Two days ago, while reading email, I clicked the play button on Windows Media
Player to listen to my
favorite CD, and my Windows XP system locked up. And I mean it really locked
up; even ctrl-alt-del failed to elicit a response. Somewhat annoyed, wondering
why playing a CD should have such a disastrous affect, I opened up the cabinet
in my desk and hit the hardware-reset button on my PC. I waited, and I waited,
and I waited. The PC went through the usual boot-up sequence until it got to
the point of reading from the hard-drive, and then there was trouble. It sounded
like the drive was trying and retrying and getting nowhere. This went on for
several minutes. I began to wonder whether I shouldn’t have implemented more
of that backup strategy
I talked about back in July. With a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach,
I pressed the reset button once more and went upstairs to make a cup of coffee.
That would give the hard-drive plenty of time to grind away.

I was worried, but not panicked. I did have a recent-enough backup of all my
book files. It’s my email that I’d loose—I don’t backup my email files—and
also the time it would take to format another drive and reinstall everything.
I had a huge backlog of email to work through, and I wasn’t too keen on loosing
all those messages.

Arriving back with my coffee, I saw that some progress had been made. The screen
had shifted to Microsoft-blue, and a little box in the center informed me that
I was running Windows XP. A minute or two later, a dialog opened and told me
that my profile (whatever that was) was damaged, and that XP was therefore going
to put me into a default profile. Finally, Windows finished booting and I was
at the desktop. Unsure about this "default profile" business, I fired
up my email program only to have it act like I was running it for the very first
time. Not good. I rebooted again, this time into safe mode. No difference with
the email program, and bootup was still taking 5-10 minutes, or longer. Something
was clearly wrong, I thought, with the hard-drive. Thinking I might still need
to reinstall Windows and all my applications, I got my notebook computer, which
I keep handy for such emergencies, down from the shelf and plugged it in. Maybe
I’d at least be able to copy my email files, and current versions of all my
other important files, to the notebook where they would be safe while I did
the reformat/reinstall thing on my desktop PC.

Sitting
down at my PC again, my eye chanced a glance at the shelf in the hutch behind
my monitor. On that shelf was a copy of Windows
XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual. Perhaps I should have a look in
the book, I thought. Opening David Pogue’s
book, I quickly found the chapter on troubleshooting, and that chapter began
by talking about something I’d never heard of before called System Restore.
It turns out that System Restore lets you roll back the state of your operating
system to a point in the past, making it easy to recover from a damaged configuration.
That sounded great, except that I didn’t have a snapshot to roll back to, or
so I thought. Turning the page, I discovered that Windows XP makes snapshots
automatically on at least a daily basis. Sure enough! I had a snapshot from
the previous morning. Within 15 minutes or so I had restored the snapshot, restoring
my damaged profile at the same time, rebooted the PC as normal, and was busy
burning my email files onto a CD. Life was good again.

As I write this, I’m looking at the cover price of the book that bailed me
out of a bad situation. The cost? Only $24.95 (in US dollars). What a bargain!
Two days ago, when I thought I’d have to reformat and reinstall, I’d have happily
paid four times $24.95, and probably more, for a quick solution. Clearly David’s
book was a good investment for me. The thing with books though, is that you
have to buy them ahead of time so you have them when you need them. And then
you have to actually read them. I shudder to think that I might have spent the
rest of that day, and probably part of the next, reformatting my hard-drive
and reinstalling software when a much simpler solution was a mere two and one-half
feet away. I’m glad I looked at the Missing Manual, and David, thanks for such
a great book!

What about you? Have you ever had a book bail you out of a bad mess?

Imagine
for a moment living life with a body not your own, not under your control. You
fight the the mounting urge to twitch, blink, or sniff, but as is the case when
holding your breath you eventually can hold out no more and you give in to the
invisible demon that is Tourette’s Syndrome. Relief! But only for a moment. Then,
as everyone around you looks at you strangely as if you are some sort of crazy
person, you feel the urge mounting again. So the cycle goes, day-in, day-out,
every day of your life.

Getting
Personal: Stories of Life with Tourette Syndrome, edited by Michael G. DeFilippo,
is a collection of personal, bare-the-soul stories from youth and adults who
live with Tourette’s Syndrome, who live the life I’ve just described. Why am
I, an O’Reilly editor, writer of Oracle and SQL books, telling you this? I’m
telling you this because I suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome, and because
my story is one of the twenty or so stories in Michael’s book.

Tourette’s is a poorly-understood affliction. Few people have even heard of
it, and fewer still have a good understanding of it. As a result, life for those
with Tourette’s is often a life full of pain. Lack of understanding on the part
of family, teachers, coworkers, schoolmates, and others leads to intolerance.
Not only must we struggle with bodies that we can’t quite control, but we endure
teasing from schoolmates, are shunned and avoided by those who might otherwise
be our friends, and are frustrated when parents, relatives, and teachers tell
us to "stop it!" Believe me, we wish we could.

Our goal, all twenty-plus of us who contributed to the book, is to promote
understanding of what Tourette’s is and what it’s like to live with it. Both
Michael and I grew to adulthood before we discovered what made us tic; before
we discovered we had Tourette’s. In my own experience, no one in my family,
no in in my schools, no one I worked with, no one at all understood what I was
going through.

Tonight I reread my few-pages-long contribution to Michael’s book. As I think
back to my early years, I realize that I may have painted too good a picture.
Growing up with Tourette’s was painful, the more so because I didn’t know then
what was wrong with me. I have many painful memories. Even today it scares me
somewhat to talk publicly like this about my Tourette’s.

Two things would have made a huge difference for me as a child. First, I wish
I’d known early on what I had. There’s no cure, and no particularly good treatment,
but just being able to put a name to the problem has made a positive difference
in my life. I know now it’s not "just me". The second thing is that
I wish people had known. I wish they had understood! Because with understanding
comes tolerance. Several otherwise good, fine, caring adults inadvertently caused
me great pain and embarrassment when I was young because they didn’t understand
what was driving me, nor did they make the effort to understand. Instead, they
just assumed that I was the problem.

Read Michael’s book if you get the chance. And if you don’t read Michael’s
book, take the time to learn a bit about Tourette’s, what it really is, and
how it affects those who suffer from it. Who knows, you might someday make a
difference (hopefully a positive one!) in the life of someone with Tourettes.

---

For more information about Tourette’s Syndrome, I refer you to the Tourette
Syndrome Association website. If you have Tourette’s Syndrome, or think
you have it, the Patient-Centered
Guides book Tourette’s
Syndrome, by Mitzi Waltz, is a good source of information on treatment,
dealing with the educational system, and other things that you’ll want to
know about. And, of course, if you just want to get inside our heads to know
what it’s like to live with Tourette’s, there’s Michael DeFilippo’s Getting
Personal.

---

Recently I purchased a new photo printer, an HP
photosmart 7550, and my kids have been having a great time printing out
photos they’ve taken with my digital camera. In fact, the kids have taken
my digital camera period :-). The software that came with the printer has a
feature that lets you select a photo and then generate a 4×6 print with one
mouse-click. Even my six-year-old can handle that. The software enlarges and
crops as needed in order to get a 4×6 image out of whatever photo was selected.
This is fine for my son, but my daughter is 13 and she wants a bit more creative
control over her prints, and that is what brings me to write this weblog entry.

I can’t for the life of me find any decent photo manipulation software that
makes it easy to generate a print from a digital photo. I’ve used Macromedia’s
Fireworks, the software that came with my camera, some software that came with
my scanner, some more software that was bundled with some Kodak photo paper,
and, of course, the software that came bundled with the printer I just bought.
All of these programs suffer from a fatal, in my opinion, flaw: they treat cropping
and zooming as two separate steps. What I want is a program that gives me the
functionality of a standard darkroom easel, something photographers have been
using for decades.

Think about how you approach the task of taking a photo in the first place.
You put the camera to your eye and look through the viewfinder. You probably
won’t like the first thing you see, so you pan the camera and zoom the lens
back and forth until you are happy with the image in the viewfinder; then you
press the button to capture the photo. You don’t treat panning and zooming as
two separate steps. Once you’re familiar with your camera, you’ll find yourself
panning and zooming in one fluid sequence. You hardly even think about it.

Generating a print represents the same exact problem as taking a picture in
the first place. Think about it! A print is nothing more than a photo of the
original image. In fact, this is literally true with film-based photography.
In a darkroom you put a negative in an enlarger and project the image onto an
enlarger table. You then take an easel representing the print size you want
and place that on the table. Some part of the total image will fall within the
easel, which is analogous to the viewfinder in your camera. You then raise and
lower the enlarger to zoom the image, and move the easel back and forth on the
table (panning), until you are happy with the image in the easel. And then you
make your print. It’s that simple.

If you don’t know what an enlarger easel looks like, you can see one at
the Pieces of Science page titled : Life
in the Dark Room. It’s a very informative page, actually. There’s a good
set of easel images about halfway down it.

With digital photography, we’ve separated the two closely related steps of
panning and zooming, and as a result what should be a fluid and intuitive process
becomes an error-prone, iterative pain-in-the-neck. The biggest problem I see
with cropping tools, at least on the software that I’ve used, is that they don’t
help you crop to a specific proportion. When making a 4×6 print, I need to crop
in such a way that the resulting width is 150% of the resulting height. No other
proportion matters, but I’ve yet to see a cropping tool that will let me constrain
the proportions of the result.

Here’s what I want: I want a zoom & crop tool that lets me pan and zoom
in one fluid sequence. I want to view my image through an easel on the screen,
and I want that easel to represent the proportions of my final print. Then I’d
like to use the mouse (or the arrow keys) to pan my image left, right, up, and
down behind the easel. At the same time, I’d like the scroll-wheel to enable
me to zoom the image in and out. Then, when I like what I see through the digital
easel, I want to hit a key and capture that image. Is that so hard?

Is there a decent software package that will do what I want? Why don’t other people have problems printing digital photos? Is there some aspect of digital photography that I’m missing? It sure seems to me like old ways are best.