Nobody Knows Anything

We made a couple of changes to our life when we moved out of our house and into this rental house. For one thing, we moved from a 2800 square foot house without a garage to a 2200 sq. ft. house with a garage, so we took a hard look at many of the things we owned and either said, “Bye,” or “Into a box in the garage you go.” (All of our books? Packed away. ALL. Except the kids’, who have been insistent that their books needed to be liberated, and so they were.)

Another thing was that we got rid of was the satellite TV.

And despite going with Comcast for our internet connection, we didn’t pick up cable. We have no direct connection to the wide world of television out there. I suppose we might be able to get “over the air” broadcasts (are those still happening even?), but we haven’t tried.

One night back at our house I found Darin in the TV room watching some movie and I asked what it was. “I don’t even know,” he said. “It was just on.”

“That is a silly reason to watch something.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Did we need all of these movie channels? We rarely watched stuff off of them. Did we need the 100s of basic cable channels? Not much. We thought about how we were spending $90 a month on satellite—that’s $1080 a year!—on stuff we just never watched.

And things we did want to watch… Well, there was always iTunes. We’d gotten into the habit last year of just buying “Lost” on iTunes every week, because for some reason the ABC-HD feed in our area kept messing up the transmission. Or our satellite dish was pointed the wrong way, but only on Wednesday nights.

$1080 divided by $30 (avg. cost of iTunes subscription?) equals 36 shows a year. I would be amazed if all of us watched 36 separate series a year. Here’s what I’ll be watching:

• Lost: Final season. SOB.
• Dollhouse: The name “Joss Whedon” buys a lot. The logic gaps are sometimes infuriating and Eliza Dushku is not exactly right for this material. But it’s okay.
• Community: So far this has been hilarious. “Sharks, pencils, and Ben Affleck.” Good times.
• The Simpsons: Yes. Still.
• 30 Rock: When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s not, it’s still okay.
• Chuck: Of course! Even if it’s on NBC!
• Dexter: A little Michael C. Hall covers up many storytelling weaknesses.

Darin also watches Mad Men (which I personally can’t stand), The Office, and Big Bang Theory (which I’ve enjoyed the few times I’ve seen, but I have a hard time loving sitcoms, despite having three of them in my above list).

I want to watch National Parks (which Nina said KQED is streaming? Let’s get that computer hooked up to the TV, people just discovered iTunes is carrying this one!).

We find series, by the way, following the advice of our most trusted TV critics: Alan Sepinwall (who as every “Chuck” fan knows, is DA MAN) and Ken Tucker (whose in-print stuff for EW is better than his blog, but never mind that). See? Critics are worthwhile, people.

So far it’s worked out great: we have stuff on the Apple TV we want to watch, we can store the old shows (or watch them on the computer, or on our iPhones, or whatever without too much hassle), and we don’t have the lure of just anything being on. Darin has been reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids, and as soon as they finished “The Fellowship of the Ring” we rented the movie. Simple.

What we’re missing out on: Food Network shows. My daughter misses her daily dose of Bobby Flay. Perhaps Food Network will figure out a way to deal with this.

Even if we do end up paying more than $1080 a year—I’m going to try to mark the various series subscriptions in Quicken to keep track of how much we end up spending—on the whole this system is a much better TV experience than watching cable/satellite. No commercials to fast-forward through! No endless promos for other shows! No teasers ruining the entire show before we see it!

Now if Darin would just hook up our DVD player so I could restart the Netflix subscription, that’d be good. Of course, what he really wants to do is get a PS3 “so we can watch Blu-ray disks.” Uh huh. I am the kind of “stupid wife” who “believes that.” My friend Otto also recommends hooking up a Mac mini, so as to use Hulu on the TV. But we don’t have a Mac mini. Maybe the kids will sacrifice their iMac for the cause…. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding.

Since sitting in front of the TV and just watching what’s on is not my idea of a good time, this setup is working perfectly for me. If I want to sit around and stare at a screen for hours to waste time…I’ll use my iPhone to play games, thanks.

We also gave up our home phone in the move. Yes, it’s true: Darin and I no longer share a phone. But everyone knows that to contact him you call his cell phone, and having the answering machine at home mostly served as a vehicle for frustration for me (since he never listened to messages). Now I get everything on my phone and it’s much easier for me to stay on top of calls I need to return and messages I need to deal with.

Dang. We really are living in the future.

Update: Oh frabjous day! Turns out there is shareware that will do precisely what I want! After playing with these various epub guides (and crashing upon the shores of “The metafile needs to be added first and not compressed in the zip file…”), I discovered Sigil, a bare bones (not to be confused with Bare Bones) project with a simple text editor that helps you put together an ebook really, really simply.

Yay, Sigil!

Re: the ongoing e-book format wars: damn, is there nothing more annoying that downloading an e-book…and then discovering you can’t upload it to the e-book reader of your choice (in my case, an iPhone) because you picked the wrong damn format? Yes, yes, I know: “Diane, you’re a dumbass.”

But still: trying to pick the right format out of the many competing ones…is there any wonder I just buy from Amazon and eliminate the middleman?

I have some .pdf files of old books I would like to read, but they’re not formatted correctly for my iPhone ebook reader (whether Kindle…or eReader…or Stanza…or B&N eReader (which doesn’t read the same books as my eReader/Fictionwise app, dammit)).

What I’ve done so far is open the .pdf file in Lexcycle Stanza and save it as an .epub file, which is the same thing as a .zip file, only with a different extension. Everything I know about the .epub format I learned during this tutorial, in case anyone wants to double-check my knowledge.

So I change the extension on the .epub file and unpack the zip, which gives me

• mimetype
• META-INF folder
• OEBPS folder

Great. I edit the HTML info in the content.obf and toc.ncx files (and maybe that’s a problem, because those are UNIX executables when I open them, but when I save them, they become text files), and I edit the various header information in the separate chapter files.

I save the .zip file, change the extension back to .epub, and upload to my iPhone…whereupon I get the error “Failed to download and import…” because the information in the container.xml file is wrong.

Well, I didn’t touch the damn container.xml file. I could understand if one of the other files were causing the problem, but they’re not.

My friend Rob recommends I just use DropBook, which I have now given a shot (but where is it putting the completed book file? I can’t find it anywhere).

This process is very frustrating. And I know that right now the ebook market is the Wild, Wild West, but in case book publishers would like to know why ebooks haven’t taken over the world, this is why: it’s too confusing, there are too many variables, and there are too many damn formats.

I was chatting away with my friend Otto today about photography. Recently I decided to get an SLR camera and relied heavily on Otto’s advice on what to get. (I am now the proud owner of a Canon 30D. With a 17-85 f/4-5.6 EF-S IS USM Autofocus Lens. And a 50mm f/1.8 lens. And a cut-up credit card.) Before I bought the camera I asked him how he learned to be such an amazing photographer (seriously, check out his site) and he said: “I took about 100,000 pictures.”

Well, okay then. I guess I have this 4g media card just burning a hole in my camera.

Today I showed him a pic I took of Simon –

– and said I knew it was too dark, but I didn’t know how to make it lighter than it was using the camera settings. Otto immediately explained to me how I could have changed various speeds and stops to change it. Then he added: “Save all that, check back in two months, see if it makes sense.”

“Yup,” I said. “I have a file in Circus Ponies Notebook called Diane’s Book of Knowledge.”

I use Notebook for two main reasons: 1) to keep a notebook about whichever project I’m working on right then, for the outline, for character info, etc., and 2)to keep a notebook about various facts and factoids I run across and may want to look at it again, such as “how to clean cast-iron” or “how to change * (asterisk) into italics in MS Word.”

“Oh,” said Otto. “I use Yojimbo for the same purpose.”

“You use leaderless samurai? Wait, no, that’s ronin.”

“You were close, though.”

So I immediately went to check out Yojimbo and holy crap if it isn’t one of the best things since sliced bread. A place to store PDF receipts! Various articles I download into my Articles folder and then never look at again because I have no idea what’s in there! Various URLs that interest me and then I never look at again because I’ve bookmarked them and then have no idea what they were! Tagging items on the fly (meaning I don’t have to come up with a set of one-size-fits-all tags)! Watch the Yojimbo Quick Start movie — that will tell you all you need to know.

(Otto also uses Yojimbo for storing passwords and serial numbers, which I am not planning to do, because I use the excellent Password Wallet, which has the advantages of a)syncing to my Palm, so I can carry that info around with me and b)being written by a friend of Darin’s. I keep 350+ passwords/serial numbers/etc. in Password Wallet and haven’t had a problem yet. Highly recommended!)

Within a few seconds of playing with Yojimbo and realizing I could definitely use it in addition to Circus Ponies Notebook, of course I bought it. Apparently my credit card wasn’t cut up enough. Hopefully I’ve fixed that now.

“How come every time I talk to you it costs me money?” I asked him.

“Hey, one of our conversations led to Wordpress, that’s free.”

“Yes, but I’d need to blog more often for that to be helpful,” I said.

Undoubtedly I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon copying articles I’ve downloaded into Yojimbo and tagging them, so maybe they’d actually be useful now.

I have no idea if products like Circus Ponies Notebook or Yojimbo exist on Windows. I do know that there’s a whole world of elegant, powerful non-Microsoft software for Macintosh that is just wonderful, so the next time someone says, “But there’s no software for Macintosh!” snicker at them. I’ve enjoyed using Jer’s Novel Writer for writing, although I’m leaning more toward Scrivener for future projects. (No, I don’t like Word, why do you ask? In fact, I’ve even downloaded NeoOffice to take care of the more egregious Word duties I have. Word is good for the final step of getting a manuscript ready and that’s about it. It’s slow, it’s hard to navigate, and the non-Universal version does something weird to my machine, making it slow down. Feh.)

I use QuickSilver, primarily for operating iTunes when I’m in other applications. I’ve never quite gotten a handle on the many, many, many features QuickSilver has, but I’m certain it would make coffee too, if I let it.

MacGourmet for recipes. (Only because Rob hasn’t finished his recipe app! Get moving, Rob!)

Otto also uses stuff like Renamer4Mac to manage his gigantic photo collection.

MacZot! has daily specials on all sorts of Macintosh-specific programs, from little utilities to a word processor like Ulysses (which I’ve used, and liked, but wasn’t flexible enough for me).

I am very, very happy with the apps out there for my little Mac. And now I am off to organize my machine just a little bit more.