I get annoyed as everyone else at people who use cell phones inappropriately—you know, during movies, while driving, or what-have-you. But lately I’ve been noticing an increase in one particular inappropriate use that baffles me. Yesterday, I got stuck in a waiting room for some time with a guy who simply could not bear to spend one minute in silence. He made and received calls continuously for at least a half hour, cutting deals, making plans, and basically involving everyone else present in the running of his business. He spoke that strange dialect MBAnglish on his phone, which in itself is quite annoying. But what truly baffled me was that because of the “hands-free” headset he was wearing, he had to use both of his hands to talk on his phone.

Here’s the picture: There’s an earbud in your ear connected by a thin cable to your phone. Inline, about six inches away from the earbud, is the microphone. Gravity and human anatomy being what they are, this microphone, left to its own devices, will hang inconveniently far from the wearer’s mouth. So everyone I’ve ever seen using one of these contraptions holds the microphone up to their mouths with one hand, while carrying the phone in the other. Thus: the two-handed “hands-free” phone.

Somehow, no one seems to notice the irony in this, the fact that you could simply ditch the headset and in so doing free up at least one of your hands. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people using these devices in this way, and I just don’t get it. If your hands aren’t free, then it’s not “hands-free.” But it seems that in some bizarre way, the users of these devices are convinced that they make it easier to talk on the phone, when in fact they make it harder.

Surely some of the blame rests with manufacturers of “hands-free” headsets, who should realize that the mouth is not located on the side of the neck. But people keep buying the things, so there’s little incentive to stop making them. On the other hand, a good bit of the blame rests with users, who would probably (in some cases at least) be pleasantly surprised to discover that the little microphone will actually pick up their voice just fine even if it’s not right in front of their mouth.

There are, of course, any number of headset designs that position the microphone closer to the mouth, many of which are even wireless. And you can set up most modern phones for voice dialing, enabling your cell phone to remain safely tucked in your pocket the whole time. Your hands could be free, they really could. But you have to take the first step. Let…go…of…the…microphone.

I have no words for how weird this is, but the following actually happened today.

At about 4:00, I decided to go out for a walk and do a few errands—you know, check the post office box, pick up a light bulb at the hardware store, buy some cat litter, that sort of thing. It was a lovely afternoon and this was going to be a very ordinary, refreshing walk. So I walked out the door, down to the end of the block and around the corner, and there on the sidewalk, scratching around in the dirt next to a small tree, were two chickens. They seemed perfectly happy and quite at home on the sidewalk in what is normally a pretty quiet residential neighborhood of San Francisco. They weren’t causing any particular trouble as far as I could tell, and they were friendly enough. But they were, I mean, chickens.

I have been to many places where it would not seem at all unusual to see a chicken on the sidewalk. A farming town in the midwest, say, or a small village in Costa Rica. But in San Francisco, where you can find anything—anything—on the street, I have never, ever seen a live chicken, to say nothing of two live chickens. And I simply had no idea what one was supposed to do upon encountering such animals that clearly did not belong there.

Perhaps, I thought, these chickens, which were not yet fully grown, belonged to the elementary school across the street. I saw two young children in front of the school with their father, and I asked them if they had any idea who the chickens belonged to. They did not. And none of us knew what the protocol was for dealing with an unexpected chicken discovery in San Francisco.

One option, of course, would have been to carry on with my walk; this is, I’m quite certain, what the majority of San Franciscans would do. I had an ethical problem with that course of action, however: nearby dogs were expressing a profound interest in the chickens, and had the birds chosen to escape by crossing the proverbial road, they would undoubtedly have been run over by an SUV. But what am I going to do, take the chickens home, keep them in my bathtub, and put up “Found: Chickens” posters all over town? Read the rest of this post »

New Macworld review: MailSteward 2.2 (November 14, 2004; December 2004 issue, p. 34)

When I set out to write about Apple’s Mail application for the Take Control series, I had several long discussions with Adam and Tonya Engst about how to divide the material into chunks of the right size, since we generally aim for 50-page ebooks and we clearly had much more than 50 pages worth of content. But as I started writing, I quickly discovered that the subject matter didn’t lend itself to the kinds of divisions we had come up with. After several false starts, I gave up on splitting the information and just wrote it as one very long document, hoping that a logical way to split the text would emerge after the fact.

After a great deal of mulling over that manuscript, Tonya suggested that I could split off the portion about fighting spam (roughly 20 pages) and expand that into its own complete ebook. The rest of the material would then be reorganized into a second book. It took quite a bit of additional effort, but the final result was a $5, 59-page ebook called Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail and a $10, 89-page ebook called Take Control of Email with Apple Mail.

Now, after all that tedious splitting, the two pieces have been rejoined into a printed book from Peachpit called Take Control of Apple Mail. It’s a gorgeous book, in full color, and includes our trademark free updates—anyone who purchases the printed book is entitled to free downloads of any future editions of the PDF version we produce. Quite a deal.

The only problem was that the book was printed a few weeks too late to meet the reset deadlines for certain large retail book chains. So although you can find it on Amazon.com and in a few bookstores, most brick-and-mortar shops probably won’t carry it until after the first of the year, at which point its days may be numbered, depending on how dramatic the changes are to the version of Mail that ships with Tiger. (A complete rewrite of the book, for example, would be beyond the scope of the free updates.)

Still, it was very nice to get my name on the cover of yet another printed book with barely any extra effort.

My first ebook, Take Control of Upgrading to Panther, came out just over a year ago. It has sold incredibly well and received rave reviews; it’s also now available in printed form as part of Take Control of Panther: Volume 1. In addition, it’s the first one of my books to have been translated into other languages. The arrangement the publisher has is that any willing and able party may translate the text into their language of choice but with no money paid up front. The translated ebooks are sold at 150% of the cost of the English versions, so that author, translator, and publisher can all receive equal shares of the profits at the same rate as the original. In other words, a translation becomes worthwhile for the translator only if he or she does enough marketing, and sells enough copies, in the target country to justify the time spent.

The first translation to appear, back in February (four months after Panther’s release) was Japanese, of which a respectable (if not stunning) 181 copies have been sold so far. In June (release + eight months), a German translation appeared; it’s sold only 26 copies, meaning the translator received a paltry reward for his efforts. Amazingly, just last month—a full year after Panther came out—a Dutch translation was released. Total sold so far: 17.

As cool as it is to be able to say my work has been translated into three other languages, I really feel for these folks who have invested so much of their time for virtually no pay. And yet, the reason seems fairly obvious to me: by the time the German and Dutch translations had appeared, the vast majority of potential customers had undoubtedly already completed their upgrades to Panther, with no further need for a book to help them. As it is, I’m only selling about one or two copies a day of the English edition (down from hundreds a day in the first few weeks), because most Mac users who have not yet made the move to Panther are now more likely to wait for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), due out some time in the first half of 2005.

Computer books always have a relatively short shelf life, because the products they describe change so rapidly. Thus, any hopes of making significant money from a translation require that the work be done as rapidly as possible after the book’s release. There will of course be an English edition of Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger when the time comes, and though no one has said anything to me yet about translations of that book, I certainly hope that if they happen, they happen quickly. Not just for the sake of the translators, either, but for the sake of the readers!

Morgen and I just got back from a t’ai chi class. As I’ve been studying t’ai chi off and on for about eight years, this is not in itself a remarkable fact. But the circumstances under which we’re now studying are kind of interesting.

We had been studying at the Inner Research Institute for about a year, and though we liked it at first, we had reached a point of frustration for multiple reasons. Our teacher, Dmitri, was great, but there were other things about the school’s approach and methodology that caused us some consternation. Plus, ever since we moved to our current home nearly two years ago, the school was much harder to get to, and the thrice-weekly classes, especially given the commute, were putting a real strain on our schedules. Apart from our pedagogical, stylistic, and logistical issues with the school, our income had dipped to a dangerously low level, and we couldn’t justify the expense anymore. So around September of 2003, we reluctantly decided to drop out.

At that time, we said to ourselves that Dmitri should really start his own school, in which case we’d be very happy to study with him.

So a couple of months ago, Dmitri called me and said that he had just been thinking to himself that maybe the time was right to strike out on his own, when he unexpectedly ran into a former student at the BART station. This woman runs a Montessori preschool a few blocks from our home, and she said Dmitri was welcome to use the space in the evenings to teach t’ai chi if he were so inclined. He took that as a sign, made up some posters, and started classes a few weeks later.

Since about the beginning of October, we’ve been back in class, Tuesday and Thursday evenings. We’re having a great time, and you can’t beat the five-minute walk to get there. We invariably leave with very sore legs, but I couldn’t be happier. It’s been too long since I felt that kind of pain on a regular basis. I don’t exactly look forward to the classes, and the actual repetitions of some of these moves can be grueling, but as I limp out of there, I always think to myself, Wow, this feels good. Maybe it’s just the endorphins, or maybe it’s the ch’i, but in any case the sensation is one of meaningful, useful, body- and character-building pain, coupled with a kind of relaxation I can’t seem to achieve any other way.

If you happen to live in San Francisco, you’re welcome to join us: 6–7 p.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays, 647 Chenery St. in Glen Park (about a block from the Glen Park BART station). Cost is $60 per month (two classes per week). Everyone is welcome, from absolute beginners to advanced students. We do the Yang style short form (Cheng Man-Ch’ing tradition), and will also be doing push-hands probably after the beginning of the year. More info: call Dmitri at (415) 285-1453.

Just yesterday I was telling Morgen that we might want to consider investing in a new digital camera for our trip to Patagonia. The one we have now is about five years old, which must be 35 in computer years. One of the things that has improved on many of the newer models is shutter lag—the delay between when you press the button and when the picture is actually snapped. Our current camera is pretty bad in that regard, making it all but useless for capturing action shots, such as a kitten jumping at a toy. As a result, most of the pictures I’ve taken of Zora that actually manage to get her face in the frame show her napping, about to nap, or just having awoken from a nap. But I’ve put a few fairly good images here: pictures of Zora. A sample:

What kind of person would go to the effort of starting a new blog and writing entries for a few days, only to abandon it for more than a month? The kind of person who badly needed the flexibility not to do something every single day.

Although I sometimes have Interesting Thing of the Day articles prepared well ahead of time (and my server is smart enough to post them on their scheduled date without my intervention), more often than not I’m working late into the night on the following day’s article, because ordinary work hours are often filled with other activities. And that every-single-day deadline can get very wearying after a while. So when I set up this blog, it was with the explicit intention that I would allow myself the freedom to go an indefinite number of days without posting anything. And that feels good.

The past four or five weeks have been filled with a continuous string of small crises, which together felt like a big crisis. My new cat was sick for a while (she’s better now); I was sick for a while (I’m mostly better now); strange and aggravating bugs showed up on my Web site (they’re fixed now); and of course there was that whole election thing (still a problem, but nothing I can do about it now). On top of all that, I was working hard to finish the first draft of my next (and long-overdue) ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups. When I get into an intense writing phase, everything else seems to disappear into the background. My In Box fills up, unpaid bills accumulate, phone messages go unanswered, and in general life gets put on hold.

On Tuesday evening as Morgen was slipping into a state of depression in front of the TV, I was putting the finishing touches on my manuscript, which is now in the hands of my editor for the first of what will undoubtedly be several rounds of editing and rewrites. But at least the hardest and longest part is done. And the election, though it produced disappointing results from the local through the national level, is also over with. So now I have a cat on my lap, the afternoon ahead of me, and only an average amount of daily work to do. What I think of as normal life.

And yet I’m also aware that the pattern of my life as long as I can remember has been long stretches of crisis mode—late nights dealing with urgent projects, assorted small mishaps, and other “abnormal” events—punctuated by very brief intervals of normality. This obviously shows that I have a skewed sense of what “normal” means; a state can hardly be normal if it occurs only rarely. But I’m going to indulge in this fantasy for a few days or however long it lasts.

My great plan for today is to do the dishes, fold the laundry, go for a walk, answer all that delinquent email, pay those bills, and perhaps get a start on writing here about some of the many things that have been on my mind during the last month. And maybe put in a few hours of productive revenue-producing work, just for good measure. In other words, to have a go at experiencing normal life for at least a day.