If a tree falls in a forest, probably nobody except conservationists care very much. If a gigantic, century-old (or more) tree suddenly has one of its tree-sized branches fall off and block an entire street and take the power out with it, lots of people care. Yesterday this happened around the corner from us. It was fascinating to walk over there and see this massive piece of a tree lying in the middle of the street—and the even more massive tree it used to be a part of still looming over the street. I tried not to think about my kids walking past that tree every day on the way to school, or the fact that I had driven by it about 10 minutes before it fell.

Anyhow, this branch falling knocked out the power at our house from 2:50pm to 1:30am. And it was just the few houses around ours: houses a block away had power. The PG&E guys were working on the power lines the whole time (including at 11pm, Right Outside Our Window) and I don’t know who they had with chainsaws in the middle of the night cutting up that tree. I couldn’t sleep (what with PG&E guys right outside our window and chainsaws going nonstop half a block away) so I got up and went to my computer.

Darin gave me a 13-inch Macbook Air for my birthday this month and this is by far the best Macintosh laptop I’ve ever had. Holy God, is it great. It’s as fast (or maybe somewhat faster) than my 2009 Macbook Pro. It’s so light that I walk around the house carrying it with one hand. I’m sincerely annoyed by Intuit’s refusal to update Quicken for Mac, so my financial software life is somewhat in flux, but in all other aspects the Macbook Air completely and totally rocks. And it helped me learn two very important lessons.

Lesson 1

Despite the power having gone out at 2:50pm, the Air still had 90% battery life when I opened it up at 11pm. I read a friend’s new book, I worked a little bit on a couple of plays I’m writing, and I wrote a gigantic journal entry about all the things that were bugging me (and doing their part to keep me awake). At 1am or whenever I went upstairs, I had about 70% battery. This thing has amazing battery life. I’d kind of been aware of it before (certainly had better battery life than my Macbook Pro, which seemed more interested in seeing if it could make batteries bulge than in using them for a long time), but last night completely amazed me.

Lesson 2

I am never moving to an Internet-based computer like a Chromebook. There are tons of reasons not to use a Chromebook already, but if my computer had been Internet-based, it would have been a paperweight last night. I know they’re talking about making web-based devices that have locally-based applications so you can still use them when you don’t have Internet access, but in that case, why not get a computer that functions that way all of the time?

If you’ve written an application and your only help for it is an online page, let it be known that I find that very annoying. Particularly at midnight, when I’m cranky.

Lesson 3

The ice in the freezer was still loose when I checked it this morning. The very bottom layer was more molded together, but I could have easily filled several glasses with ice. Our refrigerator did a very good job of holding in the cold while the power was out.

Amazon decided to advertise its new Cloud Drive for music (Did I miss something? It’s a big network storage thing, right? Why is this so much more awesome than any other way of uploading my files somewhere?) by selling Lady Gaga’s new album for $0.99 today. That’s right, you can buy “Born This Way” for $0.99 at Amazon or for $15.99 at iTunes. No brainer, amirite?

Holy. Jee. Zus.

I bought the album on Amazon. The Amazon MP3 Downloader started up and told me it’s downloading the album…without filling in the bar that tells me how much it’s downloaded. I guess it downloaded one song, but on the very next song it said: “Download failed; retry download.”

Um. Okay. How do I do that?

There is no handy “Retry” button in the toolbar. There is no “Retry” menu option. I opened the Amazon MP3 Downloader help file and searched for “retry”: the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the help.

I have no idea why it’s not downloading my album. I don’t know where to go to retry or to restart this process. The choice in the toolbar is “Pause Download”, which I don’t want to do — I want it to finish the damn download.

On the next couple of songs, I’m getting the error message “Can’t connect. Check your Internet connection and retry download.” I know perfectly well my Internet connection is just fine. And I have downloaded music for Amazon before, so I have no idea: has something changed and I’ve forgotten to push some button? Are their servers getting slammed with purchases and the only available error messages blame me, the user, for their services faults?

I’m not a naive user of computers. I know plenty about how to use them. But how much energy do I want to invest in learning every single method of how to do things, especially when there are already incredibly intuitive ways that are standard on the Mac OS? That Amazon has chosen not to do this, has in fact made it hard for me, speaks volumes. They definitely have the book download process sussed out, but they have ways to go on building a media empire.

If I had given $16 to Apple, I would have my damn album already.

(In addition, it turned out that initially I had an old version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader. Um, okay. It asks me if I want to update and I say yes…and I get kicked over to an Amazon web page, where I need to click another button to download a whole ‘nother installer, which will then update my application. This is not how Mac applications do it, guys. You hit a button, and it all magically happens in the background. I don’t have to pay attention to web pages or get extra buttons. This has been a deeply frustrating experience.)

We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.

Yeah, I should just title this “Another goddamn iPad article you can’t seem to get away from.”

Here’s what you need to know about reading books on your iPad:

• I think iBooks is a really nice application. I like the layout, I like the page-turning, I like the fact that I don’t need to have the light on in bed to use it. Take that, Kindle. (A friend of mine was in and out of the hospital all last year and said that she couldn’t have used a Kindle, because she always had a roommate and couldn’t turn on the light.) And I already stare at a screen all day; hasn’t hurt my eyes any. You should probably know that, even post-Lasik, I have very bad eyesight. I don’t think it’s the screen, though.

• Buying books from iTunes store: you don’t need to put in your password for any of the free books (at least, I haven’t yet). You do for the books with a price. This actually is an advantage for iBooks, because it stops me and makes me think. The 1-click on Kindle is completely deadly to my bank account.

• You CAN read your own .epub format books on iBooks. I’ve read a number of places that you must buy your books from the iBooks store and this is just not true. Here’s what you do:
  
  1. Drag the .epub files to iTunes.
  2. Sync your iPad

  You’re now done. Have a nice soy latte and read your dang book.

• Scrivener (the thinking writer’s writing application of choice) will soon support saving in .epub format. So you can export your novel as .epub, upload to your iPad, and read (and, hopefully, annotate) soon.

  (I should make this clear, because the developer’s made this very clear: Scrivener itself will not be on iPad! But easy export of .epub files (ie, your novel in progress) for leisurely reading on an iPad = much win.)

• I read many, many confusing webpages on how to make an .epub file, which involved voodoo and changing file extensions and other horrible tasks that frankly I use the modern computer to get away from. Eventually I found Sigil, which is an editor that creates .epub format books. I’ve found that it sucks as anything other than an .epub creator—it’s not the most robust editor I’ve ever run across. But it does create .epub books with only a little effort on my part, so currently I’m using this to create books from text files. If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.

• The Kindle app is MUCH improved. Before they updated it for use on iPad, all that was available was the iPhone app. So you could read your book on a tiny little section of this giant screen, or you could blow up the app using the 2x button, and the books looked like crap because the text wasn’t scaled, it was blown-up bitmaps. Now it’s designed to use the entire iPad screen with the proper fonts and it looks good. I like the two layouts of the library of books (in a list or as separate graphic images).

• Not anything to do with the iPad, but while we’re on the subject… Here is my take on the Kindle for Mac app: 1988 called, they’d like their GUI back. Seriously, Amazon, did you pass this off to some exec’s 13-year-old kid as their home computing project? Stop it and hire a read Cocoa developer.

• As of today, Stanza and Ereader have not been updated for iPad. This makes them useless. I found them pretty useless before (getting books from Fictionwise and Ereader has been an exercise in frustration for me more than once, and when compared to Amazon’s 1-click… no comparison) and they’re not helping themselves out.

• Screenwriter John August has a whole post on “Reading scripts on the iPad.” He points you to the best .pdf app (as of today, obviously; this situation could change at any moment). As soon as these apps allow for annotation (and export of said notes), the iPad could be very useful for writers.

I haven’t tried writing much on the iPad yet, and we don’t have the keyboard dock or anything. I guess I could use one of Darin’s wireless keyboards, but at the moment I’m spending way too much time playing Flight Control HD. I mean, using one of the book-reading apps.

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.