Tag Archives: time

Contributions Corrupt

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From a Slate.com piece.

Political corruption abounds. This paragraph appeared in a Slate Magazine article by Roger McShane.

In a nifty little investigation, the NYT details how political donations are corrupting the Ohio Supreme Court. The Times found that Ohio’s top judges “routinely sat on cases after receiving campaign contributions from the parties involved or from groups that filed supporting briefs. On average, they voted in favor of contributors 70 percent of the time.”

If highly paid judges are corrupted by political contributions, then how do you think small-town politicians react?

Who’s paying for your favorite candidate’s campaign? And why?

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Mac Cowboys

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Maria Speaks Episode 30: Mac Cowboys.

Join me and a bunch of other Mac geeks for a dude ranch mini-vacation.

Transcript:

Welcome to WickenburgA few months ago, I started thinking about how cool it would be to have a computer conference here in Wickenburg, at my favorite guest ranch: Rancho de los Caballeros. Los Caballeros is not only the nicest dude ranch in this Dude Ranch Capital of Arizona, but it has the most interesting activities and the absolute best restaurant.

The idea was to invite a bunch of authors and let each of them do three or four sessions over a five-day period. The sessions would be in the morning and there would be all kinds of activities in the afternoon, like horseback riding, golf, shopping trips into town, Jeep tours, and, of course, helicopter rides. The people who came would have a lot of fun, learn a lot, and have a great opportunity to network with other Mac users. For some people, it could even be considered a business trip. Best of all, I could introduce people to Wickenburg, the little town I live in and often blog about.

The event would be called Mac Cowboys because of the western dude ranch theme.

Now in case you don’t know, I’m a busy person. It took me nearly forever to talk to the ranch people and crunch the numbers to see what the trip would cost. It looked feasible, so I set a date in early December, before the busy Christmas holidays. Then I got a list of possible author/speakers from one of my editors at Peachpit and invited them to attend.

I guess everyone is just as busy as I am. None of them could attend. I hope that it’s nothing I should be taking personally.

Desert SceneSo rather than give up the whole thing, I decided to restructure the event. I shortened it from five days to four. I cut the speakers from five to one. I cut the sessions from 12 to just two and made them more discussion based, giving all the participants a chance to share what they knew and ask everyone questions. I arranged the activities so all participants could go together, giving everyone an opportunity to network like crazy outside the meeting rooms. Then, with greatly reduced costs, I recalculated the per-person cost. The numbers I came up with were certainly within reason for a 4-day, all inclusive weekend at a luxury dude ranch.

Now I’m taking it public, offering it to the readers of my blog, podcast listeners, and the folks who buy Mac books from Peachpit Press.

Please understand that this isn’t a typical computer conference.

For a moment, think of the last computer conference you attended. You know, the one in the big conference hall with thousands of attendees shuffling around a show floor with shopping bags. The one with overcrowded dark classrooms with bad sound systems and speakers telling you more about whatever it is they’re trying to sell than something you really want to learn about. The one where you paid to get into the conference hall, you paid to sit through seminars, you paid to stay in a hotel, and you paid to eat disappointing meals. The one with uncomfortable free shuttles or long walks from your hotel to the conference hall. The one where your only entertainment were demos on the show floor or sad vendor parties with bad food and expensive alcohol.

Now wipe those ugly thoughts right from your mind.

Wickenburg SunsetMac Cowboys is a mini-vacation first: a four-day, three-night stay with luxury accommodations at a ranch that can only accommodate about a hundred and fifty people at once. You get yourself to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport or Wickenburg and just about everything else is paid for — ground transportation to and from the ranch, hotel room, three meals a day, horseback riding, golf, Jeep tour, helicopter tour, swimming, tennis, nature hikes — all kinds of activities. There’s even free wi-fi access in certain hotspots throughout the ranch. All you pay for is alcoholic beverages and extras like skeet shooting or golf cart or club rental.

I’ve set aside three short hours a day on the two middle days for official business stuff: a pair of conference sessions where you can learn more about using your Mac. One session covers Mac OS X topics. The other covers Web publishing topics. And there will be plenty of informal sessions among participants to pick brains and get burning questions answered.

And if you’re wondering what December is like in Wickenburg, AZ, imagine 60° to 70° F sunny days — often without a cloud in the sky. Weather won’t keep you inside during the day. Sure, at night it gets cold, but it also gets dark. And you have to rest sometime.

Sound good? I think so — and I do this stuff all the time.

This first Mac Cowboys event, which is scheduled for December 7th through 10th, 2006, is a test of my idea. If it works out on this small scale, it should work out on a larger scale with more speakers and more guests. If it ever outgrows Los Cab or I feel like trying someplace new, I can take it on the road to another ranch. I’d like to do it once or twice a year, just to keep life interesting.

So consider this your formal invitation. Come on out to Wickenburg and be a Mac Cowboy for a few days.

Want more information? Check out the Mac Cowboys Web site at maccowboys.com.

The Miracle of Google

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How did we live without it?

We have the power to find virtually anything on the Internet. And that power is called Google Search.

Moments ago, I found a question in my FAQ system (horray!) from a reader of one of my long out-of-print books (darn!). He asked a question about an error message he’d seen (that I’d never encountered) while he was attempting to build additional administrative pages for a FileMaker Pro CDML-published database.

The book he’d bought is called Database Publishing with FileMaker Pro on the Web and it dates back to April 1998. It’s long out of print. If I recall correctly — I’m not at my office so I can’t consult my copy of the book — the book covered FileMaker Pro 3, which was the first version of FileMaker to support Web publishing. FileMaker Pro is now in version 8.5 and no longer supports CDML for Web publishing. CDML was the language and technology that FileMaker, Inc. bought from the Lasso folks to make FileMaker Pro Web publishing work.

So it should come as no surprise that I was unable to answer his question. And unable to replicate it, of course.

But Google has all the answers and it proved it again yesterday. I did a Google search for CDML Error 102 and Google came up with a list of Web pages that discussed the problem. I suggested this as a way for the person with the question to find his answer. (It would be silly for me to repeat what was on those pages when he could just as easily find the same pages himself.)

Google is like this. Have a question? Google it. If you enter the right search phrase, Google will come up with a Web site that answers the question. I think I can report a 90% results rate. And considering some of the questions I come up with sometimes, that’s pretty darn good.

The trick, of course, is to come up with the right search phrase. Googling a single word won’t usually get the results you seek. You need to come up a string of words that succinctly describes what you are searching for. In the example above, if I’d entered FileMaker Error, a much more general search phrase, I seriously doubt whether I’d see any results about the specific CDML error code the reader was getting. If a search phrase doesn’t get desired results, rethink it and try another phrase. In my example, I got the results I was seeking right away, so a second try wasn’t necessary.

With the amount of junk out there on the Web — including, some people might say, sites like this one — we’re very fortunate to have search technology like Google’s available to us. It helps cut through the chaff to get to the important stuff we want (or need) to read.

The Grand Canyon

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With clouds.

Years ago, Mike’s Mom and Dad went to the Grand Canyon. They’d been in Phoenix on some kind of vacation and had taken a bus on a daytrip to the canyon. The whole time they were there, the canyon was full of clouds and they didn’t get a chance to see the view.

The Grand Canyon with CloudsA few years later, in February, I took my brother to the Canyon. We spent two nights in rooms on the rim and each morning, we went out to watch the sun rise. Each morning, the canyon was full of clouds. I don’t think my brother saw the inside of the canyon at all on that trip. But he did tell my mother that it was the coldest place on earth.

This shot was taken in February 2005 when we were there with our friends John and Lorna (hi again, Lorna!). I can’t remember if this was before or after our overnight mule trip. I do remember that it was cold and overcast and rainy. The light was really interesting and the clouds made the canyon look special. This isn’t a tourist photo. You can get those anytime you go. This is a real Canyon photo, one that shows one of the canyon’s moods.

RedBubbleThis photo is available for sale as cards, laminated prints, mounted prints, or framed prints from RedBubble.

Luxury Toys?

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We’re not impressed.

Yesterday, Mike and I drove down to the new Cardinals Stadium in Glendale, AZ for the “Men’s Luxury Toy Expo and Sale.”

Mike and I are big into toys. It isn’t because we like to be conspicuous consumers. We have so few close friends in the area that there’s no one to show off to. It’s just that we like to play with toys. So it’s always nice to see what’s out there to play with.

If your idea of a “luxury toy” includes hot tubs, sand rails (modern day dune buggies), and garage storage solutions, then this show was for you. Unfortunately, those things don’t fall into what we’d consider luxury toys. We were pretty disappointed, since that’s what dominated the show.

To be fair, there were two or three Ferraris (the definitive sports car, in my opinion) and some very nice, mint condition classic cars. And I did like the idea of buying a room on a residential cruise ship to live out the rest of my life on a nonstop, around-the-world cruise. (Now that’s a house boat! I just find the $1.8 million entry fee plus $90K annual maintenance a bit tough to swallow right now.) But there were also vendors selling beef jerky, overpriced plastic shoes, and miracle mops. (In my opinion, if you have enough cash to afford a real luxury toy, you also have enough to pay a professional to keep it clean for you.)

The weirdest thing was seeing an advertisement for one of the garage storage solution places with the same exact layout and colors as my Flying M Air brochure. If that wasn’t a rip off of David’s design work, I don’t know what is. They could have at least changed the color scheme. The ad was in the show brochure and I won’t dignify it (or spread the word about the company) by reproducing it here. I’m just glad they weren’t pushing helicopter tours and charters. I’m trying to use the design for my new branding and it’s not nice to see someone else trying to do the same thing with the same design.

I’d brought along a bunch of Flying M Air brochures and old Sedona/Grand Canyon rack cards with the idea of leaving a few around on tables with other mixed literature. There weren’t any such tables, so I wound up carrying around the brochures for the whole show. That wasn’t so bad because we were only there for about an hour.

I thought the event might be a good place to advertise the business. Imagine bringing Zero-Mike-Lima onto the show floor, all sparkling and clean. That would certainly get some attention! But when I saw the kinds of people walking the floor, I realized that the dreamers outnumbered the buyers by a good margin. (The beef jerky guy was doing a good business but I didn’t see the residential cruise ship guy handing out too many cards.)

I don’t regret going, though. We got to see the inside of Cardinals stadium, which isn’t 100% finished yet. (Looks like they still have some painting to do in the bowels of the arena.) It’s a nice place — very state-of-the-art and the air conditioning works pretty darn good. The show was on the stadium’s concrete floor. The grass, which was growing nicely outside, looked ready to roll in for a game any time. The only thing I regret was not taking a few pictures. It isn’t often that you get to walk on the field (sans grass) for the newest football stadium in the country.

Would I go again? Doubtful. I’ll call later today to see what the exhibitor pricing is like. If it’s affordable, I might give it a try. Depends on how the beginning of my season goes. The show is in February; my big season here in Arizona starts in November. So I have plenty of time to think about it.