Flashback: February 6, 2002

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I take Mike’s cousin Ricky to a real ghost town.

Swansea is a ghost town about 60 miles west of Wickenburg. Located on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (or as close to there as you can get), it takes about 3 hours to reach the place by car. But it takes only 40 minutes by helicopter.

Mike’s cousin Ricky was in town on one of his annual visits. (He doesn’t come annually anymore and I’m not sure why.) Mike had to work and I needed to play. So I took Ricky to Swansea in Three-Niner-Lima.

We landed on the site of what had been the mine manager’s house. The area was flat, covered with the same fine gravel that seems to cover about 90% of Arizona’s desert. The town was deserted — at least I don’t remember anyone being around.

Swansea
Ricky stands near Three-Niner-Lima, on the site of the mine manager’s house.

We explored the town for about an hour. I’d been there before and although I found it interesting, Ricky really seemed to enjoy it. The town has quite a few buildings, many of which have enough left of them to explore. BLM, which owns the townsite, has a walking tour, with numbered stops, and a brochure that explains a lot. It really is worth seeing, but whether it’s worth a total of 6 hours spent in a car, most of which is on dirt roads, is debatable. Having the helicopter for transportation really makes places like this much more accessible.

Ricky at the Wheel
I don’t know why, but I like this photo of Ricky behind the wheel of a desert wreck.

This year, if Ricky shows up, I’ll take him someplace new. I have a few ideas for places to explore.

Finished “Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart Guide”

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Thoughts and insights on a tough revision and the computer book publishing industry.

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart GuideMy last entry was pretty depressing. I was under a lot of stress to get the book done. Now that it’s done and the stress is gone, I’m feeling much better. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece, if I do say so myself, and I’m extremely pleased with it. We (Peachpit Press and I) got a lot of feedback from readers about previous editions. It seemed that my VQS wasn’t considered “good value for the money” because it didn’t have as many pages as other competing books. What most people didn’t consider was that VQSes are traditionally short (around 300 pages). Mine was actually long at about 400 pages. And it was considerably cheaper than the other books. But I guess if you calculated price per page, I probably fell a bit short of the competition. And I can’t deny that buying two books (a VQS and a VQP) does cost readers more money. In defense of Peachpit, the idea behind that strategy is that not all readers need all that information and we could provide affordable books tailored to two markets. But that’s not how reviewers saw the situation.

That said, we decided to combine the two books into one title. The resulting “Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart Guide” is about 670 pages long and features 20 chapters and over 2,000 screen shots. Topic range from the most basic basics (like how to point and click) to Unix commands. The price tag is an extremely competitive $29.95 US, making it a very good value. If this book doesn’t please readers, I don’t think any book will.

Writing the book was a bit of a challenge. First, there was the merging of the content from two books. What do we include? What do we exclude? Not much. The biggest casualty was the AppleScript chapter written by Ethan Wilde, which was replaced by an AppleScript basics section in the Applications chapter. (Those interested in AppleScript really ought to buy Ethan’s book!) Almost everything else that was in my Mac OS X 10.2 VQS and VQP remained in this edition.

Of course, everything has been updated for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. That was the second challenge. Not just the update, but merging information about new features into existing chapters. Where do we discuss each new feature? Chapter 4, which is available as an excerpt from my Web site , got quite a few new pages. So did the i-Applications chapter, which was expanded to cover iCal and iSync (neither of which was available when I wrote the Mac OS X 10.2 VQS last year). The only chapter that got trimmed down a bit was the installation chapter. I cut out the info about installing Mac OS 9.2, since that information appears in the Classic Environment chapter.

There was a lot of pressure to finish the book on a timely basis. Timing is everything in the computer book publishing world and when a hot new product hits the market, publishers want their books out first. Trouble is, authors have to work with beta software, which often changes on a weekly (if not daily) basis to get the book done timely. Mac OS X 10.3’s beta software was available for about two months before the software was finally released. But the beta software changed. Any author who wrote about early versions of the beta wrote some stuff that isn’t right.

Want some examples? The first beta or two included a Print command under the Finder’s File menu. That command disappeared before I could try it out. Those first betas excluded a Favorites folder in the Sidebar. Sometime in the middle of the beta process, the Favorites folder reappeared. Then, near the end, it disappeared again. It was almost as if Apple wanted to kill favorites, thought they would get a lot of negative feedback, and then decided “to hell with the bad feedback” and killed it. (But favorites aren’t really gone, as you’ll discover when you read my book.) Icons changed, too. Internet Connect’s new icon didn’t appear until halfway through the beta process. Any screenshot of that icon taken before the beginning of October will be wrong.

So here’s the situation: publishers want the book written quickly. Once the book is written, it has to be laid out, proofed, edited, and printed. For most publishers, this is where time is lost. From the moment the author hands over the last manuscript chapter and TIFF files to the time the book appears in print, two or more months may have gone by. So do the calendar math: if the author waits until Gold Master of the software — on or around October 15 in this case — to finalize the draft manuscript, the book can’t possibly appear in stores until December 15. So what do authors do? Under pressure from publishers, they finalize before Gold Master. As a result, their books contain inaccuracies.

Peachpit and I don’t work this way. We have a remarkable arrangement. I do layout as I write, so I submit fully laid out pages as I work. My editors mark up this draft manuscript and I update pages as the software is changed and I get edits. As a result, when the software went Gold Master, we already had fully laid out pages for about 3/4 of the book. I wrote and laid out the rest the following week. This made it possible to send our completely accurate 650+ page book to the printer only three days after the software’s release date. I expect to hold a copy of the finished book in my hands by November 14 — just three weeks after the software’s release.

Any book that makes it to stores before mine can’t possibly be based on final Mac OS X 10.3 software. It’s just impossible. And that’s not an author’s fault. It’s the fault of publishers who don’t trust their authors to do layout. Peachpit trusts me and I don’t let them down.

Next on the agenda, Excel 2003 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide. Another revision — but this one should be a piece of cake.

On writing Mac OS Visual QuickStart Guides

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Sometimes I feel like a machine.

Pardon me, but I’m about 2/3 of the way through the largest Visual QuickStart Guide I’ve ever written. This is book #55 and the sixth or seventh (I’ve lost count) edition of my bestselling Mac OS VQS for Peachpit Press.

The first edition covered Mac OS 8, years ago, and it was an instant bestseller. People were hungry for books about the new Mac OS software and mine was the only book available at Macworld Expo (although in limited quantities) when the software went on sale. It was three weeks before the second book came out. That was a nice competitive advantage.

The book went through some changes throughout the year. It got fatter and fatter with every edition until we decided to split it into two books, a Visual QuickStart Guide (VQS) and a Visual QuickPro Guide (VQP). The VQS got skinny all of a sudden, then started to fatten up again. The Mac OS X 10.2 edition is about 370 pages and the corresponding VQP is about 350.

Simple math should have told me that when we recombined the two books into one big fat VQS, the resulting book would be VERY FAT. I’m estimating about 650 pages right now. I was wondering a while ago why this book was taking me so long. It’s because I’m really writing two books that’ll fit between one set of covers.

And I do feel like a machine. I have the VQS thing down to a science. Two computers, one to work with the software on (an eMac “test mule”) and one to write on (a G4 “production machine”). A network connection dumping screenshots into my production machine. InDesign and Photoshop running all the time. Templates, libraries, style sheets. I can produce a page from scratch in about 30 minutes (if I don’t have to take time to figure out what I’m doing) and can revise a page in about 15. I’m a machine.

And I’m very tired. Burned out. Sick of taking screenshots and laying out captions and callouts.

I start work at 6 or 7 AM and work until I’m done with whatever I’m working on. Sometimes that means working until 6 or 7 PM. That’s a long day. But most days, I quit by 4 PM. Then I go home and try not to think about computers.

But I do admit that I still get a thrill out of seeing a good book in print. A “good book” is a book that I feel that I’ve done my best on. This book will be a good book. Well, at 650+ pages, it’ll probably be a GREAT book. And a real bargain for readers.

More another time. I’m going home.

Flashback: October 11, 2000

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I fly my new helicopter solo for the first time.

I was going through some old files on my computer today when I discovered a folder full of photos of me flying my helicopter, N7139L. While I have lots of photos of me in flight, these are special: they were taken on October 11, 2000, the day of my first solo flight in my own ship.

I’d picked up Three-Niner-Lima in Chandler the previous Friday. Masahiro Nakamura, my flight instructor, took me for a flight around Phoenix’s Class B airspace, pointing out the landmarks I could use to avoid this airspace while flying between my home in Wickenburg and Chandler. I’d been flying on and off at Guidance Helicopters in Prescott, so flying with an instructor wasn’t a big deal. (I don’t think I’d comprehended yet that the helicopter was mine.) What was a bigger deal was the flight back to Wickenburg a while later with Mike. That was only the second time I’d flown without an instructor since getting my private certificate in April 2000.

That flight went well. It must have, because I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember much about any flights I took during the weekend, either.

But I do remember my return trip to Chandler the following Monday morning.

Flying an R22 solo is quite different than flying it with a warm body beside you. The problem is weight — the weight and balance is completely different. With full fuel, which I probably had that day, weight shifts to the back. But without that warm body, weight also shifts to the right. So the helicopter lifts off front-left first and back right last. It scared the hell out of me on my first solo and since it had been more than a year since I’d soloed at all, the thought weighed heavily on my mind as I prepared to depart.

N7139L
Here I am, lifting off near the fuel island at Wickenburg. Even in this shot, you can see that the skids aren’t level.

I did fine lifting off. But I did make one mistake. For some reason, I thought I could take off directly to the south, past the light posts and over the hangars. What was I thinking? Although the ship had plenty of power, it was a silly, dangerous thing to do. And I remember thinking just that as I came closer than I wanted to to a light pole.

N7139L
Mike took this excellent photo of me in flight — from the ground!

I was a nervous wreck all the way to Chandler, although I don’t remember any details or even why. It must have been the knowledge in my mind that I was a 90-hour pilot in solo control of a new helicopter. A pilot that had flown less than 10 hours in the previous 6 months. A pilot who had never navigated around the Class B and Class D airspaces in the Phoenix area alone. A pilot who was very short on confidence.

N7139L
Isn’t this a cool shot? Mike took this one, too, as I flew overhead.

Things change. Time at the stick changes them. I have 700+ hours now and have trouble remembering the fears I had when I was a new pilot. I have confidence, but I don’t think I have too much. There’s always more to learn.

Exposing a Chop Shop

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I take a customer with a camera for a ride to gather evidence for the police.

The call came on Tuesday from a friend.”Are you available to do some aerial photography work? There’s a guy burying garbage in the river bed and we want to get him busted.”

I scheduled the flight for Friday morning, when I was assured that the culprits would still be asleep. The passenger arrived with her camera 30 minutes early. She went with me while I pulled the helicopter out of its hangar and onto the ramp. I did a good preflight, gave her the safety speech, and convinced her to put all loose items (including plastic film canisters) under her seat. A few moments later, the blades were spinning up and we were ready to go.

Photo
My helicopter in its hangar. The stagecoach is a long story.

It was a beautiful autumn morning. For Arizona, that means temperatures in the 70s and perfectly clear skies. The air was smooth as we took off and headed east, toward the Hassayampa River. At first, my passenger was extremely quiet. She used hand signals to ask whether her voice would be heard over the radio if she spoke. I assured her that it wouldn’t and she began giving me flying directions and the background information about the culprits.

It seems that there were a few bad guys in town who made a living stealing equipment and vehicles, salvaging parts, and selling off what they could. They buried the evidence of their misdeeds in the riverbed, which was sandy and mostly dry for the entire year. My passenger was interested in shooting photographs of the suspects’ properties, with the idea that the police could blow up the photos and get license plates and other information from the vehicles, as well as spot stolen equipment. She was also interested in tracking down a large front-end loader that had been stolen and was probably being used to dig very big holes in the sand.

She warned me that if the suspects were out and about and didn’t like me circling, they might shoot. She told me she’d keep an eye out for anyone and let me know if I should make a quick departure.

Photo
An aerial view of the Hassayampa River Bridge in Wickenburg, from the South.

We circled two residences along the riverbed while she snapped photos. Both places looked like junkyards from the air — vehicles, equipment, building parts, and all kinds of stuff was scattered all over. Then we headed farther upriver to a third residence that looked quite respectable from the air. We didn’t find the big tire tracks she was looking for, but she seemed satisfied.

A roll and a half of film and 30 minutes later, we touched down at the airport. She paid what I asked and went away happy — probably to the local one-hour photo place.