Books

Summer of S((c)h)wag

A couple of weeks ago, I got an unexpected package in the mail: a large tin of delicious chocolate-covered cherries, sent by my publishers as a sort of congratulatory token for having finally completed the very long project of writing Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact. There’s just nothing better than getting goodies in the mail. Actually, many things are better than that, but let’s just say it’s really nice.

I’ve had a real run on surprise goodies recently. Last month, a reader who’s a professional photographer sent me a lovely print from a Moxy Früvous shoot he’d done in the early ’90s. A couple of weeks ago, I received a large gift basket of hot sauces, which I agreed to review and write about as a follow-up to my Interesting Thing of the Day article on Tabasco Sauce and my blog post about Measuring Spiciness. (Stay tuned. The wheels of progress are spinning slowly this summer.) A couple of days ago, I received two CDs from This American Life, courtesy of a reader I’d helped out with some technical questions. Just this morning, the Fisher Space Pen Company offered to send me a prototype of their latest model for testing—with purple ink, natch—as a result of my article on Space Pens. And yet another message in my Inbox this morning was from a reader and regular correspondent who wanted to know if he could buy me a gift subscription to Z Magazine.

Well, this is all quite extraordinary. I’m pleased, touched, grateful—even in the cases where a commercial motive is perhaps lurking behind the scenes. Of course, I would never, ever want someone to feel obligated to send me stuff—or even a thank-you note—for doing them a favor. Favors shouldn’t have to be repaid. But if you choose to send me stuff simply as a way of spreading some good karma around, I am certainly happy to accept. (Well, usually. When I wrote about Castor Oil, a reader offered to send me some castor bean seeds. As I have no outdoor space available where I could plant them, I had to decline.)

Because I’ve spent so much of my life at trade shows and conferences, I’ve become accustomed to using the term “schwag” to denote free merchandise, usually of a promotional nature. (Trade show attendees invariably walk away with all sorts of odd tchotchkes, usually emblazoned with corporate logos.) So by extension I’ve been referring to the items I’ve received recently as “schwag” too. Some cursory research this morning, however, turned up some curious facts. Apparently, there are three distinct spellings: “swag,” “shwag,” and “schwag,” which—though sometimes used interchangeably—have developed rather different primary meanings. As nearly as I’ve been able to determine, they (usually, not always) break down as follows:

  • swag: Typically used for stolen goods. Please do not send me any of this.
  • shwag: Typically used for marijuana of poor quality. Please do not send me any of this either. (And no, I don’t want it even if it’s high quality.)
  • schwag: Typically used for free merchandise (promotional or otherwise). You may send me this if you wish.

But please do me the courtesy of letting me know in advance if I should expect a package from you. As much as I enjoy surprises, I prefer to have a general idea of what I’m opening, times being what they are.

September: the New June

During the years when I managed software development for a living, I came to realize that any time estimate given by an engineer is a complete fiction. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, maybe it’s a desire to please the boss, or maybe it’s simply denial, but engineers always underestimate how long things will take—usually by quite a large margin. I’ve heard of various ways of dealing with this (such as “Double every time estimate, and then double it again” or “Replace ‘days’ with ‘weeks’ and ‘weeks’ with ‘months'”); I eventually learned to pad engineers’ estimates significantly before creating my personal timeline, and pad that timeline again before passing it on to my manager. That usually worked out pretty well. “Underpromise and overdeliver” became one of my mantras.

Alas, it appears I’ve now acquired exactly the same problem: my own time estimates have recently been grossly out of sync with reality.

As recently as April of this year, I imagined that by the end of May, I’d have completed half a dozen ebook projects on my list (new titles and updates) plus several Macworld articles, and be all ready for a nice, relaxing vacation month in June. I was SO looking forward to June. I further imagined that by the end of June, I’d have recuperated from all that writing, completed several much-needed household projects, and polished off umpteen ITotD-related tasks, so that I’d be ready to launch version 3.0 of the site in July.

Well, now that mid-August is here, I suppose I must finally admit that I’m unlikely to meet my May 31 or June 30 deadlines. I could get close to the May 31 deadline by September 1, though. Give or take a month. Although I did manage to take a full week off in June, it was a far cry from what I’d envisioned earlier—and I returned to a huge pile of work.

It’s not that I’ve been lollygagging around all these months. Quite the contrary: I’ve been working quite hard (for the most part)—long hours, late nights, too much caffeine. But things happen. Software misbehaves. Ne’er-do-wells in India try to hack my server to send thousands of spam messages. A magazine asks me to write a “quick” article on something or other. Readers email me with perplexing questions. Friends call me with computer problems. Something that I thought I could explain in a paragraph turns out to require three pages. These are all perfectly ordinary things, but things I didn’t budget for in my time estimates—and they’ve happened again and again. Bottom line: June is now scheduled for September. I am SO looking forward to September.

For those keeping score, however, I have at least made progress on my to-do list: I finished Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact, wrote several Macworld articles, migrated my domains to a new server, fixed half a dozen significant ITotD bugs, pruned our lemon tree, saw a bunch of movies, organized half the junk in my office, bought some colorful new T-shirts, and toured the Sharffen Berger chocolate factory. Just for example.

And for all of you wondering when you’re going to see the next (much-needed) update of your favorite ebook, allow me to assure you that I’ll soon be starting work on the next versions of Take Control of Mac OS X Backups and Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger, doing a major rewrite of Take Control of Email with Apple Mail to cover the new Tiger version of Mail, and expanding Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail to cover not only Mail 2.0 but other Mac OS X email clients as well. And all this will happen as soon as I’ve finished writing yet another brand-new ebook I’m working on, about which more later.

Are We Now Up-to-Date?

This week, after many months of preparation, my latest ebook was finally released: Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact. This title is different in several respects from all the other Take Control ebooks I’ve written. It’s much longer, for one thing: 249 pages. It’s also the first time I’ve written an ebook that will be distributed with the software it describes (in place of a conventional manual). So although you can download it free, it really costs $120 (since it’s of no use unless you have the software). The arrangement we have with Now Software is such that they get high-quality documentation quite inexpensively, while we forgo high per-unit royalties for (what we all hope and expect will be) high volume. So all parties—including readers—should benefit from this arrangement. After all, as with all Take Control titles, we’ll provide free updates to the ebook as new information becomes available.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this software, Now Up-to-Date & Contact is a highly regarded, cross-platform, network-ready scheduling and contact management package. If you’ve outgrown the capabilities of iCal and Address Book (on Mac OS X) or don’t wish to sell your soul to Microsoft in exchange (sorry) for Outlook on the PC, Now Up-to-Date & Contact offers a great solution for small and medium-sized businesses and even individual users. The just-released version 5.0 has a thoroughly updated interface, several major new features, and lots of bug fixes.

Before I started working on this ebook, it had been years since I’d last used Now Up-to-Date & Contact. Now I’m apparently the new authority on the software—even before the ebook was published, readers (having heard that I was writing it) sent me email asking technical questions. (While I’m flattered and everything, I don’t get paid to do tech support, so kindly direct such questions to Now Software in the future!)

Now Software is hard at work on the Windows version of the software, and I’ll be producing a Windows version of the ebook to go with it. There’s also a version 5.1 for Mac OS X coming, which will include some Tiger-specific enhancements (such as support for Sync Services) as well as, of course, yet another updated version of the ebook.

There is some irony in the fact that during the months I was working on this title, my schedule felt incredibly out-of-control. In theory, Now Up-to-Date could have enabled me to manage my schedule and to-do list masterfully, but I’ve learned through experience that one should never put “live” information into a program one is testing or writing about; the process of experimentation usually results in data loss. Countless times I thought, “This is a great program—I sure wish I could use it myself!”

But then, the real problem is that I habitually pile far too many projects onto my schedule. I’m working on that, though. I’ve added “Decline next project” to my to-do list. I’ll get to it eventually.

The Name of the Author

Anyone who reads Interesting Thing of the Day regularly has probably noticed that Umberto Eco is one of my favorite authors. Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Dr. Eco—OK, it was more of a live interview with Michael Krasny, from local NPR affiliate station KQED. Eco talked for about an hour and a half, then answered questions from the audience and signed autographs. I picked up a copy of his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and also got an autographed copy of Foucault’s Pendulum, one of my favorite novels of all time.

The thing that struck me most about Eco was that he’s not only incredibly smart, he’s really funny. The audience laughed a lot—though admittedly, there were a lot of “in” jokes that only made sense to those with substantial literary chops. And the talk was inspiring, too. As someone who’s immersed in the somewhat tedious work of writing one technical book and article after another, I found it fascinating to hear about his process of constructing novels, which sounds like great fun. In fact, to hear it put the way he described it, it sounds like something I could enjoy.

I’ll add that to my list, right after I get caught up reading all of Eco’s books. So, maybe 2009 or so.