Tag Archives: time

Too Busy to Blog!

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I’m back (kinda) and will be blogging again shortly.

Just a quick note to let readers know that I’ve been completely tied up (figuratively; don’t get any kinky ideas) for the past three days. I spent the time in the Phoenix area, taking care of some helicopter training issues, a bum aviation radio, a Who concert (really!), and a Part 135 check ride.

I’m back this morning and have a whole long list of things to blog about. Unfortunately, I still have a few things to do — mainly two helicopter flights and the completion of Chapter 7 of my Excel 2007 book — before I can get back to adding content to this site.

So bear with me; I’ll be back soon.

Being a Responsible Blogger

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With regular readers comes responsibility.

This morning, I noted that the feed for this blog has exceeded 100 subscribers. The 100 mark is a milestone for any blogger, and it’s no different for me — even though I’ve been at it for some time now.

I’ve been blogging for over three years and my blog doesn’t exactly follow all of the “rules” of blogging. I’m talking about the “stick to one topic” rule and “blog multiple times a day” rule. People say rules are meant to be broken, but that’s not why I break these rules. I just blog the way I want to blog and don’t really pay attention to the rules.

My Original Blog as a Separate Entity

My blog started out as a separate entity from my personal Web site, a way to share whatever I was thinking about or doing with people who might be interested. It was a personal journal, slightly filtered for the public. It was a way for me to record my life so I’d have something to look back on in the distant future. I didn’t care if anyone read it and was often surprised when someone I knew commented about something I’d written in my blog.

Back in those days, my blog wasn’t something I worked hard at; the entries just came out of me, like one-sided conversations with friends. Perhaps it has something to do with my solitary work habits — many people gather around the “water cooler” at work to trade stories about their weekends or opinions about world affairs. There’s no water cooler in my office and no co-workers to chat with. My blog may have been my outlet for all these pent-up stories.

Blog + Site = ?

A little over a year ago, I combined my blog with my personal Web site. I did it to make my life a little easier. I’d already decided to use WordPress as my Web site building tool. Why not just make my personal blog part of the site?

My Web site has been around in one form or another since 1994. I built it to experiment with Web publishing and soon expanded it to provide a sort of online résumé and support for my books. Support for my books often meant additional tips and longer articles about some of the software I’ve written about. This is fresh content of interest to people who use that software, even if they don’t buy or read my corresponding books. Since writing this content is relatively easy for me, I have no problem offering it free to anyone who wants it (as long as they don’t steal it and pass it off as their own; see my © page).

One of the great things about blogging software is that it automatically displays the newest content on the Home page and archives older content by category and date. In the old days, I’d have to manually create new pages for every article I wanted to put on my Web site and then add links to them. It was time consuming, to say the least. Sometimes too time consuming to share even the quickest little tip with visitors. So I didn’t publish very many articles. But the time-consuming, hand-coding aspect of my site is gone, and it takes just minutes to put any content online, whether it’s a link to an interesting podcast I just listened to about iPod microphones or a multi-part series of articles explaining how to use WordPress as a content management system.

What’s odd about the merging of the two sites is that my personal blog entries now commingle on the Home page with my book support entries. So these 100+ subscribers are seeing (and possibly reading) all kinds of stuff coming out of my head. (Now that’s a scary thought!)

My Responsibility

As my blog/site audience grows, my responsibility to provide good content for readers also grows.

The way I see it, when only a half-dozen people read my blog regularly, it was okay to bore them with stories about my horse eating corn cob stuff out of the bottom of my bird’s cage or rants about the quality of “news” coverage. Now, with over 100 regular readers, I need to think more about what would interest my audience and concentrate on producing the articles they want to read. (You can help me by voting on this poll.)

And that’s when blogging becomes work. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does take more effort on my part.

And it may push me far from the original purpose of my blog: a journal of my life. That’s something to think about, too.

The Other Blogs

I just want to take a moment here to comment on some of the other blogs I’ve seen out there. The vast majority of them are a complete waste of bandwidth. Some exist to echo the sentiments of others and show very little original thought. Others are complete blather, written in a style that makes me mourn for the failure of our educational system. Like chat room comments. Ugh. I don’t see why people waste their time writing this crap and really can’t see why people waste their time reading it.

But there is a small percentage of blogs that provide good, informative, or at least interesting content, written in a way that’s easy to read and understand. Those are the blogs that serious bloggers should be reading and learning from. Those are the blogs we should try to emulate, not by simply copying or linking to content, but by adding our own original material to the blogoshere.

That’s my goal and my responsibility as a blogger. If you’re a blogger, is it yours, too?

Web Site vs. Blog

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What’s the Difference?

Today I got a phone call from our local newspaper’s “business advocate” — the guy who writes stories about business. He was researching an article about blogging and figured that I was the most active blogger — if not the only blogger — in town, so I might be able to to provide some information about it. He wasn’t aware that I’d co-authored a book about WordPress blogging software (WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide) in 2006 and he probably wasn’t aware that I wrote Putting Your Small Business on the Web back in 2000. He probably also doesn’t know that I’ve written four books about Web authoring software (various versions of PageMill, now defunct) and that I’ve been building and managing Web sites since 1994 (although I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living).

We stumbled a bit in our conversation. He referred to my Web site, wickenburg-az.com, as a blog. (The site has been around since 1999, predating the blogging phenomena by at least 3 to 4 years.) I responded that it wasn’t a blog, that it was a Web site built with blogging software. And then he asked me what the difference was.

I had to think about it. What is the difference between a Web site and a blog?

They’re very much alike.

Let’s take a look at the similarities.

  • Web sites and blogs are both published on the Web and can be read with any Web browser. This gives them the same basic look and feel and similar user experiences. Web sites built with blogging software can look and feel just like a blog, even if that’s not what they are intended to be.
  • They depend on good, useful content. Web site visitors and blog readers come to read content. If the content is good and meets their needs, they’ll be back for more. If the content sucks, they won’t.

But they are different.

Of course, I needed to explain how they were different — not how they were the same. The response I came up with centered around the purpose of visitors coming to to the site, but there are more differences.

  • Web site visitors come to a site to look for specific information. That information does not need to be new. It just needs to be what the visitor is looking for. For example, I visit the HP Web site when I need a new driver for one of my printers. I know it’ll be there and I don’t care if it’s been there for five years. People visit wickenburg-az.com to get basic information about Wickenburg: what it’s like, what to do there, etc. But blog readers visit or subscribe to blogs to get fresh information or insight on topics that are important to them. I read ProBlogger, for example, because it has timely articles that can help me understand how to be a better blogger. People visit aneclecticmind.com to read articles like this one about blogging, or other articles about flying, or even other articles about what it’s like to live in a place like Wickenburg — all from my point of view.
  • Blogs tend to be more opinion-based than Web sites. Sure, HP is going to tell you on their Web site that their printers are the best, but what would you expect? On my blog, I’ll tell you what I think about my HP printer and compare it to other printers I might own or have experience with. I’ll also tell you what I think of Apple Geniuses or local restaurants or life revolving around the Internet. (Although some locals might find this hard to believe, I keep most of my negative opinions of Wickenburg out of wickenburg-az.com. Most.) The opinion aspect makes blogs more personal than a Web site.
  • Blogs rely on fresh content. It’s commonly accepted that a blogger should post at least 3 to 5 new entries a week. Web sites, on the other hand, are more static and don’t require as much updating. Their visitors don’t expect it, either.

Does it matter?

Who knows? But it’s made me think about blogging a bit more than usual lately. And I’m sure it will lead to a few more articles here about what makes a blog a blog in the near future.

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.

Computer Wait Speed

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Maria Speaks Episode 34: Computer Wait Speed

My current computer woes remind me of something I heard long ago.

A long time ago — ten or more years, which is the middle ages in terms of the computing industry — computers were being marketed primarily on the basis of processor speed. Every time Intel or Motorola would come out with a new processor chip, members of the geeky set hurried to the stories to buy a new computer or upgrade that would bring their machines up to speed. It was then that I heard this rather curious statement:

All computers wait at the same speed.

The statement, of course, was meant to poke fun at computer users. At least that’s how I read it. Your computer could be the fastest in the world, but if you weren’t up to speed, all that extra fast processing power would be wasted. After all, each time a computer completes an instruction — whether it’s opening a dialog box, applying a font style change to some text, or matching e-mail addresses in your address book when you type into a field in a new e-mail message form — the computer faithfully waits…for you. As long as it has to. And while computer processors are getting ever faster, computer users are simply not keeping up.

Let Me Tell You About My Mom

All this reminds me of a sort of funny story. My mother, who has been using computers for nearly as long as I have, is not what you’d call a “power user.” She pretty much knows what her computer can do for her and she can usually make it do it. But she’s not the kind of person who pushes against the boundaries of what she knows very often. And when she’s working with her computer, she spends a lot of time making the computer wait while she thinks about what’s onscreen and how she needs to proceed. That isn’t a big deal — I’d say that 95% of computer users are like her. People react to what the computer does rather than anticipate what’ll come up next and have the next task prepared in their minds when the computer is ready to accept it. And all these computers are waiting at the same speed.

Anyway, for years, my Mom used dial-up Internet services. Most of us did. But as better alternatives came around and Web sites got ever more graphic-intensive, most of us updated our Internet connection technology to take advantage of cable or DSL or some other higher bandwidth connection. (I was literally the first (and only) kid on the block to get ISDN at my home. This was back in the days before cable and DSL Internet service. It cost me a fortune — heck, they had to dig a trench to lay new telephone lines to my house — but I simply could not tolerate busy signals, dropped carriers, and slow download speeds for my work. It operated at a whopping 128 Kbps and cost me $150/month. Ouchie!) My Mom, on the other hand, didn’t upgrade. She continued to surf the Internet through AOL on a dial-up connection, right into late 2006. Worse yet, she refused to get a second phone line, so she limited her Internet access or was impossible to get on the phone.

Let me take a little side trip here to discuss why her attitude wasn’t a bad thing at all. Personally, I believe we have too much dependence on the Internet. I recently read “I Survived My Internet Vacation” by Lore Sjöberg on wired.com, which takes a comic but all-too-real look at Internet withdrawal. If you’re the kind of person who uses the Internet to check the weather, look up vocabulary words, and find obscure information throughout each day without really needing that information, you owe it to yourself to read the piece. It really hit home for me. So in the case of my Mom, the fact that her Internet use was minimal wasn’t such a bad thing. Not at least as far as I was concerned.

But it had gotten to the point with my Mom that she was spending more time waiting for her computer than her computer was waiting for her. And it had nothing to do with processor speed. It was her dial-up Internet connection that made it slow.

At first, I don’t think she understood this. I think that when she replaced her aging Macintosh with a PC about 2 years ago, she really expected everything to get faster. But the Internet got slower and slower for her, primarily because Web designers don’t design sites for dial-up connections. (Shame on them!) The Internet had become a tedious, frustrating place for her and she couldn’t understand why so many people were spending so much time using it.

In November 2006, I came for a visit. I had to look up something on the Internet and within 15 minutes, I was about to go mad. I asked her why she didn’t upgrade to a different service. Then she showed me a flyer that had come with her cable bill. We sat down with her phone bill and AOL bill and realized that she could upgrade to cable Internet service and actually save money. A little more research with her local phone company saved even more money.

So she was paying a premium to connect at 56Kbps or less.

I made a few phone calls and talked to people in the United States and India for her. I’ll be honest with you — the price difference between cable Internet and her local phone company’s Internet was minimal, but we went with the phone company because the person who answered the phone spoke English as her first language. (Subsequently, my Mom needed some tech support after I was gone and that person was in India. Sheesh.) The installation would happen the day after I left to go back to Arizona, but I was pretty confident that they would make everything work. And although it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped, my Mom was soon cruising the ‘Net at normal DSL speeds.

In other words, wicked fast.

My Mom was floored by the difference. I’d told her it was much faster, but I didn’t tell her it was 100 times faster. And it’s always on — all she has to do is turn on the computer and she’s online! And she can even get phone calls while she’s on the Internet! Imagine all that!

The happy ending of this story is that my mother now spends a lot more time on the Internet. (I’m not sure how happy that is.) And of course, she’s now back to the situation where the computer is waiting for her.

Who’s Waiting for What in My Office

I reported a hard disk crash here about 9 days ago. I know it was 9 days because that’s how long I’ve been waiting for the data recovery software to churn through whatever is left of my hard disk. And although it’s still progressing, it’s slowed to a crawl. I think it’s teasing me. But I’ll get the last laugh — I’m pulling the plug today.

There comes a time when you simply can’t wait anymore. I think 9 days shows a great deal of patience on my part. I know I couldn’t have waited so long if I didn’t have other computers to work with. I did get some work done this past week. I wrote up the outline for my Mac OS X book revision for Leopard. I did a lot of e-mail, fixed up a bunch of Web sites, wrote and submitted a bid for Flying M Air to dry cherries this summer in Washington State.

But what I did not do outweighed what I did do. I didn’t work on my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide. (I need the big monitor to do layout.) I did not pay my bills. (The latest version of my Quicken data files are on the sick drive.) I didn’t update Flying M AIr’s brochure. (Original files on the sick disk, need big monitor for layout.) The list does go on and on.

Now it’s time to get back to work. So I’ll pull the plug on the current data recovery attempt, put the hard disk in the freezer for a few hours, then reinstall it and try again by accessing the sick disk via Firewire from another computer. I can try multiple software solutions to fix the problem. And if that doesn’t work, I take the long drive down to the nearest Genius and let them give the computer a check up to make sure there’s no motherboard damage (again). If the mother board is still fine, I’ll leave them the disk to play with, get a new disk to replace it, and get the hell back to work.

That’s the plan, anyway.