Hey, are you busy a year from next month? Care to join me for a cruise…and a tour of CERN?

I’ll be a featured speaker on the MacMania 14 cruise, which will run from April 12–19, 2012. This is the first time MacMania is doing a river cruise, and it sounds fantastic: leave from Amsterdam and follow the Rhine through Germany (and, eventually, along the French border), with stops in such interesting locations as Cologne and Strasbourg. The cruise ends in Basel, after which you can opt for an add-on tour of CERN in Geneva (I’m so there!) or a few days exploring Paris (I’m, uh, already there). The classes I conduct will cover both Macs and iOS devices, with a special emphasis on the iPad. (By the way, if you read the descriptions of my sessions, you may be able to find a subtle clue as to the subject of my next Take Control book.) Other MacMania 14 speakers are Josimar King and Chris Marquardt.

But wait, there’s more! This particular cruise happens to share the same ship and itinerary as the Bright Horizons 12 cruise, sponsored by Scientific American. So you can also attend seminars on astronomy, neuroscience, and other fascinating scientific topics.

The cruise and its various add-ons are, as these things tend to be, on the pricey side, but I think it’ll be money extremely well spent. Start saving your pennies (or centimes) now.

A good time will be had by all; I hope you’ll join us!

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!

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.

If you’re one of the few people who read this blog with any regularity, you know that there are periodic dry spells. It’s the same with all our sites: as much as I’d love to have new posts on each of them every single day, I do have a few other things to think about, and so the projects that bring in the least amount of money tend to be the ones that spend the most time on the back burner. You know how it is. More than once I’ve written a little blurb here saying that the reason I haven’t made an appearance in so long is that I was finishing up this or that book, a bunch of Macworld articles, or whatever. And sure enough, I have been working on new books and articles in the last month too. But that’s not the real reason I’ve made so few blog posts, written about so few interesting things, and posted so few lists recently. This time I have a really good excuse.

For the last year and a half, Morgen and I have been working on the Next Big Thing, and it truly is extremely big. We haven’t said anything, except to a small number of friends, family members, and colleagues, because the outcome of our planning was too uncertain—and beyond our control. Well, today it officially crossed over from dream to reality. And the news is: We’re moving to Paris! We leave on July 1.

If you’ve ever noticed how frequently we mention France on Interesting Thing of the Day, the fact that we’re moving to Paris may not come as a total surprise. But the story of why we’re doing this, how we managed to pull it off, what we’re going to do while we’re there, and all the rest, is a long one. So we’ve been working on a whole blog about the process of moving to France and living there. We’d hoped to have that blog up and running long before now, and it’s almost ready, but we’ve been too busy actually working on making this happen to finish writing about making it happen. Stay tuned for all the details you could hope for.

The significant event that occurred today was that we finally received our long-stay visas from the French consulate. The process of applying for these visas was dauntingly long, complex, expensive, and full of ambiguities and uncertainties. But it’s necessary for anyone wanting to live in France for more than three months. We spent about a year just getting ready to apply, and we spent the last seven weeks on pins and needles wondering whether the visas would be granted or not. But, under the assumption and hope that they would be, we’ve also spent this time sorting through and packing up all our worldly possessions and making all sorts of other moving-related arrangements. Not that we’re finished yet, or even close—we’ll need every second between now and when we leave to get ready!

We are unbelievably excited about this move (though also somewhat terrified). We look forward to sharing all the details, in our forthcoming blog, in the extremely near future. And, now that we’ve overcome this big hurdle, we hope to start catching up on all those delinquent blog posts.

Just to head off a few of the most obvious questions, here are some helpful facts: (1) I will continue writing for TidBITS, Take Control, and Macworld, and we’ll continue running all the alt concepts sites (such as Interesting Thing of the Day and Spectatrix), while in France. (2) We’re taking our cat with us! (3) We have already rented an apartment; it’s located in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. (4) Our current plan, subject to change, is to spend three years in France. (5) We both speak some French, but not nearly enough. We’ll be brushing up before we leave and working on it much more after we get there.