Do the forums on your favorite Web sites get your blood boiling? Or simply frustrate you beyond belief? Well, join the club. You’re not the only one who feels this way. But there is something you can do about it. Read on.

A Brief History of Today’s Forums, from My Seat

I’ve been participating in an online community since the late 1980s. And no, that isn’t a typo.

I ran a computer Bulletin Board System (BBS) with message boards connected to the Fidonet network back then. Fidonet was a cooperative effort to gather up and distribute groups of messages posted on BBSes all over the world. Each night, in the wee hours, my computer would use special software to exchange the messages posted by my system’s users with those posted by others. They would, in turn, exchange with others. Like any true network, the content was distributed quickly and efficiently. Because there were so many Fidonet BBSes back then, I seldom had to make a long distance call to get new content. The distribution was as wide as the popularity of a topic — WRITING, I recall, was quite popular and would typically collect 300 or more new messages a day. Other topics might dribble in 2 or 4.

It was kind of cool. You’d log onto my BBS, The Electronic Pen, in the tiny town of Harrington Park, NJ. Perhaps you lived nearby. Or maybe you liked the other people who frequented the place. I might get 20 to 50 callers a day, connecting via 9600 baud modem on my two phone lines. You’d post a message in a local message board — that’s one that wasn’t part of Fidonet and could only be read on my BBS. Or perhaps you’d check out one of the Fidonet message bases. It would be full of messages from people all over the country. You’d read and reply to them. At night, your message would travel in a package with other new messages to another computer. Depending on scheduling and the willingness of BBS System Operators (SysOps) to do multiple connections in a day, your message would reach all the other BBSes that subscribed to that message base, usually within a few days or, at most, a week. If someone responded directly to you, you’d get that response a few days or a week later. Yes, it was slow. Yes, it was primitive. But it worked and it was free.

Fidonet was similar, in many respects, with the much more widely distributed Usenet newsgroups. Usenet was on the Internet, though, which was still in its infancy in those days. Few people had Internet e-mail addresses; instead, we had accounts on America Online or CompuServe or Prodigy or eWorld. (I remember, in the early 90s, exchanging e-mail with someone on CompuServe from my AOL account — it was a huge deal. Not only was I able to connect with someone in another network, but the exchange of three messages took less than 5 minutes!) Each of those systems had its own conferences or message boards, too.

What all these things had in common — Fidonet message boards, Usenet newsgroups, CompuServe Conferences, etc. — is that they enabled a large group of people from all over the country or world to come together and discuss topics. They were the precursors of today’s Internet forums.

The Death of Courtesy

The one thing that could always be counted upon in Fidonet message boards and Usenet newsgroups was flame wars. A flame war erupted when someone posted a message that was unkind toward another participant. Sometimes it was a minor rudeness that could have been avoided by the inclusion of an emoticon (i.e., smiley) and the “injured party” blew things out of proportion and escalated the situation with a ruder response. Other times, it was intentionally rude or belittling, resulting in a response that was equally so. Other participants would take sides, and soon the entire board would be filled with nasty comments going one way or the other, with a few non-partipants trying in vain to retain order. It was ugly, to say the least.

I have vague memories of filtering software developed so local SysOps could prevent offensive posts from leaving their systems. I was fortunate that my BBS was so small that none of the offenders originated there.

Flame wars were much more prevalent on Usenet than Fidonet back then. And they were virtually unheard of on AOL or CompuServe. Why do you think that is? I think it’s because of anonymity. Usenet was part of the Internet and the people who participated there were quite removed from the responsibility of a SysOp or network administrator. They felt freer to say whatever was on their mind. All Fidonet users could be traced back to a specific BBS with a SysOp who could reduce privileges on the user’s account and spread the word that he was a problem user. It was even easier on the fledgling AOL, CompuServe, and other online services; they knew exactly who you were from billing information and could cancel your account at any time.

Fast-forward to Today

The Internet has spread to almost every corner of the globe. Millions, if not billions, of people use it daily to get information and communicate with one another. The small online services that couldn’t compete — such as eWorld and Prodigy — are gone. Even the larger services are now Internet based, accessible to more than just members.

The nationally or internationally distributed message boards became dinosaurs. Information was readily available on Web sites. Communication was through e-mail. The once centralized information exchange became decentralized once again.

But since communication among users is an excellent way to build content for free, many Web site administrators have created their own forums for discussion. Anyone who has been using computers since the 80s will easily recognize a forum as today’s incarnation of local message boards on BBSes.

In today’s anonymous Internet world, where the vast majority of users prefer to hide behind an alias or cryptic user ID, these forums are populated by people who simply don’t care about the feelings of fellow participants. Most of them are rude know-it-alls who get more satisfaction out of blasting a fine point in someone else’s post than actually contributing helpful information.

As a result, many of these forums, which are often relied upon by large companies to provide technical support to their customers, are a frustrating mix of information — which may or may not be correct — and personality clashes. Their value is questionable — I’d go so far as to say that most of them are a complete waste of time.

Clash of the Nerds

By far, the biggest problem on today’s forums is the irresponsible and rude voicing of opinions that may or may not be relevant to the conversation. While I’m not saying that people shouldn’t voice opinions where appropriate, it’s the way that this is done that makes it a problem.

For example, someone in a forum might say that he’s had a lot of good experience with Product A to solve a specific problem mentioned in a forum. A proponent of competing Product B might come forward and accuse the other person of being stupid for using Product A, or that Product A is for morons. He won’t provide any facts to back up his argument or, if he does, the facts will be, in reality, more opinions. His purpose is not to provide useful information to other participants or even to answer the original question. His purpose is to bash Product A and the person who suggested it as a solution.

It’s the rude accusations that make this so distasteful, not only to the victim of the flaming, but to the innocent bystanders who agree with him or the people who have just checked in to learn something of value. And while this seldom gets out of control on well-moderated forums — like those managed by employees of a large company depending on forums for support — it’s common among poorly moderated forums.

A few weeks ago, I was a victim on a helicopter-related forum hosted by a Canadian helicopter magazine. I’d decided to try the forums after reading, in a recent magazine issue, that they’d be better moderated. I posted a question about helicopter helmets in one topic of the forum, then posted about the availability of a co-pilot seat for ferry flights in another topic. Here in the U.S., it’s relatively common for helicopter operators to offer flight time, for a nominal fee, to other helicopter pilots interested in building time. I had some long ferry flights coming up and was hoping to fill that seat to cut my ferry costs. Well, you’d think that I’d asked these guys to cut off the head of their first child. A bunch of them came down on me like I was some kind of evil monster. One of them even had the nerve to use the contact form on my Web site to send me a nasty message. (Some people really do need to get a life.)

I quickly decided that I’d made a mistake — not just in posting the message in the forums there, but for joining the forum in the first place. It was pretty obvious that there was little or no moderation by the magazine’s staff, despite the assurances that there would be. It was also obvious that the guys on the forum had not progressed past a high school mentality. They were unable and unwilling to see more than their own points of view. Although a more mature person could have expressed an opinion calmly and reasonably, this was clearly beyond their capabilities. Instead, they simply lashed out rudely, bashing me for suggesting such a thing, and painting me as some kind of evil witch trying to suck money out of poor, unemployed pilots.

All because I offered flight time in my aircraft for less than the going rental rate.

I contacted the forum administrator and told him to delete my account and any message I’d posted. To his credit, he complied within 24 hours. I’ve learned my lesson and won’t be back. And I probably won’t be joining any other helicopter forums, either.

But how many other knowledgeable, mature, and responsible people have been so turned off by the behavior in that forum to avoid it? And what about other similarly run-amok forums?

Could it be that the majority of people who participate in forums are those nasty, opinionated jerks hiding behind their aliases so they can get a sick thrill out of bashing others with conflicting opinions?

Could that be why forums suck? I think it’s the main reason.

My mother taught me that if I don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Why can’t forum participants remember this “Silver Rule”? They’ve obviously forgotten the Golden Rule, too.

Where’s the Information?

Forums run by big companies to supplement (or replace) true technical support may be moderated to prevent flame wars, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Most of them are designed in such a way that the information you need is virtually impossible to find. As a result, you’re forced to create a new topic to ask a question, then monitor that and hope it gets a response.

Is that good technical support? I don’t think so.

The forum flaws that make it tough to find information can be broken down as follows:

• Non-existent or poorly designed search feature. How frustrating is it to go to a forum and see a list of threads but no way to search them? Or a search feature that results in too many results? Or none at all? Or can’t narrow down results by date? Or product?
• Forum categories that are too broad. A well-designed forum is separated into categories or topics (both terms are used), each of which contains topics, subtopics, threads, or posts (again, a variety of terms are used). Imagine, if you will, a software support forum with just two categories: Windows Support and Mac Support. Now imagine that all the questions are posted as hundreds of individual threads in either one of those categories. How likely is it that you’ll find support for the Product A printing problem on your Mac? Won’t you, like many of those before you, simply start a new thread with your problem? And how long before it’s buried and you can’t find it?
• Threads that wander off topic. Imagine a forum thread with the subject line “Can’t Print with Product A on my Mac with HP LaserJet 2100TN.” Sounds pretty specific, no? You’d expect to find a discussion of that problem, wouldn’t you? But what you may find is (1) a Windows user claiming that Product A doesn’t work well on Macs, (2) a comparison of Canon and HP printers, (3) complaints about the same printer not working with Product Z from another manufacturer, (4) questions about Product A and PDFs, etc. In other words, anything remotely related to the topic. And once the discussion starts to stray, it can go anywhere. How useful is that for product support?

Personally, I have a problem with forum-based technical support. In most cases, the company is relying on its users to help each other. This is virtually cost-free support for the company — even cheaper than sending scripts and telephones to India or Pakistan. The quality of this “help” is not what I’m paying Adobe or Apple or Microsoft the big bucks for when I buy their software. When I have a question, I need an accurate answer quickly from someone or some resource that knows the answer. I don’t have time to screw around with support forums that may or may not answer the question for me.

Is the Information Accurate?

The scariest part of depending on forum information for support is the accuracy issue. Is the information on a forum accurate? Will it do more harm than good?

Perfect example: I visited a number of photographic forums to get information on how I could clean the CCD sensor on my Nikon D80 digital SLR camera. This isn’t a hugely expensive camera, but it did cost $1,000, which ain’t exactly cheap. Dust on the CCD is a common problem and there’s no local resource for me to get it cleaned. I wanted to see if there was a do-it-yourself solution, what equipment I needed to get it done, and how I could do it myself. What I found were dozens of different answers to this question, ranging from never clean the CCD yourself (!) to rub it with Solution A on a cotton swab. Some provided a detailed equipment list that varied from one person to another. Others provided step-by-step instructions that varied from one person to another.

With all this conflicting information, how was I to know which solution was correct? Obviously, I couldn’t know. So rather than put my relatively expensive equipment at risk of permanent damage, I decided to get it cleaned professionally, next time I’m in Tempe, 80 miles from my home.

(And in case you’re wondering, Nikon tells U.S. owners not to clean it themselves. But that’s just because Nikon is eager to avoid liability if it’s damaged during cleaning. In Japan, Nikon supposedly sells a cleaning kit with instructions. I’m not in Japan and I don’t read Japanese.)

Examples like this can be found on any forum. One guy says one thing, another guy says the opposite. Who’s right?

I personally believe part of the problem is a subset of the same sick jerks who start flame wars. In this case, they’re spreading their “expertise,” which is neither accurate nor reliable. They want to be seen as experts, so they spread their opinions as facts. Will you be foolish enough to take the advice of one of these people? I hope not.

Of course, the problem is even worse when incorrect advice is offered on a poorly-moderated product support forum.

What You Can Do

As a member of an online community, there’s a number of things you can do to make forums better:

• Ignore the trolls. If there’s a jerk in a forum who’s saying stupid, nasty things, ignore him. I know it’s difficult, but it is possible. And guess what? If everyone ignores him, he will go away. These people thrive on conflict. They’re safely hidden behind their online handles, so they’re not worried about repercussions. They’ll say whatever they want, whatever will get the most rise out of the rest of the community. They’re doing it for attention. Don’t give them any and they’ll go elsewhere to get it. (Possibly to a local school where they’ll shoot innocent kids; but that’s a social problem I’m not going to address here.)
• Rat out the trolls. If the forum is otherwise well moderated but there’s just one or two jerks trying to bring the discussion down to their level, contact the moderator privately, via e-mail or feedback form, and complain about the offending party. Use facts to support your complaint. If the forum moderator cares about the quality of the forum, he’ll do something about. If he doesn’t, then it’s likely you won’t want to be part of that forum anyway. Let it go.
• Don’t fan the flames. If you see a conflict brewing in a forum, don’t pick a side and join in. You’ll only make it worse. Instead, if you know any of the people on either side, you might want to contact them privately and urge them to drop it. Or see the first two points here for what’s likely to be better advice.
• Back opinions with facts. Got an opinion to share in a forum? Great! Lots of forum participants are looking for feedback from people with more experience or knowledge. But don’t state an opinion unless you can back it with facts. A statement like “Product A sucks.” is far more likely to get you in hot water and start a flame war than “I don’t like Product A because I’ve had a lot of trouble getting it to work with my printer and could not get any assistance from the developer to resolve the problem.”
• Search before you post. If you’re in any forum where you expect an answer to a question, search the existing topics and threads before you add a new one. Your question may have been answered elsewhere in the forum. If the forum’s search feature is well-designed and functional, you may get an answer within minutes of arriving on the forum — rather than the time it takes for you to write out your question and wait for a suitable response. This also makes it a lot easier for others to find answers.

If you’re a forum moderator, there’s a lot more you can do to make your forums the best they can be:

• Use the right software solution. A forum’s design depends, in part, on the software used to present the forum online. Choose software that gives you the options you need: search feature, categories/subcategories, threading, moderation, spam protection, etc. (Unfortunately, I don’t have any suggestions; I gave up running forums a while ago.)
• Design the forum with appropriate categories and subcategories. This will help make it easier for forum visitors to find the discussions they’re looking for.
• Make sure the search feature works. There’s nothing more frustrating than using a search feature that doesn’t find appropriate results. If your search feature doesn’t work right, you’ll get lots of repeat postings.
• Moderate. I cannot stress this enough. While the free speech argument is very compelling, are you operating your forum as the soapbox for the masses? Or do you want to maintain some kind of order? Ban the trolls, delete inappropriate messages. If someone’s post is not in line with the purpose of your forum, it should go. You have the power and I think you have the right. But don’t advertise your forum as a place for all opinions if you’re going to delete the opinions that don’t agree with yours. You’ll find yourself under fire very quickly. Instead, on an opinion-based forum, enforce courtesy among commenters to keep things civil. We can all learn from other people’s opinions, but not when those opinions are rudely shoved down our throats.

What about Blog Comments?

If you’re a blogger with an open comment feature on your blog, you may recognize a lot of these points. You don’t need to operate a formal forum to experience the nightmare of trolls and flame wars. You might already have them on your blog.

All of this advice applies to bloggers and blog commenters, too.

What Do You Think?

Use the Comments link or form for this post to share your views. Just remember to play nice…

One of the reasons I have a Treo and not an iPhone or other cool, trendy communication device is because it supports DUN — dial up networking. This is a feature that enables me to use the Treo’s Internet connectivity to connect my MacBook Pro to the Internet via Bluetooth.

So as long as I’m in a place where my Treo can connect to the Internet, I can connect my computer to the Internet. I’ve successfully used this in off-the-grid locations such as our vacation property on Howard Mesa, on a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska, and in various hotels, motels, and restaurants all over the country. In fact, I used DUN to post this blog entry from a B&B in Girdwood, Alaska.

If you’re wondering how to do this, read an article I wrote about it for Peachpit Press.

DUN works. And yes, it works better than regular modem dial-up. But not much better.

The connection speed is slow and inconsistent. It might work well for a short time, then get bogged down. And if you don’t actively use the connection, you’ll get disconnected. (I wrote “Ping to Keep Your connection Alive” on MariasGuides.com to explain my workaround for this problem.) You’re also likely to get disconnected after a certain amount of time even if your connection is kept active — I seem to get cut off after 30 minutes or so. Or if you get an incoming call. And it seems to me that it takes multiple connections to get any task done.

Doesn’t sound very good, does it?

Well it isn’t. But it is better than nothing.

I’ve now had my new POV.1 video camera for just over a week. And I’m not too pleased with my ability to operate it yet.

Tests Runs Okay

I made a few test runs with the camera.

The first consisted of me walking around the downstairs of my house, holding the camera in my hand and narrating what I saw. This was mainly a test of the controls and sound capabilities. It produced some predictably boring yet perfectly fine quality video. So far, so good.

Next, I attached the camera to a hat and had it running when I went down to feed the horses one evening. More narration, but I was limited to where the camera pointed because it was attached to my hat and the monitor was in my pocket. I couldn’t see what the camera was really pointing at. It turned out, it wasn’t pointing at what it should have been for about 90% of the video. So while the sound test worked fine — you could certainly hear my heavy breathing as I walked back up the hill — the video was not a keeper.

Next, I decided to test the setup in the helicopter. Because running the helicopter is not what a budget-conscious individual would do unnecessarily, I wanted my test to test all systems: the camera mount, video quality, and sound. Sound was the tricky part. I couldn’t just let the mic pick up cockpit sound because that was mostly helicopter engine and rotor noise. Instead, I had to figure out a way to get just the sound I wanted — intercom and radio sounds — directly into the POV.1’s recorder.

The solution was to use a tiny powered lapel mic (similar to the one shown here) that I happened to have for a cassette recorder. The mic’s pickup was small enough to fit inside my headset ear cup, dangling right over my ear. I secured it in there with a clip. Any sound that got to my ear would get to the recorder. And the Bose Generation X headset’s active noise cancellation would filter out much of the sound of the helicopter running.

[A side note here: a more permanent solution would be to get an avionics guy to install an audio out jack. I already have an audio in jack, which is standard on Robinson helicopters, and allows me to listen to my iPod while I fly. An audio out would make it possible for me (or a passenger) to connect a video camera to the helicopter's intercom system.]

I mounted the camera on the bar between the two front seats, using a mount I’d bought a year or two ago for a regular digital video camera. (That experiment had not gone well; the camera couldn’t compensate for the helicopter’s vibrations.) Then I went flying with Ed, my mechanic. We took a 14-minute flight around Vulture Peak, down to Vulture Mine, and back to the airport. Ed held the recorder unit while I flew. I used Viddler to post an edited-down version of the video. It wasn’t bad at all.

In fact, I thought I was ready for “prime time.”

Real Life Trials

My next for-hire flight was the next day. I was taking a dad, his birthday-boy son, and his son’s friend on a 50-minute flight to see the ghost towns and mines in the Wickenburg area. I figured I’d video the flight, then put the video on a DVD for the dad and his son.

[Another note here: That day, as I waited for my passengers, I met a pilot from Oregon who typically flies with three cameras on his plane. He had his laptop with him and showed me some of the video, which he'd set to music. It wasn't very exciting stuff -- not for a fellow pilot, anyway -- but he said that his non-pilot friends love it. That wouldn't surprise me at all.]

I was all set up as I had been the day before. As the helicopter warmed up, I started the recorder and placed it back on the space between the two back seats so it would be out of the way. I then did the flight. When we returned and shut down, I was surprised to see that the recorder was turned off. I figured it had run out of space on the SD card. But when I brought it inside, I was embarrassed to see that it had only recorded 41 seconds of video. The power button must have been hit after I put it down.

Dang! No video for my clients.

Anxious to get some real video to send them, Mike and I went out again with Mike’s mom. This time, I turned the camera on and locked its controls to prevent an accidentally pushed button from shutting it off.

I managed to capture 80+ minutes of video and sound. The only problem was, Mike’s mom’s profile or hands or shoulders are in every shot. In attempting to capture what was out the window in front of her, I managed to capture a bit too much of her. And 80+ minutes of partially blocked views, much of which are of boring open desert, really isn’t very interesting to anyone. Here’s a tiny bit I extracted and set to music.

On Wednesday, I took another client “heli shopping” down in Scottsdale. She’s a much smaller woman and I adjusted the camera a bit to take in more of the panel and less of her. But I also made the fatal error of using the camera’s “loop” mode to avoid capturing lots of boring stuff. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand how loop mode really worked, so when I thought I was turning it on and tagging the video, I was really turning it off. I didn’t capture any video at all.

Sheesh. Am I a loser or what?

Today’s Plan

For today’s flight to Sky Harbor, I made some changes to the mounting setup. I’d ordered a special mounting clamp from the V.I.O. people and it arrived on Wednesday afternoon. It would give me more flexibility in where I could mount the camera.

There are two places I had in mind. The first was inside the cockpit bubble, at the front passenger’s feet. There’s a ridge there at the very bottom of the bubble and I’m pretty sure I can use the clamp and the 12-in. flexible mount I also bought to mount the camera inside, pointing out. The drawback of that location, of course, is glare. An additional drawback is the position of the recorder box and the difficulties I’d have attaching audio to it. (I can’t have any wires hanging loose around the critical areas near my flight controls.)

The second place I had in mind was where I actually attached it: on the vent opening for the pilot’s door. This mount, which is shown here in the photos I took with my Treo yesterday, has the camera head outside, pointing slightly to the right and slightly down. The rest of the unit is inside, fastened to the helicopter’s airframe. I have all wires securely attached to various things that’ll keep them away from my controls. And I wrapped the camera and mount with red electrical tape, which is somewhat elastic and easier to remove than duct tape. I showed the setup to Ed and he agreed that the camera was not likely to come loose during flight.

Today will be an important test. If I can get the camera to work well from this position and not screw up using the controls, I’ll have some really interesting video. And if the mount and tape hold properly, it might be a good location for future installations.

To Las Vegas on Sunday

We’ll be flying to Las Vegas on Sunday. My planned route will take us over some very boring desert to Lake Havasu City. From there, we’ll fly up the Colorado River, past Topock, Bullhead City and Laughlin, Lake Mohave, Black Canyon, the Boulder Dam, and Lake Mead before turning west and flying right down Tropicana Boulevard to McCarran Airport. It’s one of my favorite flights and I’m eager to get the “good parts” on video.

So cross your fingers for me. I need to get some good shots soon.

Like so many techno-geeks these days, I’m involved in a bunch of social networking sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, RedBubble, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc. And all of these sites give each member the ability to include an avatar — an image to represent that user.

Maybe I’m not very creative, but my avatar is a photo of me. It was taken by photographer Jon Davison during one of our flights last September. It shows me in one of my favorite places: at the controls of my helicopter, flying over the Arizona desert. (I think I’m over the Little Colorado River Gorge in this shot.)

The way I see it, my avatar is supposed to represent me. What could represent me better than a photo of me doing something I like to do?

Evidently, not everyone has the same idea. While many of the avatars I see in Twitterrific are photos or drawings of the people they represent, quite a few are not. And in other social networking sites — MyBlogLog comes to mind — the majority of avatars don’t bear any resemblance to the people they’re supposed to represent.

I find this bothersome, especially among my Twitter friends. Why? Well, in most cases, an avatar is the only visual representation I have for a person. If the avatar features purple hair or a goofy cartoon face — you know who you are, folks! — that’s the image I have of that person. And it’s a lot tougher for me to take these unrealistic avatars seriously.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I find it easier to communicate with people I can take seriously.

A few more notes on avatars:

• Some people seem to like using their Second Life avatars as their social networking avatar. While I could write a dissertation covering my thoughts about Second Life — starting with, is your first life so bad that you need a second one? — I’ll just say that Second Life avatars are generally a highly stylized version of how people want to look. While few of us are supermodels, surely there’s a decent photo of these people somewhere that they can use online.
• Some people use glamour photos for avatars. I have a colleague who does this. When I met her in real life, I didn’t recognize her. Let’s face it, we only look like our glamour photos in our glamour photos — after they’ve done the photo shoot and brought our faces into Photoshop for some digital plastic surgery. Every time I see this avatar, I have to remind myself that she doesn’t really look like the photo.(Of course, it’s also made me want to get a glamour photo.)
• Some people use photos of their pets as avatars. Talk about going to the dogs! Do the dogs really look better? Or do they just identify with their dogs? Ditto for cats, birds, and miscellaneous wild animals.

Of course, none of this has to do with special-purpose avatars used to promote an idea or cause. An example is the Frozen Pea avatars that many of us wore on Twitter for a few Fridays to raise awareness and funds for Breast Cancer Research through the Frozen Pea Fund. I was a single pea for the day. My favorite avatar was one Twitter friend who created an image of his head sticking out of a pea car.

But I’d like to start a movement among serious social networkers. Be proud of your face and show it off as your avatar! It doesn’t have to be a full-face shot; it can be creative. (Some of the best avatars I’ve seen show only part of a person’s face.) But it should show you, as you really are.

I’d just like to see who I’m tweeting to.

A few weeks ago, I quietly added a few feature to this blog, mostly as a test. Provided by AudioFeed Creator, it automatically creates audio files from the text in my blog entries. Visitors can then subscribe to the audio content as podcasts or listen to individual entries from their Web browser or Web-enabled mobile phone.

All of this is done automatically for me, based on my full-text RSS feed. And no, there isn’t a group of people locked up in a room and forced to read all these blog entries aloud into a microphone. AudioFeed Creator uses voice synthesis. The result is actually pretty darn good.

Best of all, it’s free.

At this point, I’m considering the experiment a success. The entries are being created on a timely basis and they’re easy to listen to and understand. There’s absolutely no effort on my part. It seems like a complete no-brainer to add this feature to the site permanently.

Who might listen to it, other than people who like my words of wisdom read to them by a computer? I can see only two other groups:

• People who like to follow this blog and have more time to listen (usually while on long drives) than read.
• People with visual problems who can’t read the blog at all.

This second point makes is pretty clear that the audio feed adds accessibility to this site. While I realize that accessibility issues are important overseas, it’s something that most U.S. based blogs ignore. I’m not an accessibility expert, but I assume that making each blog post audible must increase accessibility somehow.

Anyway, I invite you to try it out for yourself. Let me know what you think by adding your comments to this post.

And if you have a blog with a full-text RSS feed, why not give AudioFeed Creator a try?

Now if only I could figure out how to change the voice to a female’s.

After sweating out the morning, waiting to hear detailed news about Apple’s new products, I finally got my hands on the specs for the product I’ve been waiting for: MacBook Air. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the product I’ve been waiting for after all.

Wait. Let’s start again. The above is what I wrote on Tuesday, before I laid hands on the MacBook Air. Now that I’ve fondled its sleek aluminum body and hefted its airy lightness, this article may have a different ending.

It’s Friday morning and I’ve been to Macworld Expo and back. And, at the show, I got a chance to look at Apple’s new entry into the sub-notebook field: the MacBook Air.

First, let’s talk specs.

Yes, it’s [currently] the world’s thinnest notebook, at about 3/4 inch tall. That’s thin. It’s about half the thickness of my obese 12″ PowerBook. (How did I carry that fat thing around for so many years?)

Other dimensions — for those of you who like all the numbers:
Width: 12.8 inches
Depth: 8.94 inches

Since my old 12″ PowerBook is sitting on my desk, let’s measure it up for comparison:
Width: 10.8 inches (estimated; I don’t have high tech measuring tools here)
Depth: 8.5 inches

The screen is a generous 13.3 inches measured diagonally. The PowerBook’s (for comparison) is about 12.25 inches.

It certainly is light, weighing in at only 3 pounds. That fat little 12″ PowerBook weighs a whopping 4 pounds and 11 ounces.

These are the numbers. And they are what disappointed me when I first went through them. Although thinner and lighter, the MacBook Air’s dimensions are also considerably larger than the computer I was hoping to replace with it. Because although “thin is in” and all that jazz, it’s overall size that can determine how truly portable a computer is.

Look at it this way: would the Moleskin people be selling so many of those little black books if they were the same size as the composition book you used in elementary school?

But I got to see the Air in person and touch it and hold it in my hands. And you know something? In real life it looks smaller than I expected it to. And the lightness feels lighter.

My overall impression was very positive. I felt myself wanting one of them, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand.

How does Apple do that? With smoke and mirrors? Hypnosis? Or it it simply the lighting in their Macworld Expo booth?

Now let’s look at what’s crammed in there.

There’s a lot packed into that slim case:

• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 80 GB ATA hard disk
• AirPort Extreme (IEEE 802.11a/b/g compatible)
• Bluetooth 2.1
• iSight Camera
• one speaker
• Audio Out port
• USB 2.0 port
• Micro-DVI port
• 13.3″ (diagonally measured) monitor
• full-sized keyboard

There are some options — processor and hard disk come to mind — but that’s basically it.

Isn’t something missing?

Yes. It’s the optical drive. Just as Apple led the pack in the phasing out of the “floppy” drive when it released the original iMac all those years ago, it’s removed the optical drive from the MacBook Air.

This is a tough nut to swallow. Apple has built a $99 external SuperDrive that will only work with the MacBook Air, that I believe most people will buy. But Apple has also created “new technology” that enables you to access the CD/DVD mounted on another computer to install software, etc. (This is something I already do in a limited way, since the optical drives on both my 12″ PowerMac and 15″ MacBook Pro are dead; the MacBook is covered under warranty and is making its way back to Apple as I type this.) But what do you do if your Air is the only computer around and you didn’t bring along an external disc drive? Like when you’re on a plane for four hours and the movie is something you can’t bear to watch?

You’re SOOL.

Personally, I think the exclusion of this vital piece of hardware is a big mistake. And it’s what may prevent me from investing in a MacBook Air to replace my 12″ PowerBook.

What was I expecting?

Well, since I don’t read much on rumor sites, I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. I was expecting a “sub-notebook.” To me, that means something smaller than the usual notebook. It doesn’t necessarily mean thinner.

What I wanted, however, was a real replacement for my 12″ PowerBook: a modern version of the same machine that had modern processing power, a decent sized hard disk, wireless, and the all-important optical drive. And I know I’m not alone in that wish.

You see, I believe that the 12″ PowerBook is the best notebook computer Apple has ever made. Perfectly sized for travel, able to display at 1024×768 resolution, all necessary ports, wireless access, optical drive. What else could you ask for? I wish Apple would have brought that up to date by thinning it up a little — hell, it’s only an inch and a half tall! — and lightening it up a bit.

This is what I wanted. This is what a lot of people wanted. But this isn’t what Apple delivered in the MacBook Air.

But Don’t Listen to Me

If you’re in the market for a laptop computer, do check out the MacBook Air. For you, it might be a dream come true.

One thing’s for certain: It certainly will generate a lot of computer envy among your friends.

As this is appearing online, I’m boarding a plane for Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This is yet another one of my quick in and out trips — I really can’t afford to be away from my office for more than two days. I’ll arrive in SF around 9:30 this morning and depart around 3:30 on Thursday afternoon. In between, I’m staying at the Nikko.

I have a lot to squeeze into this trip:

• Wednesday, 12:00 PM - meeting with two editors, one publisher, and a representative from an online publishing group regarding ebooks and ebook piracy issues. I’m tired of seeing little ebook revenue while copies of my ebooks are floating around on file sharing sites. Armed with some excellent feedback from an ebook reader, I’m going to propose some changes to the way my work appears in ebooks. I also hope to spend some time talking to one of my editors about a book we hope to start next week.
• Wednesday, 2:00 PM - appearing at the Peachpit Press booth on the show floor. I’m doing a 45-minute presentation and hope to cover some productivity tips and tricks for Leopard users. Peachpit will be videoing the presentation for eventual distribution online.
• Wednesday, after 3 PM - seeing the show floor. I’ll be walking around armed with my cameras: Treo for instant Web publishing of images, Nikon D80 with fisheye lens for a very different look at the show floor, and video camera for content I hope to put together as a short Macworld Expo movie.
• Wednesday, after 6 PM - attending one or two parties (depending on how tired I am).
• Thursday, before 1 PM - see Wedneday, after 3 PM. More of the same.

If you’d like to see photos from Macworld as they are taken, visit my TumbleLog. I expect to start sending photos as soon as I arrive in SF. I’ll try to make them interesting.

I’ll also be giving away two copies of my Leopard book during my Peachpit booth presentation. One of them will go to the first presentation attendee who tells me he/she read about the giveaway here.

If you’re at Macworld Expo and want to say hello, drop by the Peachpit Press booth. I usually pop in now and then during my time on the show floor. I’d to meet you!

Regular readers here may recall that a few months ago, I split off all book/article support content to a new blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. It looks and works a lot like this site, but it contains just the content that readers of my books and articles might want to read — and none of the flying or travel or writing stuff I often blog about. I really didn’t want to have two blogs, but it really was the best decision to attract and keep two subsets of regular readers and subscribers.

Making the split was rather tricky. It required me to export all posts from this site, open the resulting text file in a text editor, and delete the posts and comments that were unrelated to my books and articles. I then imported the remaining posts and comments into the new site, which I’d already prepared.

Of course, the original version of all the Maria’s Guides posts were still on An Eclectic Mind. And since An Eclectic Mind had been around so long — four or five years as a blog after five or more years as a regular Web site — all the original posts were coming up in Google searches. So people were still reading this content on An Eclectic Mind, rather than on Maria’s Guides.

Still following me on this?

I faced a dilemma. If I simply deleted the duplicate posts on An Eclectic Mind, visitors would get an Error 404 message when they tried to view that content from sources like Google (which accounts for more than 35% of this site’s hits these days) or direct links from other sites. I don’t know about you, but when I get a 404 error, I don’t waste a lot of time looking for the content I was seeking. I’m outta there. I assume my blog’s visitors would be the same way.

The solution was to set up redirect permanent statements in this site’s .htaccess file. Each time I deleted a post on this site, I’d create an entry for the same post on the other site. When a visitor followed a link to content that no longer existed on this site, he’d automatically be taken to the same content on the other site. It would be completely transparent to him, unless he happened to glance in the address bar for the resulting page, which would show the MariasGuides.com URL.

Deleting content and creating these entries is a long and tedious process. Fortunately, I had enough foresight to use the same permalink structure on both sites. So it’s just a matter of copying and pasting URLs and deleting posts. It takes about one minute per entry. Today, I did another batch. I’m going backwards through time, doing the newer posts first. All of 2007 is now done.

But if you pay attention to post counts — you can find the current post count for this site near the bottom of the right sidebar — you may notice that the number of posts on this site dropped by about 30 today. The site now has more comments than posts, which is kind of neat. (I learn a lot from reader participation here.) It’ll continue to drop as time goes on. I expect to delete another 200 or so posts by the time I’m done.

I tried OmniFocus for a few weeks to set up and maintain a Get Things Done (GTD) routine. I’m always interested in easy-to-use productivity tools that I can integrate into my workflow.

What OmniFocus Does

OmniFocus enables you to set up any number of projects, each of which can contain specific actions. For example, I might have a project for Flying M Air to send out a marketing letter to travel agents. Within that project might be the individual actions to get the job done: get a mailing list of travel agents, write the marketing letter, print out the materials, stuff envelopes, mail. You can set up a project so its actions must be completed in order (sequentially) or so that they can be completed in any order or concurrently (parallel). Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any way to set up some actions within a project to be sequential while others in the same event were parallel without creating groups of actions.

Each action can also be related to a context. A context is “where the work happens.” This is a lot less intuitive but, I suppose, it can be useful once you get an idea of how to use it. For example, you might set up contexts for telephone follow-up or errands. Personally, I had a problem distinguishing between context and projects and couldn’t maintain a consistent approach.

OmniFocus offers a number of commands and options that help you “focus” on specific projects or tasks. You can flag things, set priorities, enter start or end dates, and choose from a bunch of different status options. You can then create “perspectives,” which are views of tasks matching criteria. But setting these things up can be time consuming and isn’t very intuitive.

On Intuitiveness

I did not find OmniFocus to be very intuitive. For example, each time I entered a new action, I pressed Return. Return is usually the command programs use to end or accept an entry. In OmniFocus, it starts a new one. That’s likely because of the Omni Group’s experience with OmniOutliner, which this is apparently spun off from. But when I create a list of things to do, I don’t think of an outline. I think of a list of individual items. iCal doesn’t create a new item when you press Return after completing the entry of a new one. It doesn’t make sense to me that OmniFocus does.

The perspectives view looks and works just like the main OmniFocus window. Great. Except that a perspectives view contains a subset of all items and, if the View bar isn’t showing, it’s not clear that you’re looking at a subset. You wonder what happened to an event you’re looking for and maybe, like me, you think it’s been eaten by a quirk in the software. So you re-enter it and wind up with a duplicate when you finally realize you’re just looking at a subset of all actions.

Some items don’t appear at all, depending on how options are set and how the item is coded. That makes you think twice about whether you want to set sequential items as sequential — they might not appear in some views.

And I’m still not sure how OmniFocus applies color coding to tasks. I understand the red, but blue, gray, and purple? What does it mean? Without documentation during the beta process, I couldn’t be sure. (Now I don’t really care.)

Syncing…Sometimes

One of the features that attracted me to OmniFocus was its ability to sync with iCal. I had a heck of a time doing this with the beta versions, until tech support suggested that I turn off the Birthday’s Calendar in iCal. Evidently, there’s a bug in iCal and that was messing things up. When I disabled it, syncing worked okay.

But OmniFocus syncs based on context, not project. So I needed to not only use the context feature, but set up corresponding calendars in iCal to properly sort out the tasks. Then, when I manually synced with iCal — automatic syncing is not an option — each task’s project was appended to the task name in brackets. This made the task names in iCal unnecessarily long.

OmniFocus syncs only iCal tasks, not calendar events. I also had some trouble when I marked off tasks as done in one program, it would not consistently sync to the other. So tasks didn’t “go away” when they were done.

I should mention that I need iCal syncing because I sync between iCal and my Treo to have a complete list of events and tasks when I’m on the road. My memory is bad (and steadily getting worse) and I rely on my Treo to remind me of things I need to do when I’m away from my office.

What OmniFocus Doesn’t Do

OmniFocus is supposed to make it easy to “capture” tasks from other applications. This is extremely limited. For example, although I can capture a task from a mail message, there’s no way within OmniFocus to easily link to that message — even though each message in Leopard has a unique URL. Instead, I found myself copying and pasting message text into OmniFocus.

OmniFocus falls short as an outliner in that it only gives you three levels of outlining: projects, actions, and “sub-actions” (created when you group actions within a project). Four levels, if you also create folders to organize your projects. But I suppose that if you want an outliner, you’d use OmniOutliner.

There’s no easy way to relate one action to other actions because contexts are not like keywords and you can only assign one per action.

Printing is also extremely limited, so if you want to print off a list of actions to take to a meeting or on the road, you’re stuck with standard formatting with large fonts.

When Productivity Software Reduces Productivity

My main gripe with most of these GTD software “solutions” is that they make you do so much work to set them up and implement them.

OmniFocus is a prime example of this. I wasted an entire morning trying to get my iCal events into OmniFocus , sorting them into projects, and applying contexts. And then, when I synced them back to iCal, I wound up with a bunch of duplicate items in both programs that I had to weed out. While this might be due to buggy beta software, I can’t be sure. I could be a problem I’d be dealing with every time I completed a sync.

It’s far easier for me to simply open iCal and look at my task list, which is already sorted by my existing project-related calendars, to see what needs to be done.

I was hoping that OmniFocus would introduce features that were not in iCal. It did, but none of them were features I needed or even wanted. The ones I did want — primarily calendar and task list printing flexibility — were missing.

At the introductory price of $39.95, OmniFocus was a program to consider. I might have sprung for it and made it work. But when the folks at The Omni Group upped the price to its regular price of $79.95, they made the decision for me. I’ve already paid enough money for software I don’t use regularly.

OmniFocus simply isn’t the solution I’m looking for. It isn’t intuitive enough to be a good productivity tool for me.

I only wish I could get back the two to three days I spent trying to make it help me get things done.

Next week, I’ll be heading to Macworld Expo in San Francisco, mostly to do a presentation at the Peachpit Press booth.

For a 10-year period starting in 1992, I went to every Macworld: San Francisco, Boston (and then New York), and even the little-known Toronto shows in the mid 1990s. I was part of the Macworld Expo Conference Faculty and did a presentation in the Conference hall. One year, I did a solo panel and was on two other panels, too.

Those were the good old days of Macworld, when the speaker lounge was hopping with lots of friendly Mac “experts” and the attendees really did want to hear what we had to say about using Macs or specific applications. Everything was new and cool and even a writer who writes about something as ho-hum as operating systems and productivity applications for “end users” could put together a dynamic, interesting presentation in a room that was filled to standing room only.

Things change. Changes in show management and theme a bunch of years ago have left me feeling a little out of it. As Apple’s market share shrunk, only the Mac faithful and the Mac core user base — designers — came to Macworld in significant numbers. Productivity software and topics were out; design software and topics were in. I’m not a designer and I had little of value to share with conference attendees. I couldn’t come up with good ideas for conference sessions, so I just dropped out of the conference faculty.

Then, after a while, I just stopped coming to Macworld Expo. It didn’t seem worth the bother. I’d settled into a routine, writing revisions of a relatively large collection of books — mostly Visual QuickStart Guides — and that kept me busy. I didn’t need to go to the show to see what was new.

Instead, I’d tune into the live Webcast of the keynote address and learn about all the new products and features as Steve announced them while sitting at my desk, working on a book or another project.

Then Apple stopped doing the live Webcasts. I’d visit the Home page of Apple’s Web site after Steve’s gig and learn about the new stuff there. A while later, I’d download the Webcast and watch the show.

Things change. Apple’s introduction of innovative new products — starting with the original Bondi blue iMac all those years ago and the iPod much more recently — has gotten the Mac faithful excited about using Apple products again. Tiger was great; Leopard is pretty darn good, too. The ability of Intel-based Macs to run Windows effectively — either booted to Windows or while Mac OS X is running, as is possible with Parallels desktop — has gotten the attention of Windows users who are pretty unimpressed with the long-awaited Vista operating system. (Can you blame them?) Now Macs can run their Windows software. People are switching from Windows PCs to Macs. The Mac market share is growing.

This is great news for me. Although I write about Windows topics, I much prefer working with and writing about Macs. And with more Mac users comes more Mac-compatible products. In fact, there are more than a few software products that I use daily — TextWrangler, Scrivener, ecto 3 (in beta), EvoCam, iShowU, and Time Palette come to mind — that are only available for Mac OS. This not only gives me more great software to to choose from, but it gives me more Mac software to write about.

And that’s a good thing. Back in the early 90s, there were still lots of new computer users, people who needed step-by-step instructions for using software like Microsoft Word and Excel. Nowadays, these programs are old hat. Kids use them in school, for heaven’s sake! They don’t need books. And many of my old productivity titles are starting a slow spiral down to the backlist, never to be revised again.

So I’m going to Macworld. And I’m speaking at the Peachpit booth (on Wednesday, January 16, at 2 PM) about my new Leopard book and the cool things I’ve done with Leopard and Mac OS X.

But I’ll also be looking around at what’s new and exciting, ready to grab on to something different, something that’ll drag me deeper into the Mac community again.

It’s good to be a Mac user.

I just want to take a moment to heap some praise on a computer book I’ve found very helpful with my recent Instrument flight training studies: Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots: Real World Training by Jeff Van West and Kevin Lane-Cummings.

The book is, on the surface, a user’s guide for Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX), a Windows PC program that supposedly simulates flight in different aircraft. (I have issues on the realism of its simulation, as I reported here.) It takes you through the pilot ratings, one at a time: Sport Pilot, Private Pilot, Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot. But instead of flying a real plane, you’re flying a simulated plane in the software.

What’s amazing about this book is its ability to communicate valuable and real information about flight training and knowledge required by pilots. I’m concentrating on the Instrument Rating chapters in the second half of the book. I read the first two chapters of that part yesterday and learned more about making departures and planning en route flights using real FAA charts than I did in three days trying to decipher the same charts with other study material.

The book’s text is clearly written and easy to understand. Best of all, it doesn’t put me to sleep — which is always a challenge, since I do most of my reading in bed at night.

While I can’t comment specifically on the exercises to be followed with FSX since I’ve been skipping them, if they’re half as good as the background information, the book is an excellent source for anyone interested in learning to fly using FSX as a training aid. I look forward to finishing the Instrument Rating chapters. And, with luck, I’ll be able to try a few of the exercises myself using the FSX software.

From one computer book author to others: Good job, guys!

One thing I noticed about my computers: I never seem to have enough USB hubs. Indeed — the 7-port hub connected to my iMac has all ports full: digital camera cable, iPod dock, modem, printer, backup hard disk, scanner, and WebCam.

It had gotten to the point where I had to unplug an item to use its hub port.

So I ordered a new hub. It arrived today.

It’s a Belkin clip-on USB hub. It’s tiny, it has 4 ports and a power adapter, and it clips onto the side of my desk. It only costs $26.85 on Amazon.com.

I plugged it into the back of my Mac and plugged my WebCam and scanner into it, thus freeing up two ports on the 7-port hub. Everything’s working smoothly.

What amazes me, however, is how small these things are getting. The device is barely big enough for its ports. And the clip-on design prevents it from sliding off my desk like my other one did (before I taped it down).

I know I’ve just started using it, but I’m very pleased with it. Belkin, in general, makes excellent hubs. I’ve never had cause to complain about any of their products. I highly recommend them.

So there. I’m not always whining and complaining.

And no, Belkin didn’t pay me to write this. But if they want to reward me by sending another one for the other end of my desk. I won’t send it back.

Yesterday, I received a flurry of packages delivered by USPS, FedEx Ground, and FedEx — all within 30 minutes of each other. Inside were Christmas presents from my family.

The Benefit of Having an Amazon.com Wish List

I maintain an Amazon.com Wish List. I use it primarily to store the items I’d like to buy but don’t want to buy right now. But it also makes a handy way for family members to send me gifts at Christmas time. There are items there ranging in price from about $10 up to $200 or more, and ranging in type from books and music to movies and electronics and housewares. So whether someone is shopping by price or by type of item, they can find me something I really want.

This year, my mother, sister, and brother decided to dip into the list. And because I told them not to pay extra for shipping if free shipping was available, most of my Christmas gifts arrived after Christmas.

Yesterday, in fact.

My First Computer Game in 10 or More Years

Among the items on my list was Microsoft Flight Simulator X Deluxe. On the surface, that may seem like a pretty average gift for a pilot. But I’m a helicopter pilot and I normally use Mac OS computers. FSX (as it’s apparently nicknamed by its cult of users) runs on a Windows PC.

I’d asked for this to help me with my instrument rating, which I’m working on this winter. A flight instructor had suggested it to help me with my “scan.” The scan is an important part of instrument flying — it involves scanning a certain group of instruments in a certain order or frequency to maintain situational awareness and keep the aircraft from doing aerobatics in the clouds with you on board.

Although I’m a Mac user, I do have a PC. Each year for the past 10 years, I’ve written a book about Quicken for Windows. [Greetings Google Alert scanners at Intuit!] I did a Mac version for a few years, too, but sales weren’t impressive enough for the publisher to keep doing it. I’ve also used PCs when writing about Microsoft Office products. In fact, I did two Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for Windows books in 2007. So although I don’t really like using PCs, I have one — a Dell laptop everyone who knows about PCs seems to be impressed by — and I do know how to use it. And since it’s sufficiently loaded to run Vista in all of its questionable glory, I didn’t think it would have any trouble with FSX.

My brother and his wife got the software for me. This makes sense. My brother is a big Windows PC gamer and spends hours fighting wars on the Internet. (Ah, if only that were enough to satisfy world powers!) He’d asked for a bunch of components to load up his PC, but I was a more practical gift giver this year and sent him and his wife Home Depot gift certificates to help them fix up their kitchen, which really needs work. Oddly enough, I’ll probably give him this game when I’m finished with it.

I mentioned in the subhead that this is my first computer game in 10 years. I’m estimating. My first computer game was Myst, which I found interesting, if not a little spooky. I followed that up with the sequel, which I don’t recall actually playing. That’s the extent of my game experience. I’m not a gamer; I don’t believe in spending hours in front of a computer entertaining myself. I’d rather read a book or do something more constructive with my time.

The Flight Simulator

I installed FSX last night. It took nearly an hour to copy the 15GB of data from two DVDs to the Dell. While it installed, I perused another gift from my Wish List, Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots Real World Training. My mom sent me that one and it arrived yesterday, too.

This book is a big, fat, extremely well thought out volume that explains how to fly, using FSX as a training tool. It assumes you know nothing about flight but want to learn. It then teaches you from the ground up (pun intended), using accurate descriptions, illustrations, and features within FSX. It has chapters that take you through all the ratings you might want: sport pilot, private pilot, and instrument rating. It’s the instrument rating chapters that interest me and they look very complete.

The only problem is, the book — and the software, for that matter — assumes you want to fly airplanes.

I don’t want to fly airplanes and I don’t want to learn.

FSX comes with two helicopters: a Robinson R22 Beta II (which I’ve already customized with the N-number of my old helicopter) and a Bell 206B JetRanger. So rather than mess around with the airplanes, I went right for the R22.

And crashed it numerous times.

I have to mention here that when you’re a 2,000-hour pilot and you’re manipulating the controls of a virtual aircraft and can’t keep it in control, you can get pretty freaked out.

The problem is, the controls are not sufficiently realistic. In a helicopter, when you move the cyclic, you get immediate feedback. Push it forward, the nose immediately dips. Push it to the right and the aircraft immediately starts to bank. And you don’t have to push very much, either — a little dab will do ya (with apologies to Brylcreem). Although there might be delays of a fraction of a second in different helicopters depending on hydraulics or rigging, a pilot can get the “feel” for these minor differences within a few minutes and be able to fly.

But these delays were not fractions of a second. The delays between control input and aircraft reaction had to be at least two or three seconds. While a non-pilot might think that two or three seconds delay isn’t such a big deal, it really is — when it’s not what you’re accustomed to. I’d make a control input and, when nothing happened right away, I’d make a bigger input. By that time, the first input was just starting to take effect and the second would send the aircraft careening out of control. Too much correction and it would be headed the other way.

If I climbed into the cockpit of a real-life helicopter today and it had lag time like FSX’s R22, I’d crash it, too.

The details inside the cockpit, on the other hand, are amazingly accurate, from the vertical card compass (not shown here) on the split cockpit bubble to the instrument panel — although this particular configuration is not one you’re likely to find on a real R22. (The instrument in the bottom center is normally found on Instrument trainers, which have a larger panel with more instruments.) The realism of the scenery, airports, etc. is also pretty good. This screenshot has everything set to low quality graphics — I’m trying to realistic performance — but when you crank it up a few notches it looks pretty darn good. (Of course, there aren’t any houses near the runway at Phoenix Sky Harbor.)

As I type this, I’m downloading a 213MB update to the software. I’m hoping that the update, as well as finding the power cord for the Microsoft Force Feedback Joystick we have (from Mike’s old Flight Simulator days) will work together to make these aircraft fly more realistically.

I’m simply not willing to re-learn how to fly just to get practice on a computer — when I can go out and fly the real thing for a lot more benefit.

Today, while trying to find a solution to a problem I’m having with iCal 3, I did a Google search. Among the search results was a page that looked like it might have information that could help me. I clicked the link and wound up on a site called Experts Exchange. It had a question from a user, followed by a number of “Expert” and “Author” Comments. In each case, the comment text said:

All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only. Sign-up to view the solution to this question.

So basically, Google had steered me to a site that requires paid membership to view information.

While I don’t have any problem with Google doing this — if some sites feel they must charge a fee to display content to visitors, that’s their problem — I would like to be able to exclude this site from future search results I get while logged into Google. I thought that would be a good suggestion for the folks in Mountain View. So good, in fact, that I wanted to go on record.

So I followed the links on Google.com. Follow along with me:

1. About Google displayed a page full of links about Google organized by topic. This seemed to be the right path so far.
2. Contact Us (with a subtext of “FAQs, Feedback, Newsletter…”) seemed like the right link. After all, I did want to provide feedback. But all it resulted in was a list of Specific Inquiries, none of which included Feedback.

I poked around a few of the links. None of them were right. So although the Contact Us page leads one to think that Feedback is an option, apparently it is not. Google apparently isn’t interested in what its users have to say.

Of course, the Contact Us page does provide a telephone number and fax number. I’m toying with the idea of submitting my suggestion by fax. But will it be read?

With all the bad press Google has been getting lately, I’m left to wonder — as many other people have been wondering — does anyone at Google really care?

I bought a MacBook Pro at least eight months ago, when I was working on my Leopard book for Peachpit Press. I needed a computer with an Intel processor — none of my computers had one at the time — so I could write about Boot Camp and other Intel-specific topics. I went with a “Pro” instead of a regular MacBook because it offered some feature I needed that the MacBook did not. (Right now, I can’t remember what that was.) But I admit that I also prefer the metal case. (I think Apple’s plastic casing looks cheesy.)

How I Used My Laptops

The MacBook Pro was purchased as a “test mule” — a computer used specifically to test and write about software. As such, I kept it very clean, installing only the software I needed to write about. There was virtually no personalization. Heck, even the desktop picture was a plain white screen so I could get clean screenshots of windows and menus.

For computing on the road, I used my 12″ PowerBook G4. I loved its small package, which made it easy to throw in a backpack or piece of luggage. I took it everywhere. I even had a DC adapter for it that enabled me to get power from a car’s cigarette lighter/power port or the DC port in my camper. That was a good thing because the computer’s battery was the first to go. Even the replacement didn’t last long.

Over time, the PowerBook started getting really beat up. Dents and dings, scratches and dirt. One of its rubber feet fell off. Twice. Alex the Bird pulled off the F5 key and I could only get it partially reattached — it was like that for over a year, until a friendly Genius fixed it for me. My CD-ROM drive went on a trip to Alaska after burning one last disc of photos. Oddly enough, it still reads DVDs but wants nothing to do with CDs. Just spins them and spits them out.

But I continued to use it. It did the job — well, most of it — and I was willing to work around the little problems it had.

My PowerBook’s Fall from Grace

When Leopard came out, I was thrilled with the idea of Back to My Mac. The PowerBook met the minimum requirements for Leopard — barely. So I installed it.

Mistake. The poor old computer simply wasn’t up to the challenge of running Apple’s latest operating system. After a month of watching spinning beach balls and being able to type faster than the computer could take the characters, I finally downgraded it back to Tiger.

But I think its experience with Leopard has scarred it. It doesn’t seem quite as fast as it used to be.

Or perhaps that’s just because I’ve been using a brand new iMac at my desk for the past two months and the old G4 is simply no match for any of my equipment these days.

My MacBook Pro Steps into a New Role

Today, I decided to step into the MacBook Pro for mobile computing. The battery is still healthy and it reads and writes both CDs and DVDs. It can also run Leopard without any problems. So this morning, I installed most of the software I need to use while on the road. I’ll add a few more items later today. And I’m composing this blog post in ecto on the MacBook Pro, just to feel it out. (The PowerBook will return to duty as the kitchen table blogging/surfing machine tomorrow.)

I can still use the MacBook Pro for a test mule. I’ll simply set up a new account and use that to run software for screenshots or screencasting. Fast user switching makes it easy. And the computer has plenty of power to run the software I need to create the screenshots and movies.

Computers on the Auction Block

Will I sell the G4? Probably not. It really is beat up. And it’ll probably make its permanent home in our camping shed up at Howard Mesa someday. After all, it still works and it’s still able to connect to the Internet via my Treo when I’m off the grid. It’s not like I’m crunching video up there. Just blogging, e-mail, and doing some surfing, mostly for weather or phone numbers. And writing the occasional article for Informit.

I did recently sell my old dual G5 on eBay. It fetched about three times what I thought it would. I’m a very happy camper. And I assume the buyer is, too. After all, he hasn’t complained.

I do have one more computer I’d like to sell: a Strawberry iMac. I’m going to try to prep it for eBay this weekend. Once that’s gone, I’ll be down to just four computers: a 24″ iMac (my most recent purchase, used entirely for production work), the 15″ MacBook Pro, the 12″ PowerBook, and a Dell laptop (I can never remember the model). With the iMac running Parallels, I don’t even start up the Dell these days, although I’m likely to use it for my annual Quicken revision when the time comes.

Don’t get me wrong — it isn’t as if I want four computers. I don’t. But I do need certain computers to get my work done efficiently and effectively. The PowerBook has always been the equivalent of a “home” computer for me. Now the MacBook Pro will be doing double-duty.

New Apple Products in My Future?

I do see occasional glimpses of a new computer in my future: the rumored Apple sub-notebook. If it’s a viable replacement for the 12″ PowerBook — with a decent-sized monitor, full-size keyboard, wireless (including Bluetooth) built in, and CD/DVD drive — it’ll be exactly what I want.

But will it be? Apple hasn’t been creating products that meet my particular needs lately:

• The iPhone is beautiful and cool but its close ties to AT&T and limited capabilities make my Treo a better solution for me.
• The iPod Touch is similarly cool, but doesn’t offer enough “wow” factor to make me want to replace my original 30GB iPod Video (now known as the “classic”).
• I still don’t understand the purpose of AppleTV, although I suspect Apple intended it to do what the iPod does for the iTunes store — get people to buy content. But with video content providers like television networks pulling out of the Apple store, it’s becoming less attractive as time goes by. Of course, I don’t watch much television, so I’m probably not the right person to be evaluating a device like this.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m still a big fan of Apple. You wouldn’t see me looking at a Zune or buying another Dell. But I’m not so much of a fan that I’m blinded by the Apple logo. I still think before I buy — now more than ever. A product has to completely meet my needs — whether they’re real or imagined — before I buy it. Otherwise I’d rather wait until a better product comes along.

Right now, I’m anxious to see the next Apple computer. I’m hoping it’ll put my G4 into full retirement mode.