MetroMac (the local MUG) held a meeting at the SoHo Apple store tonight, which I attended mostly to hear David Pogue talk about iPhoto 2, the subject of his latest book. Pogue has also written and edited a plentitude of other technical books, including the one that remains my favorite OS X book to date - Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (my review of which is here), not to mention his Macworld articles (many moons ago) and his columns for the Times (more recently).

Pogue turns out to be as impressive a speaker as he is a writer - he has a certain easygoing attitude and utter confidence in his subject matter that leaves both readers and listeners completely at home. I left the meeting actually interested in using iPhoto for the first time, and I hope he’ll speak in the area again soon.

Mildly interesting article in today’s Times about massively multiplayer games, specifically Anarchy Online and a couple of its players. Getting a bit tired, I must say, of the sort of goofy imagine-that tone that’s become standard in any writing about net phenomena intended for people unfamiliar with net phenomena. People playing games on the Internet! Well I never!

Some of you may remember that I grudgingly shell out for fancy panties, but only when they’re on sale. And those of you familiar with the machinations of Victoria and her Secret may also be aware that they typically have only two sales a year - a semi-annual sale, in fact. So it’s that time again, and I decided last night to brave the gigantic store on 34th (the one that used to be an HMV) to stock up on undergarments for the next six months. I innocently assumed that a larger store might mean less crowding - I tried last week to shop the sale at the SoHo location closer to my office, but it’s a pretty small store and was filled well beyond capacity.

So the 34th street store is much, much larger, but as it turns out that just means it has a proportionally much, much larger crowd. Women layered two and three deep in wriggling herds around the clearance bins, harried-looking salespeople trying to sort the contents of discarded shopping bags by size and color and chasing anyone looking lost with a tape measure and the offer of a free fitting. I have never in my life had so many different women ask me my cup size in the space of half an hour (not to mention whether I’d like matching panties with that).

Braving the clearance bins myself was a disturbing, communal experience. Most of the females were grim and focused on their task, grabbing anything in the right color and checking the tag for style and size. Some women, it turns out, wear only low-rise v-strings, while others display a fanatical (and mystifying) devotion to The Almighty Thong. Some, tottering in heels worn with capri pants, are defininitely the women you see on the subway carrying their lunches in those pink striped Victoria’s Secret gift bags. Once in a while, the occasional school-uniformed pre-teen in the company of a parent, looking for something unassuming in white cotton, and one weirdly cheerful guy asking his girlfriend whether her mother would be a medium or a large in high-cut briefs.

I eventually made it out with enough unmentionables to last me another half-year, not so very much the poorer and without acquiring anything made of lace - but will I be so lucky next time?

Calling all Massachusetts drivers: I’m in the process of converting my MA license to a New York one, and because MA doesn’t print the date of the license’s issue on the card itself, I need to get that from the MA RMV. On the site, there’s a form to request a copy of your driver’s record, but since it costs $10, I’m wondering if anyone else who has received a driver’s record from MA in the past can tell me whether or not this actually contains the date of the license’s issue. MA doesn’t seem to offer a driver’s license record, and I don’t just want a list of my parking tickets. I tried asking the RMV myself, but it doesn’t seem possible to get a human on the phone (and I can’t just go over there for obvious reasons). If you can help, let me know.

In March, I mentioned an article on ESPN’s site about a Dunkin Donuts advertising campaign in which people would wear temporary tattoos of the Dunkin Donuts logo on their foreheads at sporting events. Here’s my original post. And here’s a baffling email I received a few days ago:

hi. I just thought I’d let you know you might want to make sure your assumptions are right before you put them on your website. I’m the girl you quoted on your page & I just wanted to let you know that the world hasn’t gone down the commercial spiral you suggested. My friends and I were getting paid for handing out business cards- not temporary tattoos. The only ones advertising were those getting paid. And for your information, I don’t even like doughnuts. I’m not mad or anything but just thought you might want to be careful about using people’s names on your website. Thanks.

Let’s see if I’m grasping the complaint here. Reviewing my original post, I don’t see myself suggesting that the world might be going down any kind of “commercial spiral” - whatever that might entail. I did say the ad campaign was weird, which it was.

As for poor Brittany getting mislabeled as a tattoo-wearer and doughnut-liker, these claims are not mine - as you might have guessed from the quotation marks and italics, I was in fact quoting the article I got the information from. You know, the one linked right in the first sentence of the post. I wasn’t sitting at home one night thinking up ways to slander Ms. Ojala - “I know! I’ll tell the Internet she likes breakfast pastries!” It doesn’t look like ESPN just made up her doughnut predilection, either, since it is actually a direct quote: “‘I kind of like temporary tattoos and I definitely like donuts,’ said Brittany Ojala, an 18-year-old freshman from Boston University who was sporting the orange and pink logo on her head. It’s possible that whoever wrote the ESPN article was in fact sitting at home one night thinking up ways to slander Ms. Ojala, but I doubt it.

In the end, dear Brittany, I’m sorry the world now thinks wrongly that you enjoy doughnuts, but I’m not sure why it’s me that you’re complaining to. Just be glad, I suppose, that you weren’t branded a filthy English muffin eater.

See, I’d tell you how my day was, except that all I did today was play Warcraft III. (So I guess that means my day was pretty great, actually.) I particularly dig the World Editor - when I wasn’t off keeping my sacred grove from being desecrated by the undead scourge, I was all about the world editor. If there’s one thing more fun than sending your troops through a blighted poison swamp, it’s creating a blighted poison swamp to send your troops through.

Because Crispy and I do tend to watch rather a lot of movies, I guess it isn’t that weird that we’ve seen two in the past two days. Maybe the weird part is that we, despite being vehement haters of crowds, braved two different Manhattan theatres on both a Friday and a Saturday night to actually go and see two different movies on the big screen, rather than hiding inside and watching other movies on SciFi.

Last night, we wanted to go and see Finding Nemo at the AMC in Times Square, figuring that by the time we walked through Chinatown and had dinner and wandered around the Apple store and got to Time Square that it would be late enough that not so many other people would be there with the intention of watching Finding Nemo. Of course, that was not the case - I don’t know if these were all people dragging their younguns to 10pm showings or if they were (like us) rebellious adults intent on seeing a Rated G Pixar feature, but all the shows were sold out. But we did get tickets to the X-Men sequel. On the whole, we weren’t impressed. Yes, decent effects and yes, some of the characterizations were interesting. And Mystique is attractive, we get it. The pacing was awful and the plot a little too transparent for my taste - and that’s even going by my standards for action and/or superhero movies. Spider-man was no filmic masterpiece, but I enjoyed it more than X2.

So we did finally see Finding Nemo tonight, though, and it was everything we’d told it would be. Cute and clever along the lines of other Pixar stuff. The underwarter effects were amazing - we saw at a digital theatre, so that may have had something to do with it, but I was impressed with the visuals. Pixar has come a long way since Toy Story. Overall I’d say it wasn’t quite as good as Monsters, Inc, but the shark was great and the rest of it was fun.

Mac OS X Hints is a brand-spanking new O’Reilly book containing over five hundred “power tips” and tricks for (amazingly enough) Mac OS X. The tips are culled from the website of the same name, written and maintained by Rob Griffiths. The book is edited by David Pogue, of Missing Manual and Pogue Press fame. It’s 461 pages, list price is $24.95, and the O’Reilly catalog page (containing samples from the book) is right here.

Addressing the Obvious
The most immediate question I had when I heard that O’Reilly would be publishing a book containing hints from macosxhints.com was, of course, why I should get the book when the hints are already on the site for free. Both the author and the publisher also thought of this, understandably enough. Here’s how Rob Griffiths answered the question in a post on the site, when the book was first announced: “The book isn’t just a “cut and paste” job from the site to print form. Every hint was rewritten and retested from scratch, and hundreds of screenshots were added to help clarify and explain the hints. In addition, many of the scripts and programs posted here are included (the author of each program was contacted for approval to include their original work in the book - thanks to each of you for agreeing!).” The response included in the O’Reilly press release for the book is along the same lines: “‘The 500-plus hints in this book are based on tips published in the Mac OS X Hints web site,’ explains Griffiths. ‘But it’s not just a rehash of what’s there. Every hint has been rewritten, expanded, organized, indexed, tested for compatibility with the latest version of Mac OS X 10.2, and in many cases, illustrated, making the book an even better resource than the web site.”

So the question then becomes: is this really the case? Are the differences between the hints as posted on the site and as printed in the book really significant enough to merit shelling out $24.95?

The short answer would be that, in my opinion, the book is worth its price. The long answer is (predictably) a little more complicated. There are, of course, people who are more than willing to do the extra digging on the web to get the relevant content for free - they’d rather do without the little perks (increased readability, revision, testing, screenshots) than spend potential beer money for a glossy O’Reilly book. And that’s fine - I’m more than sympathetic with this position, being frequently hard up for beer money, myself. But of course there are also people for whom the convenience is just as important as the cost, and who consider the price of the book well worth it in terms of the time saved. If you fall into the former category, don’t bother buying the book - but then, you weren’t going to buy it anyway, were you? As for the latter group, rest assured that your investment will not, in this case, be wasted.

What I Liked
I’ve read several other books on Mac OS X. The one I believe everyone should start with is still David Pogue’s Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. If you’ve already read this book (and enjoyed it) or didn’t read it but are confident you’ve already got the equivalent experience, then Mac OS X Hints is a good next step. Griffiths assumes you’re comfortable using OS X for basic tasks - he doesn’t tell you how to log in, or what the Dock is. If you’re fuzzy on those kind of basics, you’re not quite ready for this book (but you’re positively crying out for a copy of the Missing Manual). Additionally, he pushes some not-entirely-obvious processes to the introduction, so you don’t have to read the same instructions over and over in the meat of the book itself. After all, once you’ve been told the first time how to view the contents of a package, you’re probably all set in that regard. This is one of the aspects of Mac OS X Hints that I found most appealing, actually - Griffiths just explains in the beginning that he’s assuming certain things, and then doesn’t bother dumbing anything else down.

I’ve been a fan of macosxhints.com since I first installed OS X, but it seems like Griffiths’s style has really improved for the book - this may be a function of Pogue’s role as editor, as the writing in Hints displays the same familiar, comfortable tone while not skimping on depth or details. Like other books Pogue has been involved in, this one is highly readable but not oversimplified.

It seems like the revision process the hints went through during their transition from site to print has been pretty successful, as well - despite being familiar with the site, there was a great deal of material in the book that I had never seen, even after reading other OS X books. Additionally, the testing involved in the book’s creation removes a great deal of the frustration inherent in the site. As much as I like the site, there have been several hints that have mysteriously declined to function on my own system for whatever reason - but everything I’ve tried from the book worked without a hitch.

I also enjoyed the fact that this book, like Mac OS X Hacks, is made for sampling. Each article is short and to the point, and while related hints are grouped by chapter, no single tip depends on the reader having already performed one of the others (unless otherwise specified). You don’t have to read the book cover to cover - you can flip around at will without getting lost.

Incidentally, another plus is that 15% of all Griffiths’s profits from this book are being donated to the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. That in itself isn’t a reason to buy the book, but it’s good to know.

What I Didn’t Like
If I can be nitpicky for a moment, I was bothered by the frequency of purely typographical errors. Little things like “than” being used instead of “then”, or the bottom edge of a line in a sidebar getting cut off. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the book, and I’m sure it’s the sort of thing that will get corrected in future printings, but this sort of error occured often enough that I noticed it, anyway.

Another little thing was that I wish URLS had been included whenever a third-party shareware program was mentioned. Of course I know I can Google for DragThing and find it immediately - but if I’m paying for a book, it seems to me that I shouldn’t have to.

There is also the fact that this book is undeniably a book, and that limits it in certain respects (at least when compared to the site). The index is comprehensive and useful, but it’s just not as useful as the ability to search the entire text of the book. It’s also inevitably dated to a certain degree - new hints posted to the site, even if they’re infinitely more fabulous than ones already present in the book, just won’t show up in print for a long time to come. Similarly, if a new version of the OS breaks one of the hints, you’ll be able to find out somewhere on the web, but it won’t be immediately obvious when you’re just reading the book. Of course, these are problems shared by all print technical books, and not just Hints.

One final note: there’s a lot of overlap between this book and Mac OS X Hacks, although each book has a significant amount of unique content. If you own one, you probably don’t need to get the other, but it’s difficult to say which I’d buy if I had to choose. Hacks contains only 100 articles, but they’re more in-depth and the tasks they cover are often trickier or less obvious. Hints contains over 500 tidbits, but they’re much shorter and often deal with things like key commands that allow you to increase your efficiency, and things of that ilk.

The Bottom Line
If you’re the sort for whom time is at a higher premium than money - maybe you’re the kind of person who would buy a boxed *nix distribution instead of downloading it - then I’d say go ahead and get this book. It’s well worth its price as long as you understand that what you’re paying for is ease of use and reliability, as well as content. If, on the other hand, you’re living on Top Ramen for the forseeable future, you’re probably better off sticking with the site. If you do buy it, I think you’ll find it will make a happy addition to your bookshelf - stick it next to the Missing Manual and dip into it whenever you’re sitting through an install or reboot.

This morning, I’m finally getting around to posting a couple of links I’ve been meaning to toss your way for a while now. Several people wrote in yesterday to point out this story, which may be of interest to anyone who bought a shirt or who reads PA. Of course, it shouldn’t have needed an appeal to establish that video games can be protected by the first amendment - but we’ll take what we can get. Read, and rejoice.

Although I forgot to mention it at the time, WNY recently had a great story up about Misha and his super-hacker ex-girlfriend. Read, and giggle.

There’s a car-crash-caliber serialzed novel up at the WSJ. Car-crash-caliber in that it’s truly awful - but you still have to look (I was driven to dig it up by this review over at Salon). The author of the novel, Danielle Crittenden, is a “neo-traditionalist”, and her story (excruciatingly entitled Amanda.Bright@home) is a transparently allegorical tale about a woman who realizes that despite what her awful feminist Momma taught her, giving up her career to have kids is the right thing to do - her husband will take care of everything, because he’s a “mighty tree.” Read, and cringe.

Because, on some post-commute evenings, I am much too sleepy and braindead to discuss further the possible plot of The Matrix: Revolutions or to document that set of Amazon-related scripts I’ve been meaning to release or even to do the dishes, I am glad that the only people in a position to see me during such post-commute evenings are not the kind of people who would be offended by the way in which I spend my precious few at-home waking hours building complex architectural structures out of lollipop sticks and slowly ripping the hems out of my pajama bottoms while watching (or pretending to watch) whatever is on PBS.

This is why there are reading lamps: so that when I am exactly that sleepy and braindead, I can just give up and crawl gratefully under the covers with a book under the pretense that I will actually be reading (when in fact I will lie there stupified for maybe thirty seconds before immediately and deliciously losing consciousness). That way it’s not like I’m going to bed at 9:30pm, even when I am in fact going to bed at 9:30pm.