New TidBITS article: Stewing Over Safe Sleep (2007-07-30)

New Macworld article: A few items in Software Treats (July 27, 2007; August 2007 issue)

We’ve been promising this for a long time, and it has finally sprung to life: Truffles for Breakfast, our new blog about life in France.

Our original idea had been that we’d start the blog at the same time that we “officially” started the process of trying to get to France, so that we could document everything we went through—applying for our visas, dealing with all our household goods, etc.—in real time. Unfortunately, all that stuff kept us so busy that we didn’t have time to write about it too. But now that we’re here and most of the difficult work is behind us, we finally have time to sit down and reflect on what happened before, as well as begin writing about day-to-day life here.

As I said in Introducing Truffles for Breakfast, one reason for the new blog is laziness (or, to put it more positively, efficiency): it saves us from having to retell our stories many times. But we also hope it’ll be an inspiration for anyone who’s thought about doing something like this, and a resource for people who want to move to France in particular but have found the existing information available to be somewhat unhelpful.

We’ve got about a dozen posts up already, with dozens more in the pipeline. Enjoy!

New TidBITS article: Choosing Mac-Compatible Skype Hardware (2007-07-23)

New TidBITS article: FileMaker Pro 9.0 Released (2007-07-23)

Since I announced that we’d moved to France (both on this blog and on Interesting Thing of the Day), I’ve received lots and lots of feedback—some in comments, but most by email. The vast majority of people who have written have been enthusiastic that we’re doing something we really want to do; more than a few people have said they would love to do something similar.

But today, I got two messages, from two different senders (neither of them known to me), along the same lines:

Message 1:

Enjoy France, That is just enough information for me to remove you from my homepage. I do not have any love for France.

Message 2:

I liked this better before I learned you had bailed the good old U.S. of A. and fled to subversive France.

I would like to be understanding, sympathetic, conciliatory. But…seriously? You honestly mean to say that you liked me, or at least my writing, until you found out that I’m living in France—and that alone is a complete deal-breaker? Really? Every single person who steps within the borders of France, for any reason, is anathema to you? It boggles my mind.

I can only guess what’s prompting these comments. My supposition is that they’re from people who are unhappy about France’s military nonparticipation in the Middle East conflicts. People who, in protest, (still) eat Freedom Fries. I don’t know this to be the case, but it seems likely.

If my guess is correct, and if that’s the only rationale behind these comments, then I feel even sadder about the quality of education in the United States than I did before, because clearly some basic facts about France haven’t gotten through. Politically speaking, France is considerably more conservative, on the whole, than the U.S.—and it just elected a very conservative president who’s a big fan of George W. Bush. There’s also much more popular support for the military here than in the States. (On the other hand, there’s also (at least here in Paris) vastly more acceptance of people with other cultural backgrounds, especially people from Muslim countries.)

Those important facts aside, the whole notion of saying that because a country’s political leaders made certain decisions, the whole country is bad (or good) is incomprehensible to me. The United States has millions of patriotic, flag-waving Democrats who have disagreed with pretty much everything Bush has done but still love their country, and France, too, has plenty of citizens whose views on war differ from those of their leaders. How anyone can paint an entire country—tens or hundreds of millions of people—with the same brush is beyond me.

So, for the record, my moving to France has nothing whatsoever to do with my political views about either country. Good bread is good bread, regardless of who you do or don’t want to shoot.

A couple of days ago, Take Control Books released version 2.5 of my ebook Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac. Even though the version number didn’t jump all the way to 3.0 (meaning this is a free update for people with version 2.0 and 25% off for people with version 1.x), version 2.5 was a massive revision. I added new sections on VMware Fusion and VirtualBox, took out the section on Q (which is now pretty much irrelevant), and provided up-to-date info on the latest versions of Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp. And that’s just the biggest changes—tons of smaller stuff was tweaked too. If you have any interest in running Windows on your Intel-based Mac, this ebook should tell you everything you need to know.

Because things are moving so fast in this area, I predict that at least one, and more likely two, additional updates to this ebook will occur later this year. And I suspect I’ll start getting into more detail about actual usage scenarios. For example, even though I’ve now got two Intel-based Macs, I still haven’t gotten used to the notion that I can now run practically any software whenever I want. When I read about something that’s PC-only, I still have that old habit of disregarding it with a grumble, and I really have to train myself to stop. The world (of software) is my oyster now—almost any Mac, Windows, or Unix program out there will run happily on my Mac—and it will take me some time to fully come to grips with this new sense of freedom.

And, I’d just like to say that my new 17″, 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro—fully loaded with the high-res screen and 4 GB of RAM, of course—is an awfully nice way to run any and every operating system. It’s my first new laptop since my 1 GHz TiBook (ca. 2002), and I’m really digging it.

New MacVoices interview: Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac (July 11, 2007)

New Macworld article: The Google Office (July 10, 2007; August 2007 issue, pp. 60–69); includes Anywhere Wordsmith, Number Cruncher, and Mighty Messenger

New Macworld article: Fix Password Glitches (July 10, 2007; August 2007 issue)