Tag Archives: books

On Geniuses

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Why I don’t Genius Bar hop and other comments regarding my recent hard disk problem.

One of my jobs as a blogger is to produce at least one blog entry a week. As you may have noticed if you follow this blog, it looks like I’ve been slacking off lately. Well, I just want to take a few moments to assert that looks may be deceiving.

Last week was a busy one for me. I finally got my computer back up and running after its second hard disk crash in a year. This crash was far more serious than the last and required the geniuses at the Apple Store to fix.

Now I know that lots of Mac pros laugh at the word “genius” when applied to the Apple Store’s tech support folks. And I do agree that it would be difficult to call any of them geniuses in the true sense of the word. (Think Einstein.) But if you were to compare their computer skills to the average Mac user’s, they could indeed be considered geniuses. They know a lot more about the current computer models than 95% of Mac users. Sadly, I fit into that 95% these days. I could tell you all kinds of things about fixing a Mac II cx or a PowerMac 7100/66 — and that’s because I used to teach a course about troubleshooting those computers running System 7. Nowadays, my troubleshooting capabilities are limited to what I need to know — like much of my other knowledge — and I don’t really need to know all the things the geniuses need to know to do their daily fix-it jobs.

So I’m not uncomfortable applying the word genius to many (but not all) of them. To me, some of them really are geniuses when it comes to diagnosing and fixing Mac problems.

I’ll also be the first to say that the capabilities of an Apple Store genius staff on any given day for any given store is hit or miss. It all depends on each staffer’s experience, knowledge, and interest in the topics he or she needs to know. I was at the Genius Bar in the Chandler, AZ store on Monday and the geniuses that day were pretty good. One of them was a super genius, the one who helped me was definitely above average, and the guy working the iPod slot was about average. (Let’s face it: it doesn’t take much skill to fix an iPod problem. Every iPod should come with a cheat sheet printed on back that explains how to reset it; that will resolve 95% of an iPod’s problems. The iPod guy probably resets a lot of iPods in a day. I’ve gotten so good at it that I can reset mine with one hand while flying my helicopter. Darn vibrations lock it up more often than I’d like to admit.)

I’ve had repeatedly bad luck at the Biltmore Apple Store in Phoenix, which is at least 30 miles closer to my house. The two times I tried to get assistance there, the lead Genius didn’t seem interested in looking deeply into my problem and didn’t seem to care whether it was resolved or not. On my fried motherboard problem, it seemed that she spent more time telling me how much it would cost to fix the problem than diagnosing what the problem was. This, coupled with her obvious lack of sympathy, made me doubt her diagnosis, so I had to go to another store (Chandler) to get a second opinion. I got a bad taste in my mouth (so to speak) from the experience. And that’s why I don’t go to the Biltmore store anymore.

Oddly enough, sympathy for my problem seems to be important to me. My main work computer or “production” machine (currently a Dual G5) is like a partner to me. It holds onto the projects I’m working on, it has the tools I need to get the job done as smoothly as possible. When it works right, we’re a team getting the job done. When it starts acting up, I get concerned. It’s not just a machine on the fritz. It’s a work partner feeling ill. What’s the problem? Can I fix it before it becomes critical? Is its motherboard about to go (again)? Or its hard disk? Will I lose data? Will I need to take it to the hospital (fix-it place) to get it working right again? How long will we be apart? And, of course, the selfish questions, like how long will I be unable to work?

The geniuses at the Chandler store are always sympathetic to my problem. They understand that my computer isn’t just a machine I use for e-mail and to surf the Web. They understand that its hard disk contains lots of important information — including books in progress — and the tools I need to get my work done. They understand that without my production computer, there’s very little real work I can do. And even though they don’t necessarily push any harder to complete a job for me than they do for anyone else, they make it seem as if my problem is one of the most important ones they’ll tackle that day. And they soothe me with reasonable reassurances that make it easier to face the 90-mile drive home and wait for their call.

This time around, the problem was a toasted hard disk. Personally, I believe it has something to do with my Firewire ports — it occurred while my iSight was plugged in and I was attempting to suck something off a portable Firewire hard drive. (My motherboard problem also manifested itself when working with multiple Firewire devices, including an iSight, so I’m very wary of using it these days.) They replaced the hard disk — which IS something I could have done myself if I really wanted to — and managed to get about 50% of the data off my old hard disk before it ceased to function at all. This cost me dearly, but the way I see it, I was paying for my own stupidity. If I’d had my entire Home folder backed up, recovery wouldn’t have been necessary at all and I could have saved the $150.

What hurts even more is that I’d written an article for Informit.com about backing up with Fetch before I had the problem and neglected to utilize my own instructions to protect myself.

The computer was done the next day and my husband, Mike, picked it up on his way home. It isn’t exactly on his way — he works about 15 miles north of there — but it was a lot more convenient for him than for me to make the 180-mile round trip drive. On Wednesday morning, I set about restoring the whole computer to it’s normal setup. I didn’t like the way the Apple folks had set up the machine — for some reason I was really bugged about my home folder being called maria (note the lowercase) rather than its usual mlanger (which I’ve used on all my computers for years). (Is that anal or what?) So I pulled off the recovered data, reformatted the hard disk, and spent the next two days installing software and updates. The updates were particularly painful now that I’m on the super-slow wireless Internet connection I whined about elsewhere in this blog. The 139 MB Mac OS X 10.4.8 combined updater took quite a while to suck off the Internet before I could install it.

Fortunately, I managed to pull e-mail messages, endo settings and contents, ecto contents, and some other stuff off my PowerBook. My iCal and Address book data was already set up to synchronize with .Mac, so getting all that data moved over was very easy. The only thing of real value that I lost was Chapter 6 of my Excel 2007 for Windows book, which I’d been working on for the second time. (The first revision went bad and I started from scratch. So today I look forward to starting my Chapter 6 revision for the third time. I knew it would be the book’s Chapter from Hell, but I couldn’t imagine how hellish it would be.)

By Friday, the computer was 90% back to its old self and I was working on it regularly instead of my laptop. So I was out of commission for two full weeks. I blame myself for that, too, letting the disk recovery software run as long as I did before finally bringing it to the geniuses.

Telephone Support for the Price of a Book?

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Not likely.

I was driving down to the Phoenix area yesterday — my first time driving down there in months. It was a beautiful day, sunny with temperatures in the 70s. I was driving my little Honda with the top down and my iPod, connected to the stereo, blasting some classic rock. I had a 30-mile drive ahead of me on Route 60 (Grand Avenue) to get to the nearest PetSmart (or is it PetCo?), where I planned to buy some tropical fish for my aquarium. Route 60 isn’t the most pleasant road to drive on, but it’s nothing to complain about in the stretch I was driving.

I was having a good time.

My cell phone rang. The only reason I heard it is because it’s on vibrate mode and my ears were not necessary. I hit the mute button on the stereo and answered the phone.

The woman on the other end was difficult to hear at 65 mph in a convertible, so I pulled over. After all, she could be a customer for Flying M Air and I needed to hear what she wanted and to give her my full attention.

The words started coming through: QuickBooks. Book. Non-profit. How do I print checks?

It took all my patience not to explode. Apparently, this woman thought that since I’d written a book about Quicken for Windows and another book about QuickBooks for Macintosh, I could help her figure out how to print checks from the non-profit version of QuickBooks for Windows, which I had never even used, let alone written about. I don’t know where she got my phone number — it’s no longer on this site because of calls like hers — and I don’t know where she got the idea that the author of a book about a software product would be her free, technical support hotline.

I set her straight, hung up, and got back on the road. I was fuming for a short while, but the music and wind and great weather soon soothed me.

Here’s what people don’t seem to understand:

  • A book’s content is determined, in part, by the book’s project editor and page count. So an author cannot include coverage of every single nuance of a software program. The least used features are left out to make sure there’s room for the most used features.
  • An author cannot write a book about a topic unless the publisher feels that there’s enough of a market for the book to sell. That’s probably why this person could not find a book covering the not-for-profit version of QuickBooks for Windows. It’s also why I did not update my QuickBooks for Macintosh book to cover QuickBooks 2007 or my Quicken for Macintosh book for any version after 2003 (I think).
  • An author receives, on average, less than $1 per book sold. I don’t know where anyone can get one-on-one, completely personalized technical support by telephone for $1. (Even the folks in India use a script.) My point: buying one of my books does not entitle the reader to interrupt my day by telephone to ask questions about the book’s content or topics not covered in the book at all.
  • An author certainly cannot be expected to provide support for another author’s book. True story: I once got a question in my old FAQ system from someone who told me he’d bought a book by [insert author name here] and was having trouble understanding it. Could I help him? He wasn’t joking. Neither was I when I told him to contact the author of that book, not me.

This might seem like a hard line to take, but I don’t think so. I do a lot to support my work and provide content above and beyond what’s between a book’s covers. The Book Support categories you see listed near the top of the navigation bar are just an example — each one provides additional articles somehow related to a specific book. My Q & A system is also set up to receive questions that I can answer in a place where all readers can benefit from them.

That should be enough.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite

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Hardcore .htaccess stuff for mere mortals like me.

Somewhere along the line recently, I got this idea in my head that I wanted all subscribers for my main feed here to get the FeedBurner version of the feed. Those of you who are familiar with RSS know that a feed icon appears in the address bar of most modern Web browsers, offering visitors a quick way to get the feed URL or create a live bookmark. Other folks might know that they can enter the URL for a WordPress-based site followed by the word feed to get a feed URL. There are a few other formulas that can be used to generate a workable feed URL for subscribing to a feed, too.

While that’s all well and good, with so many methods to subscribe to feed content, it’s nearly impossible to get a real count of subscribers. How many people are subscribed to my feed? Beats me. How many hits a day does it get? I don’t know.

And those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know how much I love stats.

So a did a little poking around on the Web and found a few articles that explained how to use .htaccess to redirect hits to WordPress-generated feeds to my FeedBurner feed. One was this thread on the FeedBurner site, which has special instructions for WordPress users (scroll down on that page). Another was this article on oneafrikan.com, which offered some additional tricks I found useful.

Unfortunately, these solutions had one thing in common: they redirected all feed links to a single FeedBurner feed link. While that’s fine for most people, I’ve just gone through a lot of trouble to set up and promoted category feeds on my site. The last thing in the world I wanted was for someone to subscribe to a category feed and then get the main feed in their feed reader.

Of course, all of this redirect magic is done with .htaccess, the “invisible” file that works with your Web server to provide some last-minute instructions for your site. I’d already played a bit with .htaccess settings to make sure that outdated URLs published in some of my older books still pointed to the right thing on my current site. And, of course, WordPress uses the .htaccess mod_rewrite module to change ugly PHP URLs into something more attractive and logical (although very lengthy, if you ask me). I knew only enough about .htaccess to be dangerous with it, but since I treat it like a vial of nitroglycerin, I haven’t gotten myself in trouble yet.

So I figured I’d take the oneafrikan.com settings and modify them to meet my needs. The trouble is, when I looked at the code, I couldn’t translate them into a language I understood (such as English), so I couldn’t modify them to meet my needs or anyone else’s.

I spent some more time on the Web and found lots of documentation. Unfortunately, all of it assumed I knew the basics of what I now know are called regular expressions: those punctuation marks that mean something completely different from the punctuation I’m used to as a writer. Not knowing what they were called made it impossible for me to look them up online. When I started looking at the same apache.org page over and over and it never changed (not that it should, mind you), I realized I needed more advanced (or perhaps basic) help.

What I needed was a book.

I don’t just write books. I read them, too. Although I very seldom read a computer book cover to cover, I have a bunch of them that I consult when I need to figure something out. Oddly enough, some of them are books I’ve written; I tend to forget things I’ve written about when I don’t use them regularly. (And they call me an expert! Ha!) I have a book by another author that covers Apache, but the information I needed was not in there. In fact, I’m trying to figure out why I bought that particular book in the first place.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewriteSo I went on Amazon.com and I searched for .htaccess. I came up with a list of books that referenced it, but were not about it. Then I searched for mod_rewrite. And voila! I found The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite by Rich Bowen.

Not anxious to plunk down $30 for a book I might not find my answers in, I did some more research on the Web. I found a few book reviews and they were all positive. It appeared that this 160-page book covered the topic quite completely. It was definitely the book I wanted on my shelf.

Of course, I didn’t feel like waiting for Amazon.com to ship it to me. (I like immediate gratification almost as much as stats.) So when I realized that the publisher’s Web site offered the book as an eBook for only $20 (half the cover price), I bought it online and downloaded it. In five minutes, I had the answer to my question and enough information to tackle the problem. But rather than read the book on my 12″ PowerBook’s tiny (well, 12 inches, right?) screen (my G5 is still feeling sickly), I printed the whole thing out, punched holes in the pages, and put it in an old binder I had sitting around.

I realize that once again I’ve turned a short story — I found a great book about using mod_rewrite — into a long and drawn out one. (There are no short stories here.) My apologies to those of you in a hurry.

The point I wanted to make is that The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite is an extremely well organized, reader-friendly, well written, and informative book that explains exactly how to use mod_rewrite for anything you might want mod_rewrite to do: rewrite URLs, control access, set up virtual hosts, and so much more. Plenty of examples, each of which is analyzed and discussed. It’s all there.

I’m only about 30 pages into it so far, but I’m already very pleased.

The Planets

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A history of the planets.

book coverMiraz was kind enough to get me two items from my Amazon.com wish list. One of them was The Planets by Dava Sobel. It’s a kind of history of the planets — when they were discovered, how they were named, what’s important about them from a historic point of view, and more.

The book is full of fascinating details. For example, did you know that Charles Darwin traveled onboard the H.M.S. Beagle at the age of 22 to be a “gentleman’s companion” for the captain? And that the Beagle’s 1831 mission was to map the coastline of the New World?

Or that Uranus, which was discovered by Sir. William Herschel in 1781, was at first thought to be a comet?

Or that the four largest moons of Jupiter, which were discovered by Galileo in 1610, were named for Florentine Prince Cosimo de’ Medici — a ploy Galileo hoped would get him a position in the Tuscan court? (Surely you must know that Galileo was jailed by the church for his theory that the earth revolved around the sun.)

The book offers plenty of science, too. In reading it, you can learn about the composition of the Sun, planets, and important moons of the solar system (including ours). You can learn about how long it takes for each planet to rotate around its access and revolve around the sun. You can learn about exploratory fly-bys and landings and what the planets look like.

About the only thing the book doesn’t provide are photos. The author goes into great detail about how the planets look to the exploratory vehicles that have photographed them, but doesn’t include a single photograph. Yes, there’s original artwork for each body’s chapter and it’s certainly quite attractive and interesting, but there aren’t any photos to accompany the author’s descriptions. To me, that’s a major shortcoming in this book.

book coverbook coverA side note here. I’ve read two other books by Dava Sobel: Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter. The edition of Longitude I read was hardcover and richly illustrated with photos, drawings, and more. (I regret giving it away; I would like to read it again.) An excellent history of the importance of longitude for navigation and the work of a man to create a perfect timepiece for shipboard use. Galileo’s Daughter was interesting but not quite as enjoyable for me. It consisted primarily of letters from his daughter, a nun, that helped tell part of his life story.

What’s clear to me from reading three of Sobel’s books is that she has a talent for making history interesting and readable. I highly recommend her work. But whenever possible, go with illustrated editions. I really think they make the books come alive.

The Lost Painting

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History that reads like a novel.

Book CoverI saw The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr in a copy of Bookmarks, a magazine full of book reviews. I added it to my Amazon.com wish list.

The Taking of ChristThe book is an account of the finding of a painting by Caravaggio, a 17th century Italian artist. The painting, called The Taking of Christ, was found in the 1990s by a restorer.

Evidently, many paintings from that time were lost — they’d be sold by the artist or a dealer to a wealthy patron or art collector to be hung in a home. Over the years, the paintings would be moved around, handed down to descendants, sold, and resold. The records regarding these paintings were not always complete, so paintings would disappear from the records and thus “disappear” from the art world. In some cases, a painting’s value would be understated and the painting, aged, dirty, and possibly damaged would simply be discarded by an owner. Many masterpieces were lost this way.

The book tells the story of how two art history students stumbled upon some evidence that the painting had been sold to a Scotsman in 1802, who believed the painting was done by a different artist. The painting was then traced to an auction house where the trail went cold. Had it been sold? No one knew. And no one knew what had become of it.

The book is written like a novel, complete with dialog and some characterization. But all the characters are real people, many of whom were interviewed by the author during his research. This keeps the book from being a dry history tome. Instead, it has life and is quite interesting to the average reader.

The book was listed on the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year for 2006. The edition I read included an epilogue by the author which covers the discovery of another version of the same painting.

I recommend the book to anyone interested in art, history, art history, or the process of searching for lost artwork.