Tag Archives: war

RSS Summaries

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A reader chastises me.

The other day, while writing about the Reading Options in WordPress, I decided to experiment with this blog. I togged the settings so only summaries of my entries would be sent to people accessing with RSS readers.

Understand that I don’t use an RSS reader. I surf the old fashioned way, with a Web browser. I don’t surf that often and I don’t follow any one particular blog or site. So it’s never been an issue for me.

But for the book, I had to understand what this WordPress feature did. So I toggled it to the Summaries setting, downloaded a feed reader, and looked at the result. What I saw was a list of 10 or so posts in a window. I’d click a post title and the beginning of the post would appear in a window pane beneath the list. There was a link at the end indicating that there was more; clicking the link brought me to my Web site.

This seemed a logical way to release content via RSS. After all, didn’t I want visitors to come to the site where they could read not just the articles but the comments? And see all the pictures that came with the piece?

Dori of Wise Women didn’t think so. She commented on my “Stand Up for Your Principles” piece to stand up for her principles: that RSS feeds for blogs should include the entire content.

Whew! No problem. This morning, I remembered what I did to create the summaries (I did have to remember something I learned about 2 whole days ago!) and toggled the option back to its original settings. I just checked it with my feed reader and it’s working fine.

But this makes me curious. I’d like to know more from the folks who use an RSS feed reader to follow this blog. Here are a few questions; I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to answer a few of them in the Comments for this post.

  • How often do you check the site? Regularly? (If so, I’m flattered to be on your list!)
  • Why do you prefer a news reader to a Web browser?
  • Does your news reader display formatted text and graphics?
  • Which reader do you use? On what computer platform?
  • Would you like to share any advice for people considering using a reader or for bloggers like me who aren’t fully aware of the benefits?

Although I’m a technical person and write about computer technology for a living, I made a decision long ago to concentrate on only those technologies that I use or write about. There’s just too much out there to learn it all — and still have a life that doesn’t revolve around a computer! As a result, my knowledge of computer technology is spotty, with expertise on certain topics balanced by sheer ignorance of others. (Ignorance is bliss, they say.)

Perhaps its time to give the RSS feed reader topic a bit more attention. What do you think?

PostScript: I just used my RSS reader to check out the other blogs that were included in it. It appears that none of them include the full text of the article. What’s going on here? Perhaps that’s why I discarded the idea of using a reader when I first tried it about two years ago? Because you had to go to the Web site anyway to read the article? It seems that, in many instances, the reader adds an extra step to following blogs. If you’re commenting on this piece, please comment on that, too.

Brew and Go

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I get a new coffee maker…again.

It’s disposable products all over again.

Brew and GoI’ve been using a Black and Decker coffee maker called “Brew and Go” (formerly, “Cup at a Time”) for about fifteen years now. I like fresh-brewed coffee every morning, but Mike doesn’t. It’s silly to make a whole pot — even if I do want a second cup, I won’t take it from a pot that’s been sitting on a burner for 30 minutes. So I make a single fresh cup every time I want one.

(And in case you’re wondering, I usually don’t drink brewed coffee in restaurants. Burner sludgification is one reason. The other is that most restaurants out here don’t know how to put enough coffee in the brew basket to make a strong enough cup. I think it’s because it’s pre-measured and it comes in bags. This is the same reason I’m avoiding those “pod” coffee makers. You can get decent restaurant coffee in New York and on the west coast, but in the midwest, southwest, southeast, and elsewhere, the only way I can get a cup of coffee that’s strong enough for me is to order a latte at a coffee shop.)

The other day, I bought my fourth or fifth one of these coffee makers. They work fine for about two years, then they start getting unreliable. The usual symptom is that they stop brewing before all the water in the reservoir has been heated and pumped up to the grinds. You wind up with a 2/3 full cup of coffee with leftover water. It isn’t a big deal to push the button again — usually that’s enough to get the rest heated and brewed. But experience has taught me that this is only the first of the pot’s symptoms. The next step is that button getting broken. And when that happens, the coffee maker won’t work at all.

So I consider the funky button a warning sign. I’ll need a replacement soon. So I went online and found a replacement for a good price on Amazon.com. (Note to my critics: Sadly, you can’t buy anything like this in Wickenburg, so shopping locally was once again out of the question.)

Oddly enough, they showed two models and the only difference I could see between them was the size of the machine. Since both were under $20 with only a $4 price difference and I figured that I could use one in my hangar, too, I bought them both. I was curious to see how they differed.

They arrived yesterday. Their boxes are identical with two exceptions:

  • One box says “Deluxe” (that’s the $17.99 model) and the other doesn’t (the $12.99 model).
  • One box illustrates and identifies a stainless steel travel mug (the $17.99 model) and the other one illustrates and identifies a plastic travel mug.

I opened the deluxe model and got a good whiff of the plastic aroma that accompanies many new appliances made primarily of plastic. I pulled out all the packing material, plugged it in, and brewed through some plain water. Then I decided to read the instructions for some tip to get the smell out. The instruction book only had four pages in English — not much to instruct.

Of course, the unit is made in China. I’m not sure if the original “Cup at a Time” was made in China. It was a long time ago. It was probably Taiwan back then.

I brewed up a cup of coffee using the built-in filter basket. I usually don’t use that thing because grinds get through it into the coffee. I like my coffee very strong and usually grind the beans to the first “Fine” setting on the machine at the supermarket. The “gold” filters that come with many coffee makers simply aren’t fine enough to prevent the grinds from going through. But I figured I’d try it a few times. If I could make a good cup of coffee with the reusable filter, I’d save a few bucks on paper filters — not to mention the time it takes to cut the #2 cone filters down to size. I’ll experiment over the next few days and maybe even get some coffee ground a litte coarser.

The first cup of coffee tasted a bit like the plastic I smelled. Or at least I assume so — I don’t make a habit out of tasting plastic. There’s a puddle of finely ground coffee at the very bottom of my cup, like mud on the bottom of a pond. The first problem will be remedied with time, the second will probably require a grind or filter change.

But the coffee maker performed flawlessly, using up all its water and making a nice, hot cup of coffee.

The old coffee maker is now sitting in the trash like the three or four that came before it. As we all know, it’s usually more expensive to get these things fixed than to buy a new one. That’s how the disposable economy came into being.

A little side story here. Our original DVD player only lasted about 5 years. We tried to get it fixed and everyone we brought it to quoted us a price to look at it that was more than the thing was worth. Then we tried to give it away to a school or electronics repair training facility so the students could use it to learn about the machine and/or how to fix it. No one would take it. Mind you, this isn’t a machine that had been abused. All of its parts pretty much still worked. It just didn’t play DVDs anymore. The only option was to throw it out.

I recently sold two very old Macs (an 8500 and a beige G3) on eBay. I got 99¢ for one and $9.99 for the other. Plus shipping, of course. Although I’d spent a total of more than $5,000 for the machines years ago, I was willing to take the money. Not because I needed the $10.98 but because I didn’t want to take the two machines — which were still perfectly functioning — to the landfill.

I guess their new owner will do that one day.

It’s time for another cup of coffee.

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The Dan Brown Code

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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?

Swansea Here We Come!

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I finally get my BLM permit for Swansea.

Miners houses at Swansea Town SiteIn December 2004, I applied for a permit to conduct helicopter tours to Swansea Town Site. Swansea is a ghost town in a remote area of the Arizona desert, west of Alamo Lake, south of the Bill Williams River, north of Bouse, and east of Parker. I takes about 3 hours to get there by car — well, by Jeep, since a car can’t make it on the sometimes sandy, sometimes rocky dirt roads — and about 40 minutes to get there by helicopter. The idea was to take day trippers out to the town site, let them walk around with a BLM self-guided walking tour brochure, give them some refreshments when they’re done, and fly them back to Wickenburg. The trip would cost $495 for up to three passengers.

Miners houses at Swansea Town SiteYou might be asking why I need a permit to use public land. BLM, in case you’re not aware, stands for Bureau of Land Management. It’s a part of the Department of the Interior. Of the Federal Government. These are government managed lands that belong to the people. And the people can use them, as long as they follow certain rules. Among those rules are that if you want to make money by operating a tour or anything else on BLM lands, you have to get a permit.

I applied for that permit in December. It cost me $80 that was not refundable and there was no guarantee that I’d get the permit. Talk about gambling!

Of course, I didn’t get any response at all to my application. I followed up in January. That’s when I was told they needed more information, like proposed landing zones. So I took my helicopter, which was brand spanking new at the time, and my GPS, and John and Lorna, and flew out to Swansea. I landed on my preferred landing zone, which was near the middle of town, and walked around taking GPS readings of the places that would work as landing zones. I came up with about seven of them. I also took photos. One photo showed my preferred landing zone, which just happened to have my helicopter in it.

When I got back to my office, I fed the GPS coordinates into my mapping software to produce a topo map with the coordinates on it. I then numbered them in order of preference. I took the photos from the flight, stuck it in an envelope with a cover letter and the map, and sent it to BLM in Lake Havasu.

A few days later I got a message on my voicemail from BLM scolding me for landing at Swansea. It was my understanding that as a private citizen on personal recreation (not for hire), I was allowed to land on BLM land, as long as it wasn’t wilderness area or my landing would cause damage (common sense stuff). So I wrote a letter back to them. They replied grudgingly, in writing, that I was right. It’s one of those letters you keep, if you know what I mean.

Next, they told me they’d have to do an environmental impact study. This irked me for two reasons:

  • The majority of people who come to Swansea do so on ATVs and some of them have no qualms about tearing up the desert with their fat little tires. They don’t care about archeological sites or desert tortoises. Irresponsible. Yet when I land, my vehicle touches the ground in precisely two long places — where my skids touch down — and I don’t damage a thing.
  • This environmental impact study, which I thought was a waste of time and money, would be done with taxpayer dollars. I’m a taxpayer. And it made me wonder how much other wasteful spending BLM did.

But you can’t fight them. You really can’t. So although I voiced my protest and even wrote to my senators and congressmen, I had no choice but to wait.

In actuality, what I did was write off the $80 as a bad investment and swear I’d never send another dime to BLM.

Time passed. The guy who was working my case retired. I really didn’t expect to ever hear from BLM again.

Then, in December, my cell phone rang while I was at the airport putting away the helicopter after a flight. It was a new person from BLM. He introduced himself and said he was working on my application.

“Bad news?” I asked, figuring he was calling to say that it had been turned down.

“Well, no,” he replied, sounding a bit surprised. “At least I don’t think so. We’re almost done with the application and it looks like it will be approved.”

I tried not to sound shocked. He went on to tell me that he’d need BLM listed on my insurance policy as an additional named insured (no problem). We then had a very pleasant conversation about Swansea and what a great place it was. He was very friendly and knowledgeable and a real pleasure to talk to. I wrote his name and phone number down so I could follow up.

Of course, I lost that information. (if you saw my desk, you’d know why.)

Months passed. Then on Thursday of last week, my BLM man called again. He wanted to put the permit in the mail, but needed the insurance. No problem, I assured him. I’d fax it over. He gave me his name and fax number. (Can you believe I lost them again?) Today, I called the office, got the information I needed, and faxed over the insurance. And when I got home from work the permit was in my mailbox.

I still can’t believe it.

Now I know my original contact had warned me that the process could take as much as six months. Well, he really said 180 days. But maybe he meant 16 months? Or 480 days? Because that’s how long it took. The government doesn’t exactly move quickly. (Look at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.)

The permit is a simple piece of paper. The letter that came with it has some restrictions that are easy to live with. Only 3 allowed landing zones — none of which is my preferred, but one of which is very good. A maximum visit of 2 hours — as if there will be someone there with a stopwatch to time us. No overnight camping. No more than four people total — that’s all that my helicopter can seat anyway, so it would be impossible to bring more.

My contact told me he needs to chat with me before I start using the permit. i’ll call him on Thursday.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to adding the Swansea Ghost Town tour to Flying M Air’s Web site.

Dana’s Last Flight

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I take a passenger on his last journey.

It all started months ago. Dana had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He called, wanting to join a flight up the Hassayampa River so he could tell me where he wanted his ashes scattered. Talk about planning ahead.

His friend Joe had gotten a custom half-hour tour for Christmas. Joe and his wife invited Dana to take the third passenger seat in the helicopter for the flight. When they arrived at the airport, I was very surprised. Dana didn’t look good. He was having trouble walking and had become bloated from the treatments he was going through. But he was alert and eager to go on the flight. He sat behind Joe in the left passenger seat. Joe snapped photos for the book he was co-authoring with Dana.

When we got near Seal Peak, Dana pointed it out. “I want to be scattered on the side closer to the Hassayampa River,” he told us. “So my ashes get washed into the river.”

I assured him I’d make sure it was done to his request. He wanted to know how much it would cost and did some math. He said he’d have the money set aside in his estate.

Oddly enough, I didn’t feel uncomfortable about it at all. I felt kind of good. I was getting final instructions — emphasis on “final” — from a customer. There would be no guessing as to whether the place we’d drop his remains was right. I knew it would be right.

Dana got a little better, then took a turn for the worse. His caregiver called me one day. She told me he talked all the time about his helicopter flight. She said she wanted to take him for another one. We talked about money. I could tell my regular prices were a bit beyond her means. But Dana was a lifelong Wickenburg resident, one of the folks who had helped shaped the town. There was a street named after his father and a flat named after his mother. The town claimed they’d be naming one of the peaks near his home after him. Surely I could contribute something to his last days.

His two caregivers brought him to the airport at the appointed time. He didn’t look good at all. His caregiver had to practically lift him into the helicopter. But he sat up tall and seemed alert, even though he didn’t talk much. His two caregivers climbed into the back seats — it costs the same to fly one passenger as three.

A while later, we were airborne, back toward Seal Peak. He wanted to be sure that I knew where to scatter him and that he’d have enough money set aside to pay for it. From there, we flew up the Hassayampa. I asked him where the old dam had been, the one that had washed away in the 1880s and killed all those Chinese workers. He pointed it out. He also pointed out the place downstream where some of the dirt from the dam had washed up. I took him southeast, past the Sheep Mountain house. They all enjoyed the views of the lake. Then west, over Santa Domingo Wash, across Grand Avenue, and around Vulture Peak. We were flying past Rancho de los Caballeros on our way to the airport when the low fuel light flickered. Time to land.

We’d been out longer than I’d planned. But it was worth it. Dana really enjoyed the flight. And his two caregivers, who probably needed the break, enjoyed it, too.

Dana passed away about a week and a half ago. One of his caregivers called to give me the news. She also dropped off one of Dana and Joe’s books at the airport for me. It was about Constellation Road and it had a few of the pictures Joe had taken during that first flight.

There was a big write-up in the paper about Dana. I didn’t see it because I don’t read the local paper.

Joe called later in the week. We made arrangements for Friday. Dana’s brother and sister would be joining him. I explained how the ash scattering worked: we’d wrap Dana’s remains in tissue paper and toss it out over the designated scattering area.

Joe, John, and Sophie came in two cars. They were surprisingly cheerful. We went into the airport’s back room to prepare Dana’s ashes in their tissue paper wrapper. I used two sheets — I didn’t want any parts of Dana slipping out during the flight.

We took a little scenic flight over town and past Dana’s house. Then we headed toward Seal Peak. I started to climb. I wanted to be at least 700 feet over the peak so the ash package would open and scatter.

My passengers pointed out places of interest along the way. They were enjoying the flight.

I circled the peak. The wind was blowing hard from the southwest. Joe saw the spot he wanted to aim for, but when he dropped the package, the wind took it toward the river. He saw a puff of dust — a puff of Dana, in fact — before the paper disappeared from view. We headed back to the airport along Constellation Road, making a short detour to try to figure out which peak the town was naming after Dana.

On the ground, Dana’s brother asked what he owed me. I knew Dana had set aside some money for the flight. I told him that it was my honor to take Dana on his last ride. I told them that the three of them should go out and have a nice lunch on Dana and me.

When they invited me to join them, I had to turn them down. Too much writing work to do. But maybe another time.