Tag Archives: time

Leopard Postponed — What's a Writer to Do?

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It’s all about timing.

Yesterday afternoon, not long after the stock markets closed in New York, Apple put a one-paragraph announcement on its Hot News page. The announcement told the world (or whoever happened to be watching that page) that because Leopard resources had been used to finish up the iPhone, Leopard would be delayed. Instead of seeing the finished OS in June, we’ll now see it in October.

Why it Matters to Me

I took the news with mixed emotions. I had begun working hard on my Leopard Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit Press. The book will be the eighth or tenth (I’ve lost count) edition of my Mac OS VQS, which is one of my biggest selling titles. The book is important to me; the last edition accounted for half of my annual income for two years in a row. When that book is ready to write I drop everything — even helicopter charters — to work on it.

The most important part of it is getting it done on time. When Tiger came out in 2005 only two authors had books in stores beside the brand new software on its release date: Robin Williams and me. Both long-time Peachpit authors with reputations for churning out books that satisfy readers. If Robin’s book sold only half as well as mine — and I’m not fooling myself; it probably sold twice as well — we kicked butt. It was a great reward for hard work and grueling deadlines. But I have to say honestly that my Tiger book was one of the ones I’m most proud of.

This Time was Different

This time around, things were definitely different. The software wasn’t ready yet — that was obvious in the way certain features just didn’t work right. Lots of bugs to iron out, but few developmental releases. It was almost as if Apple’s Mac OS team was overwhelmed. This announcement from Apple explains a lot. Apparently they were overwhelmed, but not by the task at hand. They were overwhelmed by being shorthanded to tackle the task at hand.

Add to that the fact that my screenshot software of choice, Snapz Pro, “broke” in Leopard. Don’t misunderstand me; it did work and it took fine screenshots. But the shortcut key to invoke it did not work — even when I fiddled with Mac OS settings and tried other shortcut keys. So, for example, there was no way to take a screenshot of a menu.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Visual QuickStart Guide, but they rely on screenshots to communicate information. The book is full of step-by-step, illustrated instructions. I estimate that my Tiger VQS has at least 2,000 screenshots in it. Some screenshots show windows, others show menus. Almost every single one is less than a full screen of information. Now think of how much fun it might be to take 2,000 screenshots with something as awkward as Grab or, worse yet, Apple’s built-in screenshot shortcut keys. And then manually edit every single screenshot in a graphics program like Photoshop. Not having Snapz Pro (or something equivalent, if something equivalent exists) was going to seriously slow down my workflow.

What was even worse for me (and all other writers, I assume) was the “secret features” Steve Jobs alluded to when he first showed off Leopard. I had no idea what they were. And no one else did either. What if those features changed the way part of Mac OS X looked? All my screenshots would have to be redone. And what if the features were big enough to warrant their own chapters? Or replaced existing features? That could mean significant reorganization of the book, with changes to all the chapter and feature references. I could be working my butt off to finish a 700+ page book, only to have to redo major parts of it.

So I was under a lot of pressure. I had the ticking clock that said the software would be out “this spring.” That meant before June 20. I knew my publisher needed 2-3 weeks to get the final files printed and turned into books. That meant I needed to be done writing and editing by the end of May. But not knowing what the future would bring, was crippling me, making it difficult and frustrating to get things done.

I was not a happy camper. So when the announcement came yesterday, it was a bit of a relief for me.

The Problem with the Postponement

There is a problem, however: timing.

I had planned to work on my Leopard book for April and May. Then comes my annual secret project (which I can’t talk about until after publication) for the month of June and a bit into July. Then my annual one-month stay at Howard Mesa to get some work done on our property and knock off a few articles for Informit and possibly try to reconstruct that mystery novel I was working on (which was lost in the great hard disk crash and backup screw-up of February 2007). Then we’d planned to take a vacation to the northwest to continue our search for a new place to live. By that time, it would be September and the helicopter business would be heating up again; I already have two charters lined up for that month. Also, around that time, I’d be ready to start work on my Word for Macintosh revision.

There was a plan B for this summer, too. It consisted of me getting a job as a pilot for someone else, flying somewhere other than Arizona. I could work on my secret project while I was away and escape Arizona’s brutal heat and get to fly someplace different. I have a very good lead on a job in St. Louis (of all places) and a few possibilities in Oregon and Washington. But nothing finalized.

Now these plans for the next six months of my life are completely up in the air. Assuming an October 1 release of Leopard — this is just a date pulled out of the air; I swear I don’t know anything and if I did I wouldn’t repeat it — I have to be finished with the book by the first week in September. So I’ll work on it in July and August. While I still have my secret project to work on in June, I don’t have anything lined up for the rest of April and the month of May.

What’s even worse about all this is that I can’t work on a VQS at Howard Mesa or at a summer job elsewhere — I need a desktop computer with a big monitor to do the layout — and I can’t take a vacation when I need to work on this book. (See above for how important it is.) So my whole summer schedule is completely screwed up.

And It’s a Money Problem, Too

And since I get paid advances when I work and I don’t have anything lined up between now and the beginning of June, I’m not going to see a payday until the end of June or July. Ouch. So my finances will be screwed up, too.

It gets even worse. If the book had a release date in June 2007 (with the original release of Leopard), I’d start seeing royalties at September 2007 month-end. But because it won’t be released until October, which is after the start of the last quarter, I won’t see royalties until March 2008 month-end. That’s a 6-month payday delay for a 4-month publication delay. Double-ouch.

But that’s what the freelance writer’s life is like: a financial roller coaster.

What to Do?

Today I’ll be making some phone calls. The goal is to pin down exact dates for all of my known projects so I can decide, once and for all, if I can get a pilot job according to Plan B. And, while I’m at it, I’ll try to pick up a small book project to work on in May. (Not likely but remotely possible.)

Then I’ll get to work doing other things that I’ve been neglecting — cleaning out the condo I want to rent, washing the helicopter, organizing my office, reserving rooms for next year’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure trips.

After all, life goes on.

Rain Storm in Wickenburg

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Not much to talk about.

It rained today. For those readers who live in places where rain is a part of life, you might be wondering why I’ve taken the time to write about it.

But rain isn’t a part of life here in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. Rain is usual. Rain is special. Rain is something to look forward to and enjoy.

The rain came with a strange kind of storm. The day started out clear enough, after high winds last night blew the desert dust around. The dust was hanging in the air this morning when it got light. The same dust we’ve been looking at for the past few days.

It’s spring and wind is part of spring. Calm in the morning, windy in the afternoon, then calm in the evening and overnight.

But last night, the wind didn’t calm down. Our wind chimes tinkled vigorously all night long. We had the windows closed to keep the dust out, so they weren’t loud enough to keep us up.

This morning, it was still windy. But then it got calm. And then it got windy. Calm. Windy. Calm. Windy.

Make up your mind already!

At 10 AM, I left my desk and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Although I’m usually up before 6 AM and have my coffee right away, I don’t have breakfast until midmorning. And when I reached the kitchen with its southwest-facing windows, I realized that a storm was on the way.

Windy, calm, windy, calm. What a strange day. I watched the hazy, dust-filled sky cloud over from my northeast-facing office window. At lunchtime, back in the kitchen, I saw that the storm was closer.

Oddly enough, my neighbor’s windmill was calm. So was my other neighbor’s windsock.

The calm before the storm?

I went outside and threw my MR-2’s old car cover over my Jeep. I still haven’t put the doors and windows on the darn thing and I didn’t want to get it soaked.

A while later, the wind kicked up again. Howling this time. The palm tree branches I’d cut off our little palm tree days before blew around the yard as a dust devil came through. I went outside to check the Jeep and was surprised to see that the cover was still stretched over it.

I let the dog in.

The rain started a while later. Drizzle then pouring then drizzling. Not enough volume to keep the pavement wet; certainly not enough to get the wash flooding — a good thing, since the horses were down there. The rain cycle went on like that for a while. I checked the radar images on my Radar In Motion widget. The storm was all around me, moving in from the west.

But never enough rain to really get the pavement wet.

We have a problem here in Arizona. It’s often so dry that when it rains, the rain evaporates before it hits the ground. People think I’m kidding when I say this, but I’m not. It’s called virga. Look it up.

Sometimes, even when the rain does reach the ground, it dries before more drops can join it. The drops appear on the pavement, but dry before more drops fall around it. So the pavement doesn’t get wet. That’s what was happening today. Very disappointing.

But when I poked my head outside, I smelled the rain. A nice, fresh smell. The smell of water on the creosote bushes. A smell so unique that the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix has an exhibit that simply sprays water on creosote branches so people can smell it.

I kept working. The storm passed through. It got quiet.

When the UPS man arrived, I went outside. The pavement was dry.

To the north, I could see the mountains again. The radar showed the storm had moved to the east.

The storm was past. The rain was over.

Now I’ll have to wait again for the next storm. I hope it’s better than this one was.

One Good Reason NOT to Put Google Ads at the Top of a Page

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Google goes down.

Is it possible? As I write this (April 12, 12:03 PM MST), I cannot view any Google content. That includes Google ads on Web sites and the Google Web site itself.

Sites with Google ads prominently placed at the top are extremely slow to load and, when they finally appear, page design may be messed up. Sites that have no Google references are fine.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this happen.

Ah, it’s back. The problem lasted for about 5 minutes. Did anyone else notice? We’ll see.

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

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How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

  • Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
  • Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

Tennessee Tea Cakes?

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No. T-cakes!

A few weeks ago, I offered helicopter rides at the Big Sandy shoot, northeast of Wikieup, AZ. (I wrote about it in “The Big Sandy Shoot, Take 2.”) Among my passengers that weekend was a man and his two sons. The man, Steve, was so thrilled with his ride that he took my mailing address and promised to send me some Tennessee tea cakes.

Tea cakes? Anything that’s a cake is fine with me.

Time passed. I never really expected Steve to remember about the tea cakes. So imagine my surprise when the UPS guy rolled up with a small box from Tennessee.

I opened the box. Inside was a tin full of Tennessee T-Cakes.

T-Cakes! Not tea cakes. I’d heard the letter T as the word tea. Silly me.

How can I describe these things? They’re small cookie-like cakes that are sweet and covered with powdered sugar. They’re soft and a tiny bit chewy. Quite tasty.

The cakes came with a thank you note from Steve and a little card that reported the Legend of the Tennessee T-Cake. A nice little gift.

Thank you, Steve!