It’s like this: I just have too many blogs. Not that I’ve had time to write anything for any of them recently, but the problem is compounded by the fact that there are at least two different places where I’d write about stuff going on in my personal life if and when I had the time to do so (here and on Truffles for Breakfast). In theory, TFB is for stuff relating to our life in Paris, but since that sort of encompasses pretty much everything, it leaves little that feels like it belongs here. One of these days I’ll figure out what really belongs where, but in the meantime, for an update on what’s been going on in my life, please read New Year’s Update on Truffles for Breakfast.

Almost exactly four years ago, on October 24, 2003, Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. On that same day, the very first ebook in the Take Control series appeared—my upgrading guide, Take Control of Upgrading to Panther. Little did I know then that this little publishing experiment, undertaken by most of the TidBITS staff and a handful of other talented authors and editors, would be so successful as to eventually produce the majority of my income. But today, less than 24 hours after Apple finally announced the shipping date of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’m pleased to report that my 14th title in the series is now on sale: Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard: Early-Bird Edition.

When I wrote my second Upgrading book, Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger, I naturally started with what I’d written about Panther, added some stuff, removed some stuff, and generally updated everything to be accurate under the new system. But this time I wanted to go way beyond that. Leopard is a big, big release with lots of serious changes; I wanted the Upgrading book to reflect that and prepare users as thoroughly as possible. So in addition to massively reworking the text to cover all the changes to the Leopard installation process, I pulled in some material from my ebooks on backups, maintenance, and troubleshooting. Now I provide detailed instructions on getting your Mac in tip-top shape, complete with an excellent backup, before inserting that Leopard DVD—and I think the extra steps up front will lead to much happier installations later.

Of course, there was a tiny problem: ideally, you’d do all that preparatory stuff days or even weeks before you get your Leopard DVD, but I can’t actually release the full book, with all its top-secret information about the ins and outs of Leopard installation, without violating my NDA. So we decided to create two versions of the book. The Early-Bird Edition, which you can buy (for $10) and download today, has all the background information you need to get your Mac ready for the upgrade, but leaves out all the information I’m not allowed to reveal (which amounts to quite a large portion of the book). The full edition will become available the instant Leopard goes on sale in North America (that’s 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time next Friday, October 26). Anyone who has already purchased the Early-Bird Edition can simply click a link on the cover of the PDF to go to a Web page where they can download the full version for free. And then they can skip (or skim) about 50 pages of text and get on to the actual upgrading process fairly quickly. Of course, if you wait until next Friday or later to make your purchase, you’ll simply get the full version, which is a superset of the Early-Bird Edition.

Now then…what’s crazy to me about all this is that I initially wrote (both versions of) this book back in February, when Apple was still saying Leopard would be released in the spring. It went through our whole editorial and technical review process way back then. In April, when Apple announced a delay until October, we just put the project on ice. This summer I picked it up again, and updated the manuscript with new information from each new beta version of Leopard. Yesterday, as soon as Apple made their announcement, I had to tweak a few things in the Early-Bird Edition to correspond to the latest truth, but even so, we were organized enough that the PDF was available for sale within hours. Between now and next Friday, I very much hope to see an even more recent version of Leopard than what I’ve been working with, and should it contain any significant changes, I’ll work those into the final text as well. The result should be our most thorough and up-to-date upgrading guide ever! If you’re planning to install Leopard, I think you’ll find this ebook to be immensely helpful.

I have a few blog-related announcements, which contradict each other only slightly.

Announcement #1: Blogging Guilt Banished
Effective immediately, I’m no longer going to feel guilty about going long periods of time between blog posts, and therefore no longer feel obligated to apologize when returning after a long absence. There. I finally said it. I feel much better now.

A typical expectation among people who regularly read blogs is that new entries will occur frequently—at least a few times per week—and that blogs with no new material for a month or so are effectively “stale” and not worth subscribing to anymore. I can’t change the way anyone thinks about blogs, but I can at least admit that my lifestyle just doesn’t accommodate this sort of schedule and probably never will. I’m now officially declaring myself to be OK with that, and I’m not going to try to fight it anymore. I’m just going to go with the flow as best I can.

This has been a difficult issue for me to grapple with, especially since I now contribute to no fewer than six blogs (more on this just ahead), some of which even produce a nontrivial amount of income. But I am not a professional blogger, and as much as I may fantasize about eventually being able to live off my blogging efforts alone, that’s not even remotely the case today, nor is it a top priority for the near future. For now, keeping up with writing blogs is not my life or even my job, it’s just an additional activity in an already full life.

Most of the time, I’m simply too busy doing things to also write about doing them (even when the activities I’m doing themselves include writing). In particular, the whole notion of committing to writing something on a blog every single day—well, for that matter, committing to doing virtually anything every single day—is just contrary to my nature. I’ve done it, but I haven’t enjoyed it, and I can’t sustain it over long periods of time. I don’t have a daily routine and don’t want to have one, but even so, I have relatively little free time. And such free time as I have is time I want to spend relaxing, reading, watching TV, not typing. So unless or until my life situation changes such that blogging is what keeps a roof over my head, it’s going to have to be a pretty random (and perhaps infrequent) activity.

Announcement #2: Yet Another Blog: TidBITS Staff
One aspect of the recent redesign to the TidBITS Web site is that each of the staff members now has a “personal” blog. (That’s personal as in “specific to that person,” not “about someone’s personal life.”) And we are all encouraged to put interesting stuff in those blogs, in addition to what we normally write for TidBITS and what we would otherwise write on our personal personal blogs. So, lucky me, I have yet another blog to feed! It’s located here: Joe Kissell’s TidBITS Staff Blog.

In the past, I’ve posted any number of stories here on I Am Joe’s Blog about Mac-related stuff, but now that this new TidBITS blog exists, that’s a more appropriate place for much of that material. So expect the majority of technical topics to migrate there.

This change puts I Am Joe’s Blog in a kind of weird state. Already, I’d shifted most topics relating to my living in France to Truffles for Breakfast and most food-related topics to The Geeky Gourmet; with tech topics now moving to TidBITS, there are fewer and fewer bloggy subjects that don’t already have another home. So, I’m not really sure what’s left to talk about here. Meta discussions about Interesting Thing of the Day and SenseList? Opinions on TV shows, movies, or politics? I don’t know. If there’s something you’d really like me to talk about here, let me know—but no guarantees. Refer to Announcement #1.

Announcement #3: Twittering
In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, or this is the first Web page you’ve ever seen (Welcome!), one of the latest memes in the online world is something called Twitter. You might think of Twitter as micro-blogging. The idea is basically that, whenever you feel like it, you type a very short message—there’s a 140-character limit—saying what you’re doing right now, or what you’ve recently done, or whatever other little snippet of text is interesting to you at the moment. People can then follow your activities on a Web page, or download any of numerous programs that will display little pop-up windows when any of the people they’re following post something on Twitter. And that’s pretty much that. It’s a really lightweight thing, not big and complex like RSS, no ads (yet!), and no endless backlogs of long news stories or email messages you have to slog through if you’re out of things for a while.

Well, I’ve been resisting Twitter ever since I heard about it months ago. Because honestly, I can’t be bothered to keep telling my computer what I’m doing. I’m notoriously bad about even changing my IM status, because it feels like an annoying, intrusive, extra task. I don’t want a new list of meta-tasks, no matter how brief they may be; I just want to do my thing.

But, on the recommendation of several people who are also generally disinclined to spend time on unnecessary activities, I’m giving it a try. I can’t guarantee how well, how long, or to what extent I’ll use it, but I’m going to make the effort for a little while and see how it goes. If you want to follow me on Twitter, click here or check out the running list in the sidebar of this page. Or see my Twitters on Facebook, not that I’m a very active participant there either.

Announcement #4: Ziki
A number of people have inquired as to whether there’s a place they can go to find all my posts from the various blogs I contribute to. As a matter of fact, there are a number of ways to pull this off, but an easy one is simply to go to my page on Ziki.com. Among other things, it shows my recent posts on Interesting Thing of the Day, SenseList, Truffles for Breakfast, The Geeky Gourmet, I Am Joe’s Blog, and TidBITS, which is a good percentage of my online writing. It doesn’t show stuff I’ve done for Macworld or Datamation, but I periodically update the list of books and articles I’ve written, which includes all that stuff, my ebooks, print books, and so on.

If you were to ask most Parisians what the weather has been like this summer, they’d say it’s been awful. Not me—I’ve found July and August to be delightful: mostly cool and overcast. It’s raining as I type this, and I concede that the rain has been a bit more frequent than I’d prefer. But on the whole, I’m very happy with the weather. A day without much sun is a nice day in my book; hot, bright, cloudless days are in fact my least favorite of all. So if you tell me it’s a nice day because it’s sunny, and I reply along the lines of “Sure, if you like that sort of thing,” don’t think I’m making a joke.

I’ve said from time to time that I like sunshine well enough, as long as I can enjoy it from the comfort of a cool, shady room. I like the look of sunshine; I just don’t like being out in it. People seem to think this is an extremely odd preference, and when I mentioned this a few weeks ago in my Interesting Thing of the Day article on Paris Plages, one reader worried that I might get so little sunlight that I was in danger of suffering a Vitamin D deficit! I assure you that I’m not a troll or a vampire, and I do spend plenty of time outdoors during the day. However…

• I don’t like the heat. I was a bit concerned that we might arrive in France in the middle of another heat wave, like the deadly one here a few years ago. Notwithstanding the fact that I often go on vacations to warm places, I just don’t deal well with heat, and I particularly dislike being drenched in sweat. It was a relief to find that summer has been cool here, especially since air conditioning is uncommon in France.

• I don’t like bright light. Maybe my eyes are overly sensitive to light, I don’t know. But even on a cloudy day I seem to end up squinting a lot, or else wearing sunglasses. It’s a bother.

• I don’t like getting sunburned. I burn fairly easily, and as I remarked in my Truffles for Day post Sun, sand, Seine, I had a rather severe sunburn when I was in high school, which has made me extra cautious ever since. Applying sunscreen is a pain, especially since my limbs are hairy, and it’s not something I care to do multiple times every day. On the other hand, if I keep covered up with clothing, that just makes me hotter. A better solution, for me, is not to be in the sun in the first place.

• I like clouds. I’m happy to see blue sky, but equally happy to see big fluffy clouds filling it up. And even a completely overcast sky is perfectly OK.

• I actually like the nighttime better. I’ve always been a night owl—stay up late, get up late. I’m happy that way. I don’t think I could ever become completely nocturnal; that would just make life way too inconvenient. But I almost always prefer to be out at night rather than during the day.

Rain is another matter. During the first six months or so that I was living in Vancouver (this would have been late 1998, early 1999), it rained at least a little bit almost every single day. I have to say, that was kind of depressing. It’s not that I mind being wet as such, but dealing with the extra apparatus (umbrella, raincoat, whatever) to keep my clothes and belongings dry is an inconvenience. (On the other hand, I’m quite fond of fog—always have been.)

Likewise, cool is great and chilly is fine, but severely cold is unpleasant. I do enjoy spending a week or two every year in the snow, but frostbite isn’t really preferable to sunburn, and once again, I don’t like all the extra layers and gear required to keep oneself warm when it’s extremely cold outside.

Context, however, does make a difference. For example, back in 1993–1994 I was living in Pittsburgh. That winter was especially brutal, and I remember reading at the time that Pittsburgh was the nation’s least sunny city, with an average of only 59 days of sunshine per year. Even for me, that was too much; weather was an important factor in deciding to move from there to San Diego, rather than to Buffalo, which had been the other leading contender. But then, other things about my situation in Pittsburgh were less than satisfactory, and in different circumstances I might have been more content with the weather there. As for San Diego, it was pretty sunny, but at least it wasn’t too hot—and, happily, there was plenty of fog too.

Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks about the weather this way, can I? There must be other people who don’t equate “hot and sunny” with “nice.” Don’t be embarrassed to say so. You’re entitled to your meteorological preferences.

In any case, yes, it’s a nice day here in Paris: gray and chilly, just the way I like it.

Among the many interesting announcements from Apple yesterday was an expansion of .Mac’s capabilities, but with the same price as before. And there are lots of groovy new things, such as the Web Gallery and the capability to use .Mac with your own domain. Unlike most people, my reaction to these changes was, in a word, “Ugh,” by which I mean “I now have to spend many days updating my book Take Control of .Mac to reflect the current truth.” Yeah, I know, boo hoo.

However, what most caught my attention was the change in storage limits. Previously, .Mac came with 1 GB of storage for $100 per year, and you could increase it to either 2 GB (for $50 extra per year) or 4 GB (for $100 extra per year). Now, at those same prices, you get a base level of 10 GB, which you can increase to either 20 GB or 30 GB. And it seems a lot of people are thinking, “Wow, a 10x increase in space at no extra cost! Great!” But I’m thinking: not great.

As before, that space has to be divided among Mail, .Mac Groups, and iDisk—and, of the iDisk space, a lot of that will presumably go toward sharing all your photos and videos and iWeb sites. You can use whatever’s left for sharing files or backups. But here’s the thing. Apple is still way behind the times; they should have done that two years ago and made yesterday’s upgrade another order of magnitude greater. At least. Compared with other Web/email hosting providers (because really, that’s basically what .Mac is), .Mac still gives you a fraction of the typical storage space at a higher price. For example, Dreamhost will give you 145 GB of storage (which, by the way, increases by 1 GB each week) in their cheapest plan, which is $9.95 per month—just $20 per year more than .Mac (and you can decrease that to $7.95 per month by prepaying for two years).

My particular area of concern here, though, is backups, because I’ve written a lot on that subject, and am at this very moment in the process of updating Take Control of Mac OS X Backups to say a lot more about, among other things, online backup services. If .Mac stacks up poorly against Web hosting providers, the comparison with online backup providers is even bleaker. Mozy gives you unlimited backup storage space for $5 per month. And CrashPlan is right behind—you get 50 GB for $5 per month, with additional gigs at 10 cents each (so, 100 GB would be $10 per month, and so on). That’s exactly the sort of space:price ratio where Apple should be. Previously, they were at 1 percent of that, and now they’re at 10 percent. I find that kind of insulting, as though I’ll see all the pretty graphics (yes, they are pretty) and forget that I’m still being overcharged and underserved.

Speaking of that 1 percent figure…I find it interesting that the new iMacs released yesterday can include up to 1 terabyte of disk space. Clearly, Apple expects you to fill up that space with all your excellent new media. Equally clearly, they expect you to put no more than 1 percent of it (10 GB)—or, maybe, 3 percent (30 GB)—online. That’s weird and sad. I say this even realizing the realities of internet bandwidth (sure, it’d take months to back up 1 terabyte over a DSL connection). That’s no excuse to let your competitors leave you in the dust.

All this is not to say I don’t find .Mac useful. I do find it useful—enough so that I keep renewing every year (even though I also have to supplement it with other services). And I’m happy that it’s gotten considerably more useful in the past 24 hours. But let’s not kid ourselves: this is one area in which Apple is still far, far behind the curve.

My article in last week’s issue of TidBITS, Stewing Over Safe Sleep, generated an awful lot of feedback. Most of it was of the “Yeah, that was really stupid of Apple” or “Thanks; now I know how to solve an annoying problem” varieties. Some of it was along the lines of “How could anyone not love safe sleep?” or “I’m not seeing 49-second delays on MY machine” or “It probably doesn’t really matter if you move your computer while the RAM is being cached to disk” or the simple and elegant “You’re an idiot.” Well, thanks one and all for sharing your thoughts, constructive and otherwise.

Two particular threads of discussion, though, are worth a more detailed look.

Hibernating Only When Necessary
First, Greg Nicholson sent me a clever script he wrote (to replace the one I showed in TidBITS) that’s significantly smarter. Greg pointed out that there are certain situations, such as a long flight to China, in which one might be much more likely to want the default Safe Sleep behavior. So his script, which he runs every 10 minutes with cron, checks the battery life. If it’s over 50%, it turns off hibernatemode (as my script does). But if the charge is less than 30%, it turns hibernatemode back on. Very spiffy, and I wish Apple would have built something like this right into Mac OS X. You can, of course, tweak the percentages and so on to your liking. Here’s (my slightly modified version of) Greg’s script:

#!/bin/sh
MODE=`/usr/bin/pmset -g | grep hibernatemode | awk '{ print $2 }'`
LEFT=`/usr/bin/pmset -g batt | grep Internal | awk '{ print $2 }' | awk -F % '{ print $1 }'`

if [ $LEFT -lt 30 ] && [ $MODE != 3 ] ; then
  {
     echo "Less than 30% remains" >> /var/log/system.log
     echo "setting Hibernate mode 3" >> /var/log/system.log
     `/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3`
  }
elif  [ $LEFT -gt 50 ] && [ $MODE != 0 ]; then
  {
     echo "Greater than 50% remains" >> /var/log/system.log
     echo "Setting Hibernate mode 0" >> /var/log/system.log
     `/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 0`
     `rm /var/vm/sleepimage`
  }
fi

Greg noted that since the script requires root privileges, you need to add the following to your sudoers file:

ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3
ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 0

An easier way to achieve that effect would be to put the cron job in your system crontab, if you feel comfortable doing that.

Dealing with an Unencrypted “sleepimage” file
Correction (08-Aug-2007): I see I munged some of my facts here earlier, so I’ve rewritten this paragraph to reflect what I currently believe to be the truth.

Second, the issue of encryption came up. It turns out that using hibernatemode values of 5 or 7 (the prescribed values for those using Secure Virtual Memory) don’t actually result in your sleepimage file being encrypted—in fact, it’s just the opposite. If you have Secure VM turned on and use 5 or 7, your encrypted RAM is apparently decrypted while being written to the sleepimage file. So if you’re using Secure VM and want your sleepimage file, too, to be encrypted (which you should), stick with values of 1 or 3 (3 being the default).

Now, in the real world, this fact probably makes little practical difference for most people, most of the time. Even if you don’t encrypt your VM, it’s not a given that any particular password (or other sensitive data) will actually be in RAM when it comes time for your computer to sleep—it might be, or it might not, depending on a long list of details about how particular programs do things, how recently you logged in, what applications you have running, and so on. And also, the risk is certainly greater for power users who enter an administrative password multiple times per hour than people for whom that is a rare occurrence. Even then, the contents of your RAM is cached to that unencrypted disk image only when your computer goes to sleep and only when the hibernatemode setting is at its default (3) or “always hibernate” (1). And even then, the fact that potentially sensitive stuff is sitting on your hard disk in a readily readable format only causes problems if someone gets access to your computer and knows how to find this data. So, like I say, not a problem for most people, most of the time.

If you’re concerned about this, though, DO follow my advice to turn of Safe Sleep. But go a step further. Instead of using

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

to delete the RAM cache, use the secure version of rm, srm, and use the -m flag for a 7x overwrite rather than the default 35x overwrite:

sudo srm -m /var/vm/sleepimage

The command will take a long time to run, but the disk image holding your RAM contents will be safely overwritten. Note that you only have to do this the first time. If you’ve set up a script (as discussed previously) to check regularly to see that hibernatemode hasn’t turned itself back on, having a simple rm in that script will do the trick. The reason? When hibernatemode turns back on, Mac OS X recreates the sleepimage file immediately. But initially, it’s blank. It doesn’t fill up with the contents of your RAM until your machine tries to go to sleep. If your script runs and deletes the (blank) image before then, nothing incriminating will have been in that file.

I truly hope this all gets sorted out in Leopard.

For the past umpteen years, I have dutifully installed every new version of Microsoft Office for Mac that the company has put out. I expect I will continue doing so indefinitely. I’m not particularly fond of Microsoft as a corporation for all the usual reasons, and I’ve found plenty to complain about in every piece of Microsoft software I’ve used. Nevertheless, I use Office (and particularly Word and Excel) every single day, as probably 90 percent of my income requires it in some fashion. When new versions appear, I fantasize that certain bugs that have existed since the mid-1990s might finally be gone, and they never are, but at least a few things generally get better.

Since I don’t particularly expect that any of my long-standing complaints will disappear in Office 2008, I’ve been looking forward to it for primarily one reason: it’ll be a Universal Binary, and should therefore run faster on my Intel-based Macs than Office 2004 does. In other words, I’ll be glad when Office 2008 ships only to the extent that it should scratch one certain long-standing itch; otherwise, I would have been reasonably content to keep running Office 2004 for years to come.

I say all this to put into context my remarks about today’s announcement that Office 2008 will not, as the company previously claimed, ship in the second half of 2007 but will instead ship in mid-January 2008. As a user, this slippage in ship dates is barely worth noticing. Its net effect on me will probably be next to nil. As a Mac journalist, I find it highly significant that a company the size of Microsoft can’t hit a release window that’s six months wide even when they set that target a mere six months in advance, and I think that’s worth giving the company at least a mild tongue-lashing. But really: I don’t care about the slip. It’s a pity, but no big deal.

What I do care very much about, though, as someone who uses words for a living, is the language Microsoft chose to use in the press release they sent out announcing this delay. It is, truly, a delay: a difference of (depending on how you interpreted “second half of 2007″) anywhere from two weeks to six months and two weeks. And most of the news sites that reported on the delay described it as such. But Microsoft themselves did not use the word “delay.” They didn’t mention that they’d previously announced an earlier date. They didn’t say they were sorry. Instead, they used standard weaselly marketing language to make it sound like they were announcing a virtual non-event, and perhaps even to subtly suggest that anyone who wanted to think about it differently doesn’t care about quality.

Here is the exact text of the press release I received:

Office 2008 Coming January 2008

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) today announced that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac will be available in the US in mid-January of 2008 (planning for Macworld), with global general availability in the first quarter of 2008. This was a business decision based on the Mac BU’s commitment to deliver a high-quality product.

“Our number one priority is to deliver quality software to our customers and partners, and in order to achieve this we are shifting availability of Office 2008 for Mac to mid-January of 2008,” said Mac BU General Manager Craig Eisler. “We’re successfully driving toward our internal goal to RTM in mid-December 2007, and believe our customers will be very pleased with the finished product.”

As the Mac BU moves closer to the product launch, Microsoft will share more details about features and exact timing.

More information at the Mac BU’s Mac Mojo blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo

Now then…what Microsoft could have said in their press release, instead, is this:

“Office 2008 for Mac, which we previously said would ship in the second half of 2007, has been delayed until January 2008. We ran into some unexpected problems, and we now realize we can’t get this out as soon as we said. We apologize for any inconvenience this delay may cause. We hope our customers will find the final product to be worth the wait.”

See how much better that is? It’s easy: just plain English. No weasel words, but no protracted pseudo-explanations either. Just: “Look, stuff happens. It happened. We’re sorry. Here’s the new plan.” And yet, with those few words, you acknowledge that there’s a difference between what you said and what you’re doing, that that is in fact a bad thing that you wish hadn’t happened, and that you understand why people might be a bit upset with you.

Why is that so hard? Why can’t a company bring itself to admit any fault, however minor, to say they feel badly about something? It’s OK, really. Your customers will forgive you. What customers should not forgive is marketing speak. I don’t cry over spilled milk. I cry over “The erstwhile contents of the glass have been redistributed in a more horizontal fashion. This was a business decision based on gravitational forces. Information on forthcoming moisture containment strategies and potential new sources of dairy products will be made available by mid-January 2008.”

We’ve been promising this for a long time, and it has finally sprung to life: Truffles for Breakfast, our new blog about life in France.

Our original idea had been that we’d start the blog at the same time that we “officially” started the process of trying to get to France, so that we could document everything we went through—applying for our visas, dealing with all our household goods, etc.—in real time. Unfortunately, all that stuff kept us so busy that we didn’t have time to write about it too. But now that we’re here and most of the difficult work is behind us, we finally have time to sit down and reflect on what happened before, as well as begin writing about day-to-day life here.

As I said in Introducing Truffles for Breakfast, one reason for the new blog is laziness (or, to put it more positively, efficiency): it saves us from having to retell our stories many times. But we also hope it’ll be an inspiration for anyone who’s thought about doing something like this, and a resource for people who want to move to France in particular but have found the existing information available to be somewhat unhelpful.

We’ve got about a dozen posts up already, with dozens more in the pipeline. Enjoy!

Since I announced that we’d moved to France (both on this blog and on Interesting Thing of the Day), I’ve received lots and lots of feedback—some in comments, but most by email. The vast majority of people who have written have been enthusiastic that we’re doing something we really want to do; more than a few people have said they would love to do something similar.

But today, I got two messages, from two different senders (neither of them known to me), along the same lines:

Message 1:

Enjoy France, That is just enough information for me to remove you from my homepage. I do not have any love for France.

Message 2:

I liked this better before I learned you had bailed the good old U.S. of A. and fled to subversive France.

I would like to be understanding, sympathetic, conciliatory. But…seriously? You honestly mean to say that you liked me, or at least my writing, until you found out that I’m living in France—and that alone is a complete deal-breaker? Really? Every single person who steps within the borders of France, for any reason, is anathema to you? It boggles my mind.

I can only guess what’s prompting these comments. My supposition is that they’re from people who are unhappy about France’s military nonparticipation in the Middle East conflicts. People who, in protest, (still) eat Freedom Fries. I don’t know this to be the case, but it seems likely.

If my guess is correct, and if that’s the only rationale behind these comments, then I feel even sadder about the quality of education in the United States than I did before, because clearly some basic facts about France haven’t gotten through. Politically speaking, France is considerably more conservative, on the whole, than the U.S.—and it just elected a very conservative president who’s a big fan of George W. Bush. There’s also much more popular support for the military here than in the States. (On the other hand, there’s also (at least here in Paris) vastly more acceptance of people with other cultural backgrounds, especially people from Muslim countries.)

Those important facts aside, the whole notion of saying that because a country’s political leaders made certain decisions, the whole country is bad (or good) is incomprehensible to me. The United States has millions of patriotic, flag-waving Democrats who have disagreed with pretty much everything Bush has done but still love their country, and France, too, has plenty of citizens whose views on war differ from those of their leaders. How anyone can paint an entire country—tens or hundreds of millions of people—with the same brush is beyond me.

So, for the record, my moving to France has nothing whatsoever to do with my political views about either country. Good bread is good bread, regardless of who you do or don’t want to shoot.

A couple of days ago, Take Control Books released version 2.5 of my ebook Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac. Even though the version number didn’t jump all the way to 3.0 (meaning this is a free update for people with version 2.0 and 25% off for people with version 1.x), version 2.5 was a massive revision. I added new sections on VMware Fusion and VirtualBox, took out the section on Q (which is now pretty much irrelevant), and provided up-to-date info on the latest versions of Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp. And that’s just the biggest changes—tons of smaller stuff was tweaked too. If you have any interest in running Windows on your Intel-based Mac, this ebook should tell you everything you need to know.

Because things are moving so fast in this area, I predict that at least one, and more likely two, additional updates to this ebook will occur later this year. And I suspect I’ll start getting into more detail about actual usage scenarios. For example, even though I’ve now got two Intel-based Macs, I still haven’t gotten used to the notion that I can now run practically any software whenever I want. When I read about something that’s PC-only, I still have that old habit of disregarding it with a grumble, and I really have to train myself to stop. The world (of software) is my oyster now—almost any Mac, Windows, or Unix program out there will run happily on my Mac—and it will take me some time to fully come to grips with this new sense of freedom.

And, I’d just like to say that my new 17″, 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro—fully loaded with the high-res screen and 4 GB of RAM, of course—is an awfully nice way to run any and every operating system. It’s my first new laptop since my 1 GHz TiBook (ca. 2002), and I’m really digging it.