What can happen when faith sets out to prove its power through science.
I heard a podcast about this study the other day — a study that attempted to prove that people who were prayed for right before major surgery were more likely to have a more successful outcome to the surgery. The Deity in the Data by William Saletan on Slate.com presents some details and possible conclusions.
Maria Speaks Episode 24: What I’m Up To.
This short podcast brings listeners up to date on what I’ve been up to since my podcast suddenly stopped in November, along with a repeat of my pledge to keep coming up with new podcasts weekly.
Transcript:
I promised a new podcast every week and I’m trying hard to deliver. This week, I’ll bring everyone up to date on the things I’ve been up to. Of course, there are always more details in my blog at www.aneclecticmind.com.
I promise I’ll try not to bore you.
About a month ago, I started working on a new book for Peachpit Press called WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide. I’m working with a co-author on the project, Miraz Jordan. Miraz lives in New Zealand, where it’s always tomorrow. I’m recording this on a Sunday evening and, at this very moment, Miraz is probably hard at work on a Monday afternoon. I think it’s kind of unfair that she gets an extra day on the deadline. Or is that one less day? Too much sangria this afternoon to think it out properly.
WordPress, for those of you who don’t know, is my current blogging platform of choice. I started using it late last year and quickly fell in love with it. Since then, I’ve sucked down all the information I could about it and I think it’s safe to say that I experiment with it daily. I love its flexibility most of all — the ability to build all kinds of features into a blog-based Web site and to have it look just about any way you like. But I felt I needed a seasoned expert to help me write the book, so that’s why I asked Miraz to join me. She’s been using the software for years and has over a thousand entries in her blog at mactips.info. Check it out.
My other current writing project is actually a DVD training video for macProVideo.com. It’s about Microsoft Word for Macintosh and, if I can figure out how to narrate while I’m performing tasks without sounding like an idiot, I might get it done sometime soon. I know that writing a script for each segment isn’t the way. I quickly discovered that I can’t read a script and perform tasks at the same time.
If you follow my blog, you know that I had a series of computer problems this past winter.
First, my main production Mac’s hard disk got scrambled and required professional help to bring back from the near-dead. I backed everything up, reformatted that drive, and reinstalled everything.
Reformatting my main hard drive is a maintenance task I used to do every time I upgraded to a new version of the system software. Mac OS X’s time-consuming installations and hidden preference files made it a bit of a chore, though, so I stopped.
Reformatting and rebuilding a hard disk is like a massive spring cleaning. Imagine taking all the furniture out of your home, stripping out the carpet and tile, sandblasting the walls and floor, and putting brand new versions of everything you had back in. The benefit is that when you’re done, everything is right where you put it, all in one piece and easy to find. You also throw out a lot of junk you didn’t really need.
Moving is like that, too. You throw away stuff when you pack, you move the boxes you packed, and then you throw more stuff away when you arrive in your new place. Sometimes I think you should unpack at your old home just so you can throw away the second time without moving it first.
The second computer problem was way more serious. My Web server’s hard disk crashed. (There must have been something in the electricity this past winter.) The drive was a complete goner. And, of course, the DVD drive in that computer was already toasted. So I had both replaced and rebuilt the Web server from scratch using whatever backups I had.
Of course, I didn’t have everything backed up. This was my third hard disk crash since 1989 and you think that by now I’d learn. I didn’t. My two WordPress blogs (aneclecticmind.com and wickenburg-az.com) had their databases backed up — thank heaven! — but the theme files, plugins, and other stuff that makes up a WordPress blog had not been backed up. Neither were a bunch of the image files. Because the themes were so heavily customized (due to all that experimentation I bragged about earlier), it took a lot of rebuilding to get it back to what I wanted to see. wickenburg-az.com is still not 100% back — it’s missing lots of pictures.
It’s kind of weird because I was never really happy with my first version of aneclecticmind.com, but I’d put so much work into it that I wasn’t willing to change it. Then all that work got wiped away, as if my computer sensed my dissatisfaction and wanted to prod me into fixing it. So when I rebuilt, I made it more to my liking. I’m much more pleased with the current site. But I really wish my computer hadn’t taken so much with it.
Miraz and I will be covering backup strategies for WordPress blogs in detail in our book — or on its companion Web site. I don’t want any of my readers to go through what I went through. What a waste of time!
I’ve also been flying. A lot.
March was my busiest month ever at Flying M Air and I actually earned enough money to pay the helicopter loan for the next two months. I did charters to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, photo shoots at proving grounds and golf courses, real estate tours, and a charter to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. (Helicopter Zero-Mike-Lima, there’s an airbus on short final for runway 7 left. Do you have him in sight? Sure. I’d have to be blind not to see him.) All that and the usual round of 25 minute and 50 minute tours.
March was also a record breaking month in a bad way. In one week, two different passengers broke my record of no pukers in my helicopter. One of them puked in my lunch bag. (Watch the leather seats and the carpet! Move the microphone away from your mouth!) They were both kids, so I can still tell people that I’ve never had an adult puke in the helicopter. And I have a new policy: no flights over 1 hour long with kids on board.
Yesterday, I flew more than 90 people at an airport event in Buckeye, AZ. So I have June’s loan payment taken care of, too. Looks like I’ll be able to keep the helicopter a few more months.
I even flew today — two flights totaling an hour and a half. Where are these people coming from? And where the hell were they in January and February? And will they stay long enough to take me through the long, hot summer?
I got one bit of listener feedback recently from Justin. Or maybe it was Jason. I’m sorry. I accidently deleted your e-mail. Justin or Jason got a new iPod Nano and wants some iPod tips. I want some, too. I’ll have to look some up, put together a podcast, and record it for us. Until then, I recommend doing a Google search for something like iPod tips. I did it and found a bunch of sites. Unfortunately, I’m not prepared to comment on their quality.
If you have feedback about this podcast or my podcasts in general, send them to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’ll try not to delete it before I commit your name to medium-term memory. I do take requests for topics. As Justin or Jason has learned, I don’t always get right to the request topic, but I eventually get there. This just hasn’t been the best week for thinking about new things. Too much old stuff to think about.
Thanks for listening. More next week.
Maria Speaks Episode 23: The Big Sandy Shoot
It’s been quite a while — about three months, in fact, since I did my last podcast. This morning, I got an e-mail message from a listener named Anne-Marie of Seneca Design and Training, reminding me that I was neglecting my podcasting duties. So I’m going to try to get back into the swing of things and deliver a new podcast at least once a week. But I do need your help. If you want to hear more podcasts, do what Anne-Marie did: e-mail me. Use the Contact Me page on my Web site, www.aneclecticmind.com. Tell me what kind of content you want to listen to and I’ll see what I can do to deliver.
If you’re new to Maria Speaks and don’t know much about me, you might want to visit my Web site at www.aneclecticmind.com. It’s been recently redone — again — and that’s a long story — and it combines my book support site with my blog. You can get a better idea of what I do and write about so you can come up with special requests. This past week, I wrote about the Dan Brown plagiarism case, how spelling checkers are making me lazy, and my AmazonConnect author blog.
Today, I’m going to fill you in on my rather unorthodox and interesting weekend with an audio blog entry.
Transcript:
Another entry from The Truth is Stranger than Fiction files.
I spent most of Friday and Saturday watching and listening to men shoot machine guns out in the desert.
Let me go back to the beginning.
Months ago, my friend Ryan, who I met at Wickenburg airport a few years back, told me he wanted to get me involved in an annual “shoot” out in Wickieup.
Wickieup, for those of you who don’t have an Arizona atlas handy, is a small town on the Big Sandy Wash (or River, depending on who you speak to), about 75 northwest of Wickenburg on route 93. Basically, if you’re driving from Wickenburg to Las Vegas (or back) and you didn’t buy gas or corn nuts or use the toilet in Wickenburg (or Kingman), you stop at Wickieup. It’s a ranching community, too, with lots of nice people and even its own 4H Club.
Ryan took care of all the arrangements. Our mutual friend, Ed (more Ryan’s friend than mine), was planning to fly up in his Sikorsky S-55 turbine conversion, a monster of a helicopter that I’d first seen down at Falcon Field (where he’s based) at an airshow we’d both been part of at Falcon Field two years ago. Ed is getting up there in years (he’s past 70 now) and although he still flies, he lost his commercial insurance and gave up his part 135 certificate. He’s a really experienced pilot and the only one I know to have his helicopter hit by a train. But that’s another story.
The plan was for Ed to fly up to Wickenburg for fuel on his way to Wickieup. Ryan and another guy would be on board. They’d pick up my EZ-Up (a shade thing) and other big gear and take it up for me. Then we’d fly up to the shoot in loose formation, making a bit of an “entrance” when we arrived.
On Friday, I had my gear packed. A stuff sack full of camping gear that included a tent, sleeping bag, air matress, and pump and the EZ-Up. I had a change of clothes and some other gear packed into my helicopter, which I’d filled with fuel and parked on one of the heli-spots.
Around 11 AM, I saw Ed’s helicopter coming. It was impossible not to. The damn thing is about 20 feet tall and big enough to hold a Jeep. But when it landed, I saw that it didn’t have a jeep inside it. Instead, it had all the gear its three passengers needed for their overnight stay. And as you can see by the photo, guys don’t know how to pack light. (Yes, that is a full-sized futon and a bar-be-que grill.) I told the folks at the airport that the helicopter was my cargo ship.
After Ed fueled, we both started up and he took off. Ryan rode with me and we quickly caught up with the bigger ship. Although larger and turbine-powered, the S-55 is slow. Its cruise speed is about 80 and I’m not sure, but I think that’s 80 MPH, not knots. It was hard to form up with him without passing him. Ryan wanted me to fly circles around him, but I thought that would be rude, so I didn’t.
Glenn, Ed’s passenger up in the cockpit (you have to climb about 12 feet to get up there) was getting some stick time, and we could really tell. The ship didn’t hold altitude very well and seemed a bit “wiggly.” But Glenn is a fixed-wing guy, so you really can’t fault him. It takes a gentle touch to fly a helicopter, even one as big as Ed’s. Ryan got this nice air-to-air photo of them in flight; that’s Harquahala Mountain in the background.
Flying that slow was a bit boring, so I took Ryan on a side trip to see Waters-Sunset Mine. That’s a place I advertise tours for, but haven’t gotten any takers yet. When we finished zipping out there, I scanned the sky for the dot that would be Ed’s S-55. I found it and zipped on over to get back into formation. I don’t even think they missed us, despite the fact that we were gone for about 10-15 minutes.
We finally caught sight of Wickieup and, a while later, the shoot site. The owner of the site owns a whole section of land — that’s a square mile, for those of you who don’t know western real estate lingo — on the west side of the Aquarius Mountains. The area there is full of ridgelines with deep washes between them. The place is set up so shooters are on one ridge and shoot across to the side of another ridge. Below is wash; above is higher ridge. It’s standard desert landscape at about 2900 feet elevation: cacti, mesquite, palo verde, etc. The whole place is surrounded by BLM land, so there’s no complaining neighbors to worry about.
As we came in, another helicopter landed. It was a MD 520N that turned out to be a rich guy’s toy. More on that later.
We parked on the west side of the ridge where the shooters were lined up, already hard at work using up their ammo. The problem with the field was that although it was at least 20 acres, there weren’t many level spots out on the west end. North and south sides were high with a slope between them. Erosion had added a few 12 to 18-inch deep ruts in the middle. Ed landed on the south side, right along the edge. I tried to land near the 520N on the north side, but couldn’t find a place I thought was level. (Understand that I am completely paranoid about dynamic rollover.) I wound up on the south side behind Ed, with one of my skids hanging about a foot over the edge of a cliff. (Yes, my tailcone is hanging out into space in the photo.) Although I shut down there, I didn’t waste any time moving it. I kept imagining the darn thing falling backwards and tumbling over the cliff and trying to explain to my insurance company why I’d parked there. Ryan and I found a level-ish spot on the north side and moved it. I made Ryan sit beside me for extra weight on the front end. He’s a big boy and I figured he’d help prevent us from toppling over backward.
Here’s where it gets weird.
Just about all the guys at the shoot were shooting machine guns. What kind of machine guns? Damned if I know. All kinds of machine guns. They were mostly under shade structures (like my EZ-Up), shooting across the wash at “reactive targets” set up on the other side. A reactive target is one that blows up when you hit it. (Heck, I wish I could make this stuff up.) You can actually see smoke from a reactive target in the photo below.
Every once in a while, an extremely skilled R/C aircraft pilot would take a delta wing airplane, made out of styrofoam, and launch it into the firing zone. The guys with the machine guns would try to shoot it out of the sky. It was actually pretty funny to watch because although there were at least 20 guys at a time firing all kind of machine guns at the darn thing, it took a very long time — 5 minutes or more — for someone to hit it. Sometimes no one hit it and the pilot would bring it back in for more fuel.
I was set up for rides and, after scarfing down a terribly spicy thing I wasn’t allowed to call a hot dog, I flew a few passengers. It was $35 per person with a 2 person minimum for an 8-10 minute ride. I flew two really nice guys who were so nice that one of them, Kent, paid for the three kids from the 4H food booth to go for a flight. (Kent later e-mailed me this photo of me getting the kids settled in on board.) They ranged in ages from about 6 to 10 (maybe; I don’t know kid’s ages) and the youngest one’s eyeballs looked about to pop out when I took off. But I took them down to Wickieup so they could see their school and house from the air. They got a real kick out of seeing cows and horses in the wash.
The rich guy started giving rides. For free. It’s hard to compete with that. I went with Ed and a guy named Mike to Kingman to get fuel and take care of some other business. I was POed about the free rides, but there was nothing I could do about it. I gave Ed some stick time — I had the duals with me and installed them — and he couldn’t get over the fact that the three of us could cruise with full fuel at 110 knots at only 22 inches of manifold pressure.
You gotta understand that Ed is flying a helicopter built in 1954. That’s more than 50 years ago. His helicopter is older than I am. I should hope that a 2005 helicopter has a bit better performance with lower operating costs.
When we returned, I took a few more people for flights, but never enough to keep me flying nonstop. That was okay, because I didn’t have a ground crew, so I had to do all the money work and safety briefings.
The shooting stopped at 5 PM for dinner.
I did my last flight around sunset and spent a few minutes putting up my tent and setting up the mattress. Ed came by and kept me company. Then we walked back to the rented “toy hauler” Roger Senior (one of Glenn’s friends) had rented, where Ryan and Glenn were making dinner. They made an excellent meal of grilled sea scallops wrapped in bacon and marinated New York Strip steaks. Sheesh. It was good eating. We were just about finished with dinner when the night shooting began.
Here’s where it gets really weird.
Because it had rained less than a week ago and there was some moisture out in the desert, the shooters were allowed to use tracer rounds. So now the guys had bullets that basically glowed in the dark. The targets had been replenished — wouldn’t want to run out of dynamite, would we? — and were all marked with glow sticks. And these guys were shooting away at them in the dark, with visible bullets that left streaks of red or green. It was like a really big budget war movie scene. Lots of gunfire punctuated, now and then, with an explosion.
And when the R/C aircraft pilot let out one of his planes — complete with glow sticks so you could see it fly — the guys went absolutely bonkers. They still had trouble hitting the darn thing, even with all that firepower and the bullet streaks to guide them.
My only regret is that I didn’t even try to get pictures. If they’d come out, they would have been outrageous. This was a scene too sureal to describe.
Glenn had brought something very impressive that I wish I could tell you more about. All I remember is him saying that it’s the fastest firing machine gun available except for a “mini gun” (whatever that is). It was originally mounted on an aircraft during some war and relied on the slipstream to keep it cool. At the shoot, they could only shoot about 100 shots at a time before it got too hot.
Every time these guys fired off a bunch of shots that glowed away into the dark night, they’d turn around and look at spectators with a grin that resembled that on a cat that ate the cream off the milk. (Am I dating myself with that one? It really is what they looked like.)
Of course, I got a chance to shoot a machine gun, too. Glenn and Ryan insisted that I take my turn sitting on the plastic bucket before this thing’s tipod mount. I had to put my feet against it to stop the recoil. Ryan held the bullet “in feed” and Glenn held its “out feed” — I’m making these phrases up — I don’t know what it’s called — while I used my thumbs to push the trigger. It was cool. I admit it. But not cool enough to spend $30K on my own gun.
Later, Roger Junior shot the same gun and got the barrel to glow red.
There was a guy sitting in the space next to us shooting a 50 mm thing. Every time he shot, Ryan would say, “Buck-fifty, buck-fifty, buck-fifty, buck-fifty,” because that’s what every round on that gun cost. It made a huge noise that must have impressed everyone.
Ed took his turn at the gun. He and I had the same basic impression — these guys were nuts! But they were having a good time and no one was getting hurt. And it was kind of cool — even the small fires that started out in the desert.
And every once in a while, there would be an explosion or a flare lighting the whole scene with an eerie red light.
It was nearly 9:00 PM when Ed claimed he was tired and wanted to hit the sack. He was sleeping on a futon in his helicopter. (Yes, there is enough room in that thing.) Ryan still needed to pitch his tent. I needed to find my helicopter in the dark to retrieve a flashlight from it. So we left the guns behind and headed out to the west end. We all took care of business.
At 9:00 PM sharp, an airhorn sounded and all fire stopped. By that time, I was in my tent, wishing I would have gotten a little more air in my air mattress. I fully expected the shooters to have a little post-shooting party, but by 10 PM, the place was quiet.
I got a decent night sleep — it was my first night in a tent in about three years — but wished I’d brought along my long johns.
I emerged from the tent at 5 AM. It was still dark, but I needed the outhouse. I looked out over the range and saw the glow sticks on the three airplanes they’d shot down the night before.
Later, I followed Ryan to the rented camper where he promised to make coffee. The sun came up. I went back to my tent and took a picture I hope to use for a “heli-camping” brochure. My tent looks really small in the photo.
Ryan made sausage, potato, and eggs in a dutch oven. Half our group didn’t eat eggs. (What’s that about?) So just Ryan, Ed, and I ate the eggs.
The shooting started up. I took a few passengers up. Mike arrived with his truck. He was pretty impressed with the firepower and agreed with me (and Ed) that it was weird. Ed, Glenn, and Ryan flew away in the S-55. The rich guy was already gone — he’d left after breakfast. We did a few rides sporatically throughout the afternoon.
I made a fuel run with a passenger and took 45 minutes to find a quart of AeroShell W100 oil in Kingman (the airport manager is going to get a letter about that).
Back at the range, a good sized fire broke out and shooting was stopped. (Never fear, the fire burned out quickly; and even if it didn’t, the organizers had a great fire crew.) I finally got the non-stop flow of passengers I needed to turn a profit. I’m still not sure if I got enough — Mike went to a hockey game with a bunch of the money so I don’t know the final take. I do know that as of 3 PM, I was down a few hundred dollars because of the ferry time, fuel trips, and 2-passenger loads — some of the guys were so big I couldn’t take more than two at a time.
My conclusions about all of this:
Will I do this again? Hell yes!
More on Dan Brown.
Slate’s recent article, “The Dan Brown Code – In a court filing, the best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code reveals all the secrets of a pulp novelist,” by Bryan Curtis, offers some interesting insight into the mind of a failed songwriter turned bestselling author. It also makes for some amusing reading.
Also from Slate, Tim Wu’s “Holy Grail Wars” echoes many of the concerns I blogged earlier about the plagiarism lawsuit. If you don’t have time to read or listen to it, here’s the crux of it for me:
The authors of Holy Grail chose to make claims to truth—and while that gives their book a certain rhetorical power, it should also mean their work loses much legal protection. When copyright starts saying you can’t borrow claims to truth, it stops helping and starts hurting all authors.
Let’s start at the beginning. One of the basic principles of copyright law is that you can’t copyright historical facts, though you can own how you express those facts. Say you write the first article ever saying that John F. Kennedy had Addison’s disease (a fact). If the law says that you now own that fact, almost anyone who wants to write about Kennedy’s life or illnesses needs your permission. That’s a broad right, one that’s not just a damper on future scholarship and authorship but possibly a damper on that fact itself—you might, for example, be a Kennedy loyalist who wants to keep his disease secret forever.
It also appears, from the article, that the British courts have a different take on the copyright issue than American courts. Evidently, borrowing ideas from material presented as fact is okay unless you borrow too many of those ideas. What?
I go to Macworld Expo, see new stuff, party with the Peachpitters, and still manage to find my hotel.
I took an America West — or is that US Airways? — flight from Phoenix to San Francisco on Thursday morning. The flight departed at around 8:15 AM and took off into the east into clear skies. The plane banked to the right until it was heading west, following I-10. I saw familiar sights out my window for most of the flight: Wickenburg, Harquahala Mountain, Salome, Bouse, the Colorado River, the road that runs past Rice and eventually past the north end of Joshua Tree National Park, the airport at Twentynine Palms, Big Bear Lake, Apple Valley, Edwards Air Force Base, and Rosamond. The jet took a route just south of the one I usually take when flying the helicopter from Wickenburg to California’s Central Valley, but because we were cruising at about 30,000 feet, I could see so much more. The lake at Rosamond seemed huge, the windmills on the Tehatchapi’s southern slopes were clearly visible. The pass was socked in on both sides with clouds, but the town of Tehatchapi, on top of the mountain, was perfectly clear (see photo). The central valley was completely filled with low clouds — so low that I don’t think general aviation flight would be possible. It reminded me of my scud-running adventure from last spring’s Georgetown, CA to Wickenburg, AZ flight. The tops of the clouds had a odd pattern to them, like waves far out on the ocean.
I spent the flight catching up with podcasts. Listening, that is — I’ve fallen far behind recording them. I listened to NPR’s story of the day episodes stretching back into mid December. When I was finished with those, I started on Slate Magazine podcasts. I did the crossword puzzle in the airplane magazine and attempted to take some notes for a presentation I needed to do later in the day. Then we started our approach to San Francisco and the mountains along the coast poked up their slopes through the clouds below us. There was green grass on some of the southern slopes; in a month or two, all the hills would be a rich green color there. But I seldom get to the California coast in the spring, so I’m accustomed to seeing the grass when it’s all dried out, making the hills look golden in the California sun.
The plane got to the gate at 9 AM local time. I had just one bag — a small backpack that held my PowerBook, some books I planned to give away at the end of my presentation, and clothes for the overnight stay and next day — so I didn’t have to go through the baggage claim ordeal. The bag was heavy, though, and it only seemed to get heavier as I made my way from the gate to the BART station.
BART, in case you don’t know, stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. I used to take a cab from the airport to Moscone Hall for the Macworld Show, but I’d heard that BART went from the airport into the city and figured I’d give it a try. It was a relatively pleasant trip in a train car that reminded me more of a Long Island Railroad electrified train car than a New York City Subway car. The seats had upholstery and I don’t think they were quite as clean as they should have been. That gave the car a not-so-nice smell. But it wasn’t bad and I got used to it. I listened to my iPod and looked at the window when the train was above ground. It took about 30 minutes to get to what I thought was my stop: Montgomery Street. In reality, I should have gotten out one stop earlier, at Powell.
I came up from underground, got my bearings, realized I’d erred about the train stop, and started walking. San Francisco reminds me a bit of New York in that it has that “old city” feel. Lots of old buildings, many of which are pretty tall, some narrow streets, noisy traffic, homeless people on the sidewalks. The weather was pleasant and I was soon warming up inside my jacket.
My friend Ray called on my cell phone with a lead on a helicopter job for a construction company working along the Mexican border. I stopped and took notes on a receipt, wondering if I could be fortunate enough to get the job.
It was less than a mile to Moscone and when I got there, I found the place relatively quiet. It was just after 10 AM and most attendees had already gone into the exhibit hall. I used a free pass to go through the registration process and get a badge, then crossed the street and went into the hall. I saw some scooters pulling advertising trailers — an Apple advertising gig, I knew. (I later got a photo of the scooters parked alongside the street.) My first order of business was to dump my jacket and the heavy bag at the Peachpit Press booth. It took me a while to find it, which was quite embarrassing because I actually walked right by it twice. They said it was near the Apple booth and they weren’t kidding. It was right inside one of the doorways to the exhibit hall, adjacent to the Apple booth.
I ran into a few people I knew, including Connie Jeung-Mills, the production person who’d worked on many of my books. I chatted with her while I stuffed my belongings under a table skirt in the booth, reserving an old Adobe canvas bag and note pad to carry while I walked the floor. I couldn’t believe the number of books in the booth. Most of the titles were about graphics and Web publishing, but I also the books I’ve written for them: Tiger, QuickBooks, and the little Visual QuickProject Guides for Word and Excel.
I walked the floor. There was a lot to see, but not nearly as much as in the “old days,” when the show took up both sides of Moscone’s hall. I’ve never seen so many iPod accessories in my life. I think one out of every ten booths was peddling something for an iPod. Talk about trying to cash in on a craze. There were even iPod-compatible cars on display (see photo).
By 2:30, I was ready for a rest. I also needed to create my presentation, which was scheduled for 4 PM. I’m a last-minute person — I always have been — so I left the hall and found a seat on one of the balconies overlooking the hall entrance. It was nice and bright and airy up there and only about half the seats were occupied. Some people chatting, some people using laptops, other people eating or reading. I was very surprised to find that my PowerBook immediately connected to a wireless network when I opened it up. I was able to surf the net and check my e-mail.
I jotted down some notes about topics I thought my audience would be interested in. Mostly “cool features” stuff taken from my soon-to-be-published Informit.com article titled “Five Funky Finder Features.” (They may change the title, so if you go looking for it online, keep that in mind.)
While I worked, a man sitting nearby began complaining about how few seats were available. Two of the four balconies were blocked off, cutting the amount of available seats in half. But that didn’t seem to matter, since there were still empty seats to be had. One woman sitting nearby made the fatal error of acknowledging him. This resulted in him continuing his complaints. Another woman finally said to him, “I’m trying to enjoy my lunch and you’re ruining it.” He kept up for another minute or so before the woman, who was eating some kind of salad out of a Tupperware container, said, “No, I really mean it. Your complaints are ruining my lunch.” He seemed to get it then and he shut up. A while later, he closed up his iBook and went away. The whole exchange had been pretty funny. I was glad the woman had spoken up, though. He’d been quite a whiner and it was good when he finally shut up.
I did my presentation and it went well. I covered it in another blog entry.
Afterward, I met with Nancy and Cliff, two of my editors, for drinks and a bite to eat before the Peachpit Party. We wound up at an ethnic restaurant about two blocks away. Don’t ask me what kind of ethnic restaurant — I really don’t know. We ordered three different tappas dishes and a round of drinks. We talked business for a while — stuff I don’t want to cover here. Cliff left to go to an Apple party. Nancy and I finished our drinks and headed over to the Peachpit party.
I saw a bunch of Peachpit authors and editors and drank exactly one vodka martini more than I should have. The problem was, I still hadn’t checked into my hotel and I wasn’t exactly sure where it was. Or what it was called. Although I didn’t feel drunk after the third martini, I knew it was time to stop so I switched to water. Good thing I did. They must have used delayed reaction vodka in those drinks because I didn’t start feeling drunk until I was halfway done with my water. Still, I never got too drunk to realize that there were lots of people worse off than I was. Kim was probably the worst. It was her last day of work for Peachpit and she was partying a bit heartier than she should have.
I dug out the info for my hotel around 11:30, realized it was only about a block away from where Tom and Dori were staying, and walked with them. The walk took us down Market Street, which was surprisingly active with normal people (and a few weirdos) at that time of night. When we went our separate ways at Fourth Street, I felt safe enough to continue that last long block on my own. But it was good to get to my hotel and check in. I think the guys at the desk suspected that I wasn’t exactly sober, but they didn’t comment. I’m sure they’ve seen worse. And I wasn’t too drunk to realize that the guy had forgotten to give back my credit card with my room key.
I stayed at the Hotel Milano on Fifth Street. It’s an old hotel that has been fixed up. My seventh floor room had two windows that looked out across a narrow ventilation shaft to the two windows of a room in the next hallway. The room was big with a small television at one end and the king-sized bed at the other. I got undressed and into bed and watched a Seinfeld rerun for a while before turning off the television and going to sleep.
The only thing I’d forgotten to do was to check and adjust the thermostat. I was cold enough all night to sleep poorly but not cold enough to get up and do something about it. I hate that.
I woke at 5:30 AM local time. (I hate that, too.) I watched some Weather Channel and started work on this bLog entry before showering, getting dressed, and going out for breakfast. I wound up at the Marriott a few blocks away. I had a nice breakfast from the buffet, then walked back to my hotel and wasted more time on my computer. The show didn’t open until 10 AM and there was no reason to rush.
I packed and checked out at 9:30 AM. My bag was heavy, despite the fact that I’d given away the five books I’d brought with me from Arizona and I hadn’t bought anything else. I did have some product literature on board, but not enough to take the weight of five books.
At Moscone, I took a seat on one of the balconies to check my e-mail and my Web sites. The sites had been down the day before because of a computer glitch, but they were back online that morning. At 10 AM, I was back on the show floor, stashing my bag under a table at the Peachpit booth.
I bought a SightFlex stand for my iSight camera. Heavy.
I called America West and asked about an earlier flight. It was fully booked.
I bothered an Apple booth guy for a demo of iWeb. It’s a cool little software package and I hope Peachpit lets me write a book about it. The guy who gave the demo was a software engineer and had written Pages, Apple’s word processing program. (I don’t know why they didn’t have him demo that.) I told him I used Word and had been using it for years. He told me that if I tried Pages, I’d switch. So I’ll try it again next week and see how I do with it. Word really is overkill sometimes. But, at the same time, I’m not too thrilled with the idea of software that works more like a page layout program than a word processor without giving you the control over page elements. If I recall, that was my main gripe about Pages.
The Apple Booth, by the way, was enormous. I think it gets bigger every year. There’s always a huge theater area (see photo) and this year there were 40-foot high “posters” of the new MacBook Pro (terrible name!) laptop and Intel processor iMac. I felt like a Lilliputian as I walked around the booth.
I wandered around the hall some more, killing time.
I ran into Sandee Cohen, Ted Landau, and Tonya Engst at the Peachpit booth and spent some time chatting with each of them. Then I grabbed my bag and made my exit. It was 11:30. I figured I’d stop by the Apple store before grabbing a bite to eat.
I dropped off my bag at a hotel along the way, checking it with a bellman. It felt good to get that damn thing off my back.
After looking around the Apple Store, I spent about an hour in Cody’s, a very nice bookstore near Market Street, not far from Virgin and the Apple Store. They were expecting President Carter as a speaker later in the day and the audience seats were already starting to fill with people who had nothing better to do with their time than spend the day sitting in a folding chair in the basement of a building, surrounded by books.
I walked up to Union Square, passing a handful of panhandlers and more than a handful of tourists. The cable car runs down Powell Street there and there are always a lot of tourists around. The area itself reminds me of lower Broadway in New York, with lots of discount luggage stores and shops that sell t-shirts and other tourist favorites. Kind of sleezy without being sleezy enough to scare people away.
Then I made my way to the Nikko, thinking about sushi for lunch. I was just about to go into the Japanese restaurant there when I noticed a Chinese dim sum restaurant across the street. I went there instead and had a very good lunch.
By that time, I’d had enough of San Francisco and was ready to head out to the airport. You know, I’ve been to San Francisco dozens of times and, unless you have a lot of time on your hands and comfortable walking shoes on your feet, it isn’t such a great place. I had neither and was more interested in finding a comfortable place to wait for my flight home than shopping or even walking around the city.
I retrieved my bag, gave the bellman a tip, and descended into the BART station. A while later, I was on a train bound for Daly City. I changed trains and got on another one for the airport. I listened to podcasts the entire time: Slate magazine and, when I was finished with those, Slate Explainer. The usual at the airport: get a boarding pass, go through security, find the gate, settle into a seat. I found a seat by an electric outlet and used it to charge up my PowerBook. For some reason, I expected to use it on the plane.
The plane was completely booked. Overbooked, in fact. They offered $400 worth of travel for volunteers, but I wasn’t interested. There was a woman in my seat when I boarded and, since it was my seat and not hers, she gave it up. When all the seats were filled, they closed the doors and we got underway.
I was asleep within ten minutes of departure.