When I spun off the computer-specific content from my original site to the Maria’s Guides blog-based site, a bunch of regular blog readers were spun off with it. Those are people who came to visit my site specifically to learn more about using their computers and software.

The people that remain here are obviously interested in other topics. The question is, which ones?

So I’ve created a new poll to query visitors. I hope you’ll take a moment to let me know what you like to read about here. I’ll do my best to deliver the content people want to read about, so having your say is a good way to ensure that I keep writing what you want to read about.

Here’s the poll. It’ll also be in the rightmost sidebar, at least for a while.

Last month, I put up a poll to get your opinions on the U.S. presidential candidates. Here are the results:

I watched the results change from day to day as people voted. Clinton started out in the lead, then Obama took a strong lead. That lead melted somewhat to get to the March 6 results. Similarly, McCain and Huckabee took turns leading the Republican race (although neither had more votes than the top Democrat at any time). I admit the Huckabee results surprised me. I really didn’t think he had such a following, especially with the kinds of people who might read this blog.

Earlier this week, the deck was shuffled slightly when Huckabee dropped out and McCain cinched the Republican nomination — well, with delegate votes, anyway. I decided to refresh the poll accordingly. Here it is, for your voting pleasure.

Please don’t get POed because I took Ron Paul and Mike Gravel off the poll. I did it for practical reasons. Neither of them will get the Republican nomination, so neither of them are seriously in the running.

As for Ralph Nader — get real. This guy runs every four years and the only thing he manages to do is take votes away from the Democrats. He didn’t even get 1% of the popular vote the last time around. GlassBooth.org doesn’t list him; I can’t see why I should. If you feel that strongly for him, choose Someone Else in the poll.

Many people have been asking me who I prefer. It’s a tossup between Clinton and Obama. (I can’t, in good conscience, vote to put a 70+ year-old-republican in the White House; we really do need a change.) If you’d like to debate this, I created a post just for commentary: 2008 Presidential Election: State Your Case.

Meanwhile, cast your simple vote here. And if you do choose Someone Else, take a moment to let us know who (and possibly why) in the Comments for this post.

And yes, you can expect this poll to be revised when the Democrats finally choose a final candidate.

May as well conduct our own poll here. There are currently 6 official candidates. Tell us which one you’d vote for if the election were held today.

I’ll release a new poll each time a candidate drops out or is added, so if you vote on this poll and then see that you can vote again one day in the future, it’s likely that I’ve released a new poll on this topic.

As usual, you can use the Comments link or form for this post to share your comments with other readers. No bashing anyone, please! Let’s keep it civil.

It’s that time of year again: time to think about the things you can do next year to make your life a little better. In other words: time to make a New Year’s resolution.

Have you made one? Please take this poll.

I put “Lose weight” as the top item on the poll because that’s the resolution made my most people in the U.S. Personally, I’ve made it every year for the past three years. But my weight continues to climb. The way I see it, I still “owe” that resolution to myself.

This year, I’ve also decided to stop using the word fuck as an adjective. While it might seem surprising to you that a “lady” would use a word like that in conversation, you need to understand that where I’m originally from — the New York metropolitan area — it isn’t that unusual. That doesn’t mean it’s “ladylike.” It’s not. And that’s why I’m going to stop using it. Not only is it unladylike (which really doesn’t bother me in the least), but it’s crude and makes the speaker sound uneducated.

I’m also thinking about going off all alcohol for a year. Wow. That would be a tall order indeed. I really enjoy a nice glass of wine with dinner. But since I don’t like to put an unfinished bottle away, that usually means a half a bottle at dinner. Since I don’t drink cheap wine, this can get expensive. The martinis, which I enjoy a few times a week, would have to go, too. This would seriously impact my olive consumption. But I’m interested in seeing if getting off alcohol completely would (1) make me feel better mentally and physically and (2) help me lose weight. So it would be an experiment. I think I’ll try it for at least a month. That should be enough to show me if there are tangible benefits other than to my bank account.

What about you? What can you add about New Year’s resolutions? Use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts.

As the holidays draw near, I thought I’d add a new poll to the site.

If you have any comments, don’t hesitate to use the Comments link or form below to add them.

I’m just finishing up a 6-day trip in northern Arizona. As usual, I brought my old 12″ PowerBook along to keep me connected. It has a built-in AirPort wireless card and can also connect to the Internet via Bluetooth with my Treo where Internet service is available on my wireless network.

I’m pleased to report that I had access to the Internet on every stop of this trip:

• Sedona. We stayed at the Sky Ranch Lodge on Airport Mesa. I had a Garden View room. I’m not sure if the WiFi connection was available throughout the property or if I just got it because I was relatively close to the main office. I don’t recall seeing it advertised anywhere. So I was very surprised to get a nice strong signal from my room.
• Grand Canyon. I stayed at Bright Angel Lodge. While there wasn’t WiFi available there, my cellphone service was able to get Internet access, which I could then share with my PowerBook. So although the connection wasn’t fast and it required pinging to keep alive, it was available.
• Lake Powell. We stayed at the Lake Powell Resort northwest of Page. Although there was WiFi in the lodge lobby, it didn’t extend out to my room, which was two buildings away. Again, the Treo came to the rescue and I was able to get online.
• Monument Valley. We stayed at Gouldings Lodge. While I know my Treo can’t connect to the Internet there, my room was sufficiently close enough to the main lobby to connect to one of the lodge’s two WiFi hotspots. (I’m not sure, but I think the folks at Red Bull may have added the second hotspot when they were there in May for the air races. They were responsible for getting the cell tower put up nearby.)
• Flagstaff. I stayed at the Radisson on the west side of town. WiFi is a standard feature in its rooms.

In each case where the hotel provided WiFi access, access was free. I didn’t even have to log on to a service and agree to usage terms. I just opened my PowerBook and waited a moment. A dialog told me that none of my trusted networks were available and offered to connect me with another network.

Paying Extra for WiFi?

I am surprised, however, at the number of high-priced hotels that are charging a fee for WiFi access. It’s interesting to me that lower budget hotels give away WiFi access but you can expect to pay $5 to $10 per day for the same access in a Hyatt or Marriott or Hilton — each of which tend to be more costly than an average hotel chain.

I’ve also come to the point where the availability of free WiFi in a hotel’s rooms weighs into my booking decision. For example, if faced with two hotels that have the same rate, I’ll go with the one that has free Wi-Fi, even if it doesn’t have popular amenities such as in-room coffee, free breakfast, or a fitness room. A fast, reliable Internet connection is more important to me than many other hotel features.

What Do You Think?

What do you think about WiFi access when you travel? Here’s a quick poll. Don’t be afraid to use the Comments link or form at the bottom of this post to share your thoughts.

On Wednesday, Steve Jobs announced four new iPod models, available in plenty of time for the holidays. They range from a restyling of the very basic iPod Shuffle to an improved iPod Nano to a renamed, increased capacity iPod Classic to a wifi-enabled, browser equipped iPod Touch.

Not to miss out on an opportunity to gather opinions, I’ve set up the following poll:

Keep in mind that this poll does not ask which iPod you will buy. It asks which one you would buy.

And I hope you’ll take the time to use the Comments link or form below to let us know why you’ve made your choice.

A feed subscriber has indicated that he’s not too fond of the “Twitter Updates” posts that are posted automatically each night by Twitter Tools. He’d like to see them off the feed.

But if people want them off the feed, they probably also want them off the site. So that’s the question for this newest poll.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about and would like to vote, please look at some examples first.

Use the Comments link or form below if you like. Try not to be too cruel.

6-Sep-07 Update:
I turned the Twitter Updates post feature off over the weekend.

Today, I downloaded and installed the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin and set it up to keep the Twiiter Updates posts off the Home page and out of the feeds. So I turned the Twitter Updates Post feature back on. With luck, they should not appear in feeds or on the Home page. But they’ll continued to be archived to this blog, primarily for my own journaling purposes. Thanks everyone for the feedback. I’m closing the poll down now.

12-Dec-07 Update:
I decided to kill the Twitter Update posts completely. Not only did I disable the plugin’s features, but I deleted all the update posts from the system.

Now that the iPhone hype has died down, serious Mac users can turn their attention, hopes, and dreams to Mac OS X development. That means Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which is due to be released sometime in October.

By this time, most Mac users have a good idea of the features in store for them in Leopard. If you don’t you can see demos of the features on the Apple Web site’s Leopard Features page. If you have time and want to participate in the poll, I highly recommend you brush up on what’s going to “transform your Mac.”

As the author of Mac OS books and how-to articles, I’m naturally curious about what has other Mac users most excited about Leopard. I want to make sure I provide sufficient coverage to the new features that’ll make the biggest impression. I also want to know what I can write about in the future here, on this site, to keep Mac users coming back for more.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to try yet another unscientific poll to see what the Mac community is looking forward to most in Leopard. Here’s the poll:

As usual, your comments and additional insight are appreciated. Use the Comments link or form at the end of this post to share your thoughts.

As I type this, I’m listening to TWiT 103: The Good, The Bad, the iPhone. It’s an excellent podcast episode with over an hour of conversational commentary by Leo Laporte, Richard Baguley, Veronica Belmont, Ryan Block, and Cali Lewis.

Moments ago, they were discussing the different cellular carriers. One hates Cingular and wonders whether AT&T will be better. Another says it has to be better than Verizon, but what’s wrong with AT&T? Another says he has no problem with Verizon, but wonders about T-Mobile. In other words, everyone has an opinion and none of the opinions seem to correspond.

It seems to me that everyone has at least one positive experience and one negative experience with at least one carrier. Those experiences are what keeps them with or away from specific carriers. I know that my comments about AT&T — which weren’t even about it’s cellular service — met with a lot of nasty complaints from people who thought I was mistaken.

So here’s the latest poll, which I’ll let run indefinitely:

Don’t just vote; use the Comments link or form for this post to share your comments about your preferred provider and/or one you may have had problems with in the past. If you select Other from the poll choices, be sure to let us know which provider you use. Obviously, my list is not exhaustive, although it should cover most providers available in the US, where I live.

My only request — keep it civil, folks.

After reading today (Tuesday) that people are already on line for iPhone purchases on Friday — and selling their spots on line for $250/day or more — I started wondering what most people thought about buying an iPhone. So I whipped up this quick little poll, which I’ll leave up until Saturday morning.

This poll is now closed. Thanks for participating!

I’ve been trying without much success to follow a number of blogs using a feed reader. I realized just today that the reason I’m not succeeding is that some blogs simply post more new content than I’m able to keep up with.

And that brings up the question of my latest poll for blog readers:

Please vote. If you already voted, you’ll find the current results displayed here instead of the poll.

And if you have any comments to share about why you selected the option you did, please share them.

(If you’re reading this in an RSS feed, you may have to visit this post to see and vote on the poll.)

I’ve just added the following poll, asking readers to share information about their blog-reading habits. It’ll appear among the Random Polls in the sidebar and can be accessed at any time in the Polls category.

Please vote. And if you have any comments to share about the kinds of blogs you follow regularly, please use the Comments link.

(If you’re reading this in an RSS feed, you may have to visit the site to see and vote on the poll.)

The site’s second poll is for pilots only. I’m curious about how often pilots manually go through the weight and balance calculation for a flight.

If you’re not a pilot, please don’t vote.

If you’re reading this in an RSS feed, you may have to visit the site to see and vote on the poll.

26 visitors have voted on the “What Brings You Here?” poll I put online a few weeks ago. 31% say they’re interested in Blogging topics; 23% say they’re interested in flying. The other options are also represented by votes. This is as of today (January 25).

What brings you here? Please let me know by voting in the poll. I’ll try to write more about the topics that most interest site visitors. Here’s the poll again:

If you’ve already voted, you’ll see the results here. If you haven’t voted, click to vote and see the results. And you can always see the results of a random poll in the Home page sidebar.

And if you’re reading this via RSS feed, you’ll have to stop by the site to place your vote. Click the post title in your feed reader and come on by!