over the mountains we have to cross or fly around: the Weavers, the Bradshaws, and Mingus Mountain.

Duats also has a flight planning feature and I use this next. It takes the information I’ve already entered to get the weather and uses it to calculate the route and enroute time for the flight. Since I can’t put as much detail into Duats as I need to, its flight plan is much simpler than my scenic route. It says it’ll take 45 minutes to get there and 40 minutes to return. I file both of those flight plans, each with their own times (10 am and 4 pm) with the FAA. They’ll sit in the FAA’s computers until I either activate them (one at a time, of course) or they expire.

Next, I whip out my Manifest form. This is an Excel spreadsheet I designed that automatically calculates weight and balance for my helicopter. I enter all the flight plan information, as well as my starting fuel load and the names and weights of my passengers in the seats I expect to put them. For weights, I add 20 lbs. I used to add 10 lbs, but the folks who book these flights don’t seem to have a clue about weights. It’s always better to overestimate than underestimate. And since it’s nearly impossible to load an R44 out of CG, it doesn’t matter if the two passengers sit somewhere other than the seats I expect to put them in. When my passengers are light — as these two are — I usually put them both on the same side of the helicopter so they have the same basic view. I then fly so that the most interesting views are on their side. But if they both want to sit in back, that’ll work, too. Or any combination they want.

The Manifest form is also designed to be used when I don’t have access to the Internet. It creates the same flight plan that I file with the FAA. So if I have to get the weather from a telephone briefer, I can file my flight plan over the phone at the same time rather than via the Internet.

If I have access to a printer, which I usually do during flight planning, I print out my manifest form for each leg of the trip, my flight plans for each leg of the trip, and my weight and balance for each leg of the trip. If I plan to start each leg of the trip with the same amount of fuel and take the same amount of time, I only print one weight and balance sheet. No sense wasting paper. But today I printed two sheets — I plan to fill up in Sedona since my passenger load is light and fuel is currently cheaper there than in Wickenburg.

I usually give a copy of my manifest — that’s the form with the passenger names and flight plan — to Mike. He’s my backup flight following. I call Mike when I depart and arrive each leg of the trip. If I don’t call in on time and he can’t get me on my cell phone, he takes the next steps with Flight Service.

Of course, I also open my filed flight plans with the local Flight Service Station (FSS). Although I prefer to do this on the ground before I start up, the FSS prefers that pilots do this on departure. My problem is that as a helicopter, I don’t always get enough altitude to access one of the radio frequencies the FSS uses. So I sometimes can’t activate a flight plan until I’m 10 minute into my flight. I close the flight plan by phone when I land, then call Mike to let him know I’ve arrived safely.

All the paperwork that’s generated for the flight is left on my desk in my hangar. After the flight is done, I file it. The FAA likes to look at these papers when they do their base inspection, even though I’m not required to save them.

And that’s about it. As you can see, the whole routine is designed to make sure I properly plan the flight and have at least one form of flight following to make sure a search is conducted promptly if I do not arrive at my destination. It sounds like a lot of work, but I can normally do it in less than 20 minutes with my computer and an Internet connection. To do it manually would take about twice the amount of time.

So I’m flying to Sedona today. I’d better bring a book; I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time at the airport there.

MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, eBay Shopping

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Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping. This episode is a hodgepodge of information related to my podcasting efforts and the trouble it has been giving me lately. You can find the transcript of this podcast in the “Call Me a Geek” area of Maria’s WebLog. The easiest way to find that is to click the link on my home page, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Let’s start with the MPEG-4 lessons. If you’ve been following my podcasts, you know that I’ve begun creating the occasional enhanced podcast. Enhanced podcasts include images and links and are saved in MPEG-4 format with a .m4a extension. My other podcasts are saved in MP3 format with a .mp3 extension.

Podcast publishing is not exactly a simple task — well, not when you do it the way I do. After recording, editing, and saving the audio file, I then log into Blogger where I create a blog entry for the podcast. There’s a link field that I fill out with the URL for the audio file’s location on a server. I put a short blurb about the episode in the entry and publish it.

Publishing the entry on Blogger does two things. First, it creates the Maria Speaks home page. That’s the plain old Web page you see when you browse www.aneclecticmind.com/mariaspeaks. Then it creates an XML feed file called atom.xml, in the same location as the home page. This feed file has all the codes necessary for podcatching software — like iTunes and a bunch of others I really don’t know — to see and download the new audio files.

But that’s not what most subscribers use to access my podcast. They use my Feedburner feed. Every 30 minutes or so, Feedburner’s software checks out my atom.xml file to see if it has changed. If it has, it revises its version of my xml feed file, which can be found at feeds.feedburner.com/mariaspeaks. That’s the file most subscribers subscribe to and it’s the one with all the bells and whistles to make sure my podcast entries appear correctly in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere.

Sound confusing? It is, in a way. But I don’t usually have to deal with too much of it. As I said, I create and save the audio file, then create and publish the corresponding blog entry. Blogger, Feedburner, and subscriber’s software does the rest.

My MPEG-4 lesson started yesterday. Well, in all honestly, it started about four months ago, but I didn’t realize it then. Back then, it was a problem getting my podcasts to work. But I changed the way I was doing things and it started to work, so I assumed I’d been doing it wrong in the first place. Actually, I wasn’t.

Here’s the symptom: my enhanced podcasts weren’t accessible from the Maria Speaks podcast. Anyone trying to access the file from the Maria Speaks home page by clicking the entry name got an error message. File not found. And there was no attachment to either version of the xml feed file.

The regular podcasts were fine.

Thus began my troubleshooting exercise. I zeroed in on the difference in the file name extensions and started researching. To make a long story short, I discovered that in order for me to include m4a files in my podcasts, I had to set up a MIME mapping on the server to identify the m4a extension’s type as audio/MPEG.

If you’re completely lost, don’t worry about it. This isn’t the kind of thing most computer users need to deal with. I certainly don’t. Fortunately, I have a server in my office that I can set up MIME mapping. I added the appropriate entry, moved my m4a files over to that server, fixed the URLs in Blogger, republished, resynced Feedburner, and everything began working fine.

I’m still trying to find out if the server space I have on GoDaddy.com can be modified to add the MIME mapping I need there. I’d much rather serve from that server than the one in my office.

So that was my MPEG-4 lesson.

Server woes started this morning. I was still fiddling around with the MPEG-4 files and was very surprised to see that the folder on my GoDaddy server that I’d been using to store my MP3 files was gone. I mean gone like it was never there. And oddly enough, two folders that I thought I’d deleted were back. What the heck was going on?

I assumed that I’d accidentally deleted the missing folder and was mistaken about the other two folders. After all, I’ve been busy lately with my QuickBooks book and a bunch of unexpected helicopter charters. I was obviously being careless. So I rebuilt the missing folder from backup files on my iDisk and went to work.

All the way to work — it’s a ten-minute drive — I thought about my carelessness. And when I got to my office, I did some more research. What I soon realized was that all of the space on my GoDaddy server had been reverted to the way it looked on October 10. Over a month ago. What the heck was going on?

I called GoDaddy technical support and was fortunate enough to have a tech guy answer right away. I told him the symptoms. We did some brainstorming, using the info we both had. We soon discovered that on October 10, I’d requested a change from a Windows server to a Linux server. For some reason, it had taken GoDaddy five weeks to process the change. In the meantime, I kept uploading files to the Windows server when the Linux server was already set up but not accessible to my account. Last night, GoDaddy switched my access to the Linux server, which hadn’t been updated since I requested the change. So I was suddenly faced with a server that hadn’t been updated for five weeks and access to the server I’d been using all along was completely cut off.

Well, this wouldn’t have been so bad if I was using the server space for a Web site. I keep backup copies of all my Web site on my main production computer. If a Web site’s directory or disk is trashed, I can have it replaced in a matter of minutes. But the only thing I use this server for is storing my podcasting files. Not just for Maria Speaks but for KBSZ-AM’s Around the Town radio show, which is broadcast every weekday. When GoDaddy made its change, it wiped out about 20 podcast files.

The really tragic part of all this is that I’d been saving all those podcast audio files on my PowerBook’s hard disk. Two days ago, I got an onscreen message saying I was running out of disk space. Well, why not delete some of those podcasts, I asked myself. After all, I can always get new copies from the server.

Two days later, of course, I couldn’t.

Well, the GoDaddy tech guy was very helpful. He told me they’d do a server restore for the Windows server and copy the files in my directory there to the Linux server. Although GoDaddy usually charges $150 for this service, they admitted that they were at least partially at fault for the screw-up and waived the fee. Now I just have to wait up to 10 days for the files to reappear. And, when that happens, I have to re-upload any files I uploaded to the server between yesterday at midnight and the day the server is restored. Like this podcast.

Oh, and I did lose one of my enhanced podcast episodes. It was one of my better ones, too: Mac and Windows File Sharing. It was on my .

Mac disk space, which I also cleaned up in an effort to get rid of unneeded files. So if you have a copy of it — that’s the version with the m4a file extension — please send it to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’d really like to put it back online for the latecomers here. The lesson I learned in this ordeal is that I must have a copy of every single file I want to make available on a server. If I’d had all my files, I could have just restored the server back to its original condition and got on with my life. And not bore you with this story.

SmartDiskWhat’s weird about this is that I considered the server my backup and I deleted the originals, depending on the backup. If you recall my famous NaNoWriMo podcast episode, you’ll remember how I spoke about the importance of backups. Yeah, well the originals are important, too. Which brings me to the final topic of this podcast: eBay shopping. I’ve been surfing eBay for the past two weeks, trying to get a deal on a portable FireWire hard disk. The idea is to use the external hard disk to store all my media files, thus keeping them off my PowerBook’s internal hard disk, which is only 40GB. SmartDisk makes a drive called the FireLite and I figure I can get an 80GB model for about $130. There’s plenty to choose from, all in unopened boxes. But I seem to have the worst timing; I’ve lost about a dozen auctions in the past two weeks. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually bid on two of them at a time, knowing I can’t possibly win both.

That’s the same technique I used to snag a new iSight camera this week. I put the same bid on both cameras. I won one and lost the other. Fine with me. I figure I’ll bring the camera home and use it on my laptop for a Webcam and for iChat. I might also do some video podcasting — but don’t hold your breath on that.

My other big eBay acquisition is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. It’s about half the price on eBay as it is in the Apple Store. Sealed boxes, unregistered. Sounds almost too good to be true. We’ll see.

The server, of course, is so I can finally get rid of WebSTAR and do some serious Web hosting on my server. I’ll bore you with that in another blog entry.

That’s all for today. I hope you learned something from this mess. Thanks for listening!

Three Quick Book Reviews and a Rant about Amazon.com

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What I’ve been reading.

Late yesterday afternoon, while taking a relaxing, hot bath, I finished reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Those of you who are movie-goers may remember the movie of the same name, which came out in 1986, starring Sean Connery and a very young Christian Slater.

I vaguely remembered the movie and was drawn to the book by its mention in a number of lists that appeared in Bookmarks magazine and Mystery Scene magazine. So I went to our excellent library here in Wickenburg and borrowed a copy of the book.

I’m fast reader, but this book was a slow read for me. The underlying mystery of the dying monks is what interested me, but the book was also full of insightful details about monastery life in 1300s Italy. And there was another plot line concerning a meeting of several orders of monks with delegates from the Pope. That was backed up by page after page of information about religious beliefs and differences of opinion and Middle Ages politics. Although I’m sure this is interesting to a student of those times, it was the part that slowed me down.

Since there was a movie made from the book and since I only vaguely remembered it, I picked up a copy at the video rental place on my way home yesterday. I couldn’t get it in DVD, so I was stuck with a less-than-perfect VHS copy. That’s okay; it was good enough for a Sunday evening’s entertainment. Mike watched it with me. The movie simplified the book’s details and made a bit of a plot twist that put protagonist William (Sean Connery) in greater jeopardy — something that always seems to work well in movies. It was more entertaining than the book, but I think it could have been done better. Still, the visuals of the abbey seemed quite realistic.

I also purchased the recently published The Elements of Style: Illustrated, which I heard about in an NPR interview with the illustrator, Maira Kalman. This book is a faithful reproduction of the grammar and usage classic with a twist: many of the example sentences are illustrated with full-color paintings. This little hardcover book will replace my old softcover edition on my reference book shelf. The illustrations are colorful and amusing. I bought four copies of the book and plan to give the other three to my favorite editors as Christmas gifts.

A few months ago, I heard another story on NPR, this one about a new computer DVD set called The Complete New Yorker. This eight DVD set includes scanned images of virtually every page of the New Yorker magazine going back to its first issue in 1925. Extremely flexible and well-designed reader software makes it easy to find, browse, view, or read each page of each issue. I’d read some feedback on Amazon.com (which I no longer use to buy my books; more on that in a moment) about this “book” and most of the complaints centered around not being able to read the articles without seeing the advertisements. But that’s precisely why I find this book so interesting. I can see magazine content with advertisements side-by-side. That might seem weird, but when you consider that the ads go back to 1925, you may realize the historic significance of it. Or at least my interest.

I installed the reader software on my PowerBook — it works great on Mac OS x 10.3 or later, as well as Windows (as you might expect) — and was soon browsing the very first issue of the magazine. Then I tried out the search feature, which enables you to search by year, issue, author, department, or topic. Although the search feature could be a little quicker, I suspect it’s my G4 PowerBook that’s holding it back. (The computer is just starting to show its age.) I look forward to loading everything up on my dual G5 in the office — including disk images of the 8 DVDs (if that’s possible) for something to browse through when I’m on hold, waiting for some kind of customer service or technical support. (I seem to spend an awful lot of time on hold these days.)

If you’re wondering why I’ve called it quits with Amazon, here’s the deal. I became an Amazon associate back when the company was first started and sold quite a few books for them, pocketing a generous 15% commission. Somewhere along the line, they changed the commission structure and my revenue stream suffered for it. But that’s not why I’m cutting them out of my life.

I first started getting annoyed by Amazon’s reader review program. Reviews seemed to fall into three categories: normal people writing reviews (okay with me), people who were very full of themselves and thought they were great reviewers writing reviews (get a life, guys), and people who obviously wrote a review to bash the author or the book for some personally-motivated reason. This came to a head when I read a review of one of my Quicken books and realized that the reviewer hadn’t even read the book before soundly bashing it. Most of what he said was simply not true and anyone paging through the book could see it for themselves. But one of the problems with buying online is that you can’t page through the book. People rely on the reviews and when they bash the author, people don’t buy. Of course, it goes the other way, too. I once bought a book on Amazon.com because of several rave reviews. I truly believe the author had his friends write those reviews because the book was just awful. But Amazon rewards people for their “opinions,” no matter why they were contributed or how realistic they are.

Amazon also constantly “suggests” titles based on previous purchases and searches. I once bought two books about eBay for my sister, who was trying to put my godfather’s antiques on eBay for sale and needed help. For months afterward, Amazon kept pushing eBay books at me. And I’m really tired of seeing lists of suggestions by people I don’t even know. Yet there’s no way to turn off this feature — I’ve written to them and asked.

The final straw happened last month when I ordered three books and a calendar, all of which were supposedly in stock and ready for shipment. I chose the “Super Saver” shipping option, which gives you free shipping when all items can be shipped together. Suddenly my order was shifted to the back burner. I received an e-mail message saying that the items would be shipped out on December 26 — more than two months after my order! I wrote to them asking why I had to wait. I got a response with some nonsense about multiple warehouses and how the items would have to be collected in one place for shipment. But they made a “one time” exception for me. I had the books in 3 days. I’m still waiting for the calendar.

I started browsing Barnes & Noble’s Web site, www.bn.com, and found the same prices as Amazon with fewer annoying “reviews” and targeted marketing. BN also has free shipping for orders over $25 and when you choose it, your books go out within 3 days using 3-day UPS shipping. So now I use BN.com and highly recommend it to anyone who buys books online.

What’s next on my reading list? I think I need to finish up a few books I started and set aside. More on those in another entry.