Joe Kissell – Page 35

Zora

After many months of thinking about it, Morgen and I finally adopted a kitten today. Zora is a 3-month-old brownish-gray tabby. I’ll put some pictures here at some point; I figure adjusting to a new home is traumatic enough without having to deal with camera flashes.

We were really tempted by a bunch of others, but somehow Zora charmed us the most. Hats off to the San Francisco SPCA for an outstanding orientation program for new kitten owners (“Kittengarten”) and all-around helpfulness.

One of our biggest worries was what we would name a cat. Every animal that come in gets a more or less arbitrary name, and some of them are pretty awful. For example, the woman handling the adoption showed us a picture of her dog Gus, who had originally been named Sushi. On the other hand, some names seem to fit just right—such as a black male cat we also liked named Mojo (which sounds like the beginnings of our names put together). Zora was in the same class; it seems to me like the right mix of fearless, playful, and contemplative. She’s clearly a very smart cat, and she’s already shown progress toward developing the crucial skill of falling asleep on my lap while I read a book.

October 2, 2004 by Joe Kissell Bricolage

Where is Patagonia?

I’ve just done something reckless and irresponsible: I’ve purchased two tickets to Buenos Aires. (Yes, round-trip tickets. I’m not that reckless.) Despite the fact that I was able to apply some frequent-flyer points to reduce the cost of the fare, this is going to be one monstrously expensive trip, and it’s going to put us significantly in debt. After all, we still have to pay for the tour we’re taking (meals, hotels, guide, ground transportation and so on), plus still more airfare to get us to and from our final destination: Patagonia.

On Christmas Day this year, Morgen will turn 30, and she wanted to do something special. By “special,” she meant going someplace so exotic that it was completely outside her comfort zone and her (already considerable) experience. I said, “You pick the place, and I’ll be there.” For a while it looked like we’d be going to Spain. Then Rome. Then Australia. But these places were ultimately not exotic enough. Finally she said, with irrevocable determination, “Patagonia.” So Patagonia it is. And my only question was, “By the way…where is Patagonia?”

Everyone who has seen The Princess Bride (that is, I believe, 99.3% of all English-speaking people) has heard of Patagonia—that’s where the original Dread Pirate Roberts had retired and was living like a king. (It’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it?) Patagonia is the name given to the southernmost part of South America, the west part of which is in Chile, and the east part of which is in Argentina. The exact northern boundary is somewhat indeterminate, but it seems to be around the Rio Colorado, giving Patagonia an area of about 350,000 square miles—about a third larger than Texas. It’s a really big place. And yet, it’s one of the most sparsely populated areas on Earth. You’ve got your sheep (producing the famous Patagonia wool), stunning mountains, massive glaciers, vast empty plains, and some of the fiercest winds anywhere. People—not so many. You don’t go to see amusement parks and resorts, you go to experience the breathtaking landscape, the wildlife, and the utter remoteness of it all. You go to think about pirates, explorers, ranchers, outlaws, and prospectors—the people who made Patagonia legendary.

I go for all these reasons, but mainly to help make my wife’s 30th birthday as special and meaningful as it can be. If everything goes according to plan, on her birthday we’ll be in Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego—the southernmost city in the world.

In all, we’ll be gone about two weeks. A lot of that is travel time. (Did I mention it’s very, very, very far away?) I’m expecting that this adventure will provide me with enough Interesting Things to last the winter. And I also expect that we’ll return home exhausted, (more) broke, and very happy.

By the way…in a couple of years, when I turn 40, I get to turn the tables and select the crazy destination. The wheels are already spinning.

September 16, 2004 by Joe Kissell Travel

Take Control of Panther, Volume 1

Yesterday I got my first sample copy of Take Control of Panther, Volume 1, a compilation of the first four Take Control ebooks. These should be appearing on the shelves of your favorite bookstore any day now. It’s nice once again to have my name on the cover of a (more or less) current printed book.

I wrote my portion of this book back in October of 2003, and though I’ve revised it several times since then, it seems kind of strange that it was nearly a full year before it appeared in printed form. Stranger still: I won’t see any money from this edition until January at the earliest, and possibly much later. That’s because of the odd way print publishers still work, even in the 21st century: royalties are computed quarterly (or, in some cases, biannually), but then the publisher generally has another full 90 days to actually send out a check. So in this case, since we’re just at the end of the third quarter, the publisher has until the end of December (i.e., 90 days from the end of Q3) to send out a check for whatever books were sold this month—less a certain percentage as a reserve against returns. The check will actually go to TidBITS, which will in turn send each of the contributors their cut. I don’t think very many copies will be sold in the next two weeks, so if I get a check in January it’s likely to be quite small. Maybe in April I’ll get a bigger check—just in time for the book to become obsolete as Apple releases Tiger!

September 15, 2004 by Joe Kissell Books Mac Stuff

Nisus Writer Express 2.0

Here’s a bit of irony for you. I’m using the newest and flashiest word processor (Microsoft Word 2004) running on the world’s most advanced operating system (Mac OS X), and still I have to contend with writing tools that are more awkward and less powerful than the ones I was using 10 years ago. I miss the days of Nisus Writer 4 and 5 in the early 1990s, because that tool, quirky though it was, made the job of writing (whether an academic paper or a 600-page book) as easy as I could imagine it to be. Those were the days.

The old Nisus Writer still runs in Mac OS X’s Classic environment, but with some limitations. And for a variety of reasons, I prefer never to use Classic if I can possibly avoid it. Meanwhile, as a professional writer, I am required to view and edit Word files, including comments and revision marks, which for all practical purposes restricts me to using Word as my word processor. Unfortunately, even the newest version of Word is a poor writing tool; for all its bells and whistles, it makes the basic writing and editing tasks I need to do most frequently unnecessarily difficult.

Over the past few years, Nisus Software, my erstwhile employer, has been recreating Nisus Writer from scratch as a native Mac OS X application. The first couple of versions of what they’re now calling Nisus Writer Express were too limited to be of any real use to me, but they recently released version 2.0, and I was eager to give it a try and see if it held any promise.

September 11, 2004 by Joe Kissell Mac Stuff

Zora

Where is Patagonia?

Take Control of Panther, Volume 1

Nisus Writer Express 2.0

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