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Buffalo Lights Hits the Server What the hell are "buffalo lights"? Finally
done The earlier work has in most cases been so rewritten as to bear little resemblance to the orginal sources, so it would be fair to say that 90 percent of the book is new. This might not be quantifiable, but I'm sticking with it.The chapters are arranged by theme and appear in chronological order, so that anyone with the nerve to read them all can follow the extraordinary twists and turns of my life over the last several years. For anyone who doesn't know by now, in 1999 my wife quit her job as promised and we sold everything to high-tail it out to Taos, New Mexico. Since then we've been trying like mad to invent new lives from scratch, which would have happened even if we had had a plan: New Mexico is like that. Many of you may dream of doing something similar, in which case trusted friends and family members may wish to begin scheduling an "intervention" toot sweet. As for us, we came cold, without anything more than a vague idea of what to do about housing or finances, in the process creating an extended crisis that is still largely unresolved. This is not to say that yours truly is feeling anything but very much alive and charging full speed ahead, however! But my better half is still contemplating whether to leave me chasing after espresso bar queens and flee back to humid, boring, civilization -- and who could blame her? It only took me three years to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other and get serious, after all. Go figure. Commercial
break:
Practical
(?) stuff Basically, I totally hate Word. All the dialogue boxes are ugly as sin, there are too many buttons in the toolbar (I'm sure someone without a life can customize it), all the formatting procedures are arcane, obtuse, non-intuitive, and a pain in the butt. Making simple changes to the section headers frequently caused blocks of text to shift, jump, wobble, and end up where I never intended them to be. Speaking as a writer, Word scared me to death. I never felt confident that the document was "safe." Many times I would do a little editing on page 115, say, and then find that something had gone loosey-goosey back on page 10. Experienced users no doubt have fixes for my complaints, but please don't email me to advise me to use the auto-save feature: I did! Creating the PDF file is easy. Microsoft Word integrates decently enough with the necessary Adobe widgets, though so would anything else I might have used. I found I had no need of Acrobat whatever. In fact, even with OS 9.1, there more ways to crank out PDFs -- I have a lot of software -- than I could figure out. Going directly from Word seemed to produce the worst results, incidentally. Administrative
slog As of this writing at 12:42 p.m. MDT on Monday afternoon -- yes, I'm late! -- I have sold two copies, and nobody even knows about the damn thing yet. But at least the sucker is launched now. No more "what ifs" or "gee, I coulda had a V-8." I know I'm going to hear plenty from people about typography, organization, editing, etc. and that's good: the only way to learn really, really fast is to make as many mistakes as possible. Feel free to extrapolate from there and render judgement on the whole amazing, insane, and ultimately life-affirming exercise of jumping into the volcano. When you've finished reading the book, you'll know just what I mean. 
"Grack!" Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr still needs everyone to hit the FarrFeed link and beat the amateur porno blogs. FARRFEED.COM -- new Salon blog! That's right: GRACK! updates will now be included in the all-new FARR SITE NEWS newslist, featuring items of interest from all my online & print publishing projects. To join up, just CLICK HERE and send a blank email! (Current year's columns just below)
"GRACK!" is © copyright 2002, John H. Farr, all rights reserved
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