Categories
Digital Miscellaneous

How a certain computer company lost me, and how they won me back

Just a few months ago, I replaced my PC with a Mac, and I’m kind of surprised that I did. Here’s my personal technology history, briefly: 

The first computer I remember seeing was around 1986 or ‘87, when my dad brought home a “portable” Compaq that was the size of small suitcase. It had an operating system called DOS. I didn’t get anything my own computer-like device until late high school, when I got a Panasonic word processor. The Panasonic took me all the way into my senior year of college, when email was just starting to become common. My first computer was an Apple LC III (Or was it II? Hard to remember).

At my first newspaper job in 1994, we wrote our stories on Macintosh Classics with those teeny tiny black and white monitors. The World Wide Web hadn’t been invented yet. When it was, around 1997, we got up from our Mac’s to use the special “Internet computer,” which was PC. (Yes, I’m serious that it was the special “Internet” station.) I still had the LC III, but my roommates had PCs that I’d use from time to time. 

In 1998, I bought my first laptop, a Macintosh Power PC. By the time 2002 rolled around, though, I wanted a newer, faster computer. But I was put off by how high the prices for new Mac’s. I’d also been having problems with sharing documents between home and work, and with files from the Internet that wouldn’t work on a Mac. So I bought a cheap, fast laptop, and I was pretty happy about it.

I stayed with PCs for 10 years. But then a bunch of little things happened that planted the seeds for an eventual return to Mac.

I’m somewhat techy, but I did need help with certain things from time to time, especially with modems and routers. Around midway through my PC run, I noticed that the customer service offered by my PC maker (Dell) was deteriorating noticeably — the reps just were not as helpful, and it was obvious they were all based overseas. Another thing: I could see that the compatibility issues for documents and other files were going away. My students (I teach as an adjunct) had Macs and were navigating those issues just fine.

I had the misfortune to buy my final PC during the terrible Vista years, and as time went on, it created many aggravations. Meanwhile, Apple was launching its iPods and iPhones, and offering more services. I also started noticing that while the price difference between Macs and PCs were still there, they were less than they had been, while Apple was offering more services and options.

This year, when it was time to buy a new computer, I was well disgusted with my PC, so much so that I was willing to pay the extra money and switch back to Mac.

I’m writing all this down here now, and it makes a coherent story. But I have to say the ACTUAL thought processes for making the switch were much less linear and much more intuitive, and not a decision-tree type of thing at all. It was more like this: PCs=aggravating, Macs=interesting. Purchase. 

Thus are the impulses on which rise and fall the fortunes of the major tech companies.

Categories
Cooking Librarianship

Managing my back issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine

I am a Cook’s Illustrated fanatic. That is not too strong of a word to express my devotion to that magazine. My grandmother was a wonderful cook, but for whatever reason, she didn’t pass down her skills to me. In her defense, I never asked. So I feel like Cook’s Illustrated taught me how to cook.

One of their many tag lines is, “Recipes that work.” And CI recipes really do work. If you follow the instructions exactly, the food is excellent. And after many years of following CI recipes to the letter, I finally learned my own technique. Little things, like how hot the pan has to be to put a good sear on a piece of meat. How to roast vegetables. When to pull the cookies out of the oven at the perfect moment.

After more than 10 years of Cook Illustrated issues arriving in the mailbox every other month, though, I do believe they have offered recipes for everything I’m in interested in cooking. Frankly, I noticed this for the first time about two years ago, but I was in denial. Now I’m admitting grudgingly that the heyday of Angie and Cook’s Illustrated is coming to its natural end. And frankly, I’m tired of keeping dozens of raggedy back issues organized in my kitchen’s limited space.

Fortunately for me, I have options — many options. What makes Cook’s Illustrated special has no ads, and this is a good thing. But it also means they’re always packaging and re-packaging their content, to sell it again and again. Thus the Cook’s Illustrated spin-offs of Cook’s Illustrated Online, America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Country and The Best Recipe Cookbooks.

I’ve had a subscription to the website for sometime now, and it’s always been handy. It’s an instant index to the paper issues, for one. And sometimes I would decide at work to cook a certain recipe that night; it was wonderful to be able to log on and see the ingredients so I could stop at the store on the way home.

So here’s my plan to reorganize my own personal library of Cook’s Illustrated received wisdom: I’ve bought two giant CI cookbooks, The New Best Recipe (updated edition) and More Best Recipes. I’m storing my hard copy back issues in anticipation of recycling them at a future date. I will keep the website subscription. (And to be honest, I’m thinking of getting the iPad subscription to the magazine, too.)

Why this long, rambling post about all this? I think my relationship with Cook’s Illustrated is a case study in information management.

What I’m finding in this case is that sometimes more information isn’t better. It’s just more. I’m trying to find a way to get less information, but information that is more relevant to me and better organized. Sixty magazines are hard to keep organized. Two cookbooks are easy.

Categories
Books Poetry

The Ireland visit, a reader’s tour, 2012

When the spouse and I went to Ireland in 2007 for the first time, I was in full-on James Joyce obsession, and we saw a lot. We did the Dublin Writers Museum. I had the glass of burgundy and gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrnes. We drove out to Sandycove to see Joyce’s Martello tower and the museum there. And in Galway, we went to Nora Barnacle’s home.

For our most recent trip, I was (am?) in full-on William Butler Yeats obsession. Sadly, though, we did not go to Sligo. There were good reasons for that, involving travel time and logistics and such like. So the ultimate Yeats tour of Ireland is still out there waiting to be undertaken.

No regrets, though! We had THREE great literary moments in our latest trip to Ireland, which I will recount here.

1. Dublin Literary Pub Crawl/Seamus Heaney radio interview. The pub crawl put together stops at Dublin’s historic pubs with  dramatic readings from Irish literature — Samuel Becket’s “Waiting for Godot,” James Plunkett’s “Strumpet City,” Oscar Wilde on his travels in America. The actors who proclaimed the roles did a great job, and the pubs had great ambiance, too. The capper on our night out, though, was the ride back to our cousins’ house north of Dublin in County Meath. As we were leaving the city, a radio interview with Irish poet Seamus Heaney was just beginning. 

It’s very difficult to summarize the career of Seamus Heaney briefly, so I won’t try. I’ll just note here that he won the Nobel Prize in 1995, and I’ll link to the Poetry Foundation’s biography of him and let you take it from there. Or, you could take a moment to read “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.” (“Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:/ Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,/ Subtle discrimination by addresses/ With hardly an exception to the rule.”)

As we were pulling into the driveway at home, the radio interview had just ended, we had listened to some of Heaney’s major works, and it was the perfect ending to a memorable evening in the city of Dublin. 

2. Yeats exhibit at the National Library. We went to the National Library of Ireland on one of our first afternoons in the country, so the spouse could do some research. Lo and behold, their very notable exhibit of The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats (see worthwhile NYT write-up here) was still going! This exhibit opened in 2006, and we wanted to go when we visited in 2007, but we got too busy, and like I said, I was obsessed with Joyce back then, not Yeats. 

This time, I got to spend a blissful hour and a half in the exhibit while the spouse did research in the library’s reading room. 

Most, most wonderful about the exhibit was the area that showcased Yeats’ poetry. You couldn’t miss it, it was a screened seating area right when you entered the exhibit, and it included wall-sized renderings of his poems with out-loud readings. The recorded reading were by Yeats himself, Seamus Heaney, Sinead O’Connor and several others. Sinead did a particularly haunting job with “Easter 1916.” (I’ve looked for a CD of these readings to no avail, sad.) The National Library has posted a virtual tour of the Yeats exhibit, and I’ve spent time on it even now. It’s fascinating.

3. Listowel Writers Week/Paul Durcan reading. The reason we went at the time we did this year was so we could go to Listowel Writers Week, the literary festival is in its 41st year, in County Kerry. Listowel is a charming town, and the highlight of the week was getting to see the poet Paul Durcan read on Friday night. Durcan is another one of Ireland’s celebrated poets; the Irish Independent says he “comes second only to Seamus Heaney as our most famous living poet.” 

Durcan’s new book, “Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being” was in every bookstore we stopped at in Ireland (Dublin, Ballybunion, Kinsale, Clonakilty). The night of the reading, the spouse stood in a very, very long line to get me an autographed copy. It’s one of my favorite presents I’ve received in a long time and my best memento of the trip. My favorite poem is “The Recession.” The inscription reads, “For Angie, Warmest wishes, Paul Durcan, Listowel, 1 June 2012.” 

Categories
Books Fact-checking

Books: ‘The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics’

Books: ‘The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics’

Just one more thing I love about being a journalist: Sometimes I get to interview authors of books I really like. Here’s a link to my interview with Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist who wrote “The Happiness Hypothesis” and “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics.” 

Categories
Books Travel

Books to read for a trip to Ireland

We’re going to Ireland again, so it’s time for another Irish reading list.

So what’s on my reading list? I don’t have all that much time, so it’s fairly short. 

Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. You won’t find anything here about the Celtic tiger or the financial crisis. By “modern,” they mean from about1800 to 1992, with a heavy emphasis on before 1922. Got that? Instead, this is mostly a history of how Ireland won its independence from Great Britain. If you’ve watched “Downton Abbey,” this is the kind of book that would give you great insight into the world of Tom Branson, the “very political” driver. 

The Forgotten Waltz, by Anne Enright. This is a contemporary novel, the story of an affair. Enright won the Booker Prize for a novel about a family confronting the suicide of an  adult son. Her writing is supposed to be fabulous. 

Mothers and Sons, by Colm Toibin. This choice is much more difficult, I’ve been wanting to read something by Toibin for years. “The Master“— probably his best-known work — is a fictionalized portrait of the American novelist Henry James. Toibin’s novel “Brooklyn,” is about an Irish girl arriving in the States in the 1950s; it also got excellent reviews. His newest work is a set of essays called “New Ways to Kill your Mother,” in which he contemplates literature and family. But I will probably go with “Mothers and Sons” because it’s about (relatively) contemporary Ireland and also for a more mundane reason — I have it on my bookshelf. 

Categories
Books History

To End All Wars, by Alan Hochschild – Favorite Nonfiction of 2011

This history of World War I — To End All Wars by Alan Hochschild — was my favorite nonfiction book of 2011. I don’t usually think of World War I much, yet it was an astounding conflict in so many ways, with its vast loss of lifeless and the almost pointless way it started. I wasn’t really sure how the war ignited before I read this book, and now that I have more detailed knowledge, I’m not sure I can explain it any better. Basically, Austria invaded Serbia, and the rest of the countries of Europe really wanted to go to war, so they all jumped in.

Hochschild uses a smart structure for his history: He focuses on people in Britain, switching between the points of view of the generals running the war and the anti-war protesters trying to stop it. There’s plenty of futility to go around on all sides: The generals don’t understand that they can’t take out machine gun nests by throwing infantry and cavalry at it. Meanwhile, the conscientious objectors are trying turn public opinion that seems absolutely gung ho for war.

Hochschild tells the story through just a few characters, including the Pankhurst family, a mother and her daughters who were radical suffragettes — bombing buildings and rappelling into parliament — before they split over the war issue. The mother, Emmeline, became a fervent war supporter, while one of her daughters ran a prominent anti-war newspaper. 

Finally, World War I has popped up in some uniquely personal contexts for me. My husband has been working on a history of his grandparents, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1913. His great uncle John came to the States around the same time, but was drafted and sent back Europe to fight with the Americans in 1918. Back in Ireland, the Easter Rising, which eventually led to the country’s independence, happened in 1916, right in the middle of the war.

On a lighter note, World War I is figuring heavily in the new season of my favorite TV show Downton Abbey.  

I would strongly recommend this book to people who are interested in history but who find traditional scholarly treatises to be dull and plodding. This book is anything but.

Categories
Fact-checking Journalism

A Look at PolitiFact Grades of Candidates – NYTimes.com

A Look at PolitiFact Grades of Candidates – NYTimes.com

This is an interesting analysis from the New York Times’ 538 blog of the many ratings we’ve issued over at PolitiFact. 

Categories
Books

PowellsBooks.Blog – Powell’s Q&A: Chad Harbach – The Art of Fielding

PowellsBooks.Blog – Powell’s Q&A: Chad Harbach – The Art of Fielding

I still think everyone should read the new novel, “The Art of Fielding.” Here’s a Q-A with author Chad Harbach where he talks about how he sees the novel, plus also his other favorite books.

Categories
Journalism

Unnecessary Journalism Phrases

Unnecessary Journalism Phrases

“To be sure,” “very unique,” “close proximty” … you get the idea!

Categories
Books

Review: Memorable characters in Chad Harbach’s ‘Art of Fielding’ explore human condition through baseball – St. Petersburg Times

Review: Memorable characters in Chad Harbach’s ‘Art of Fielding’ explore human condition through baseball – St. Petersburg Times

I reviewed this book recently; it may be my favorite novel of the year, though there are a few more months to go.