I'm spending about a week in California, on a visit to my day job, Citrix Systems. At one point I was flying to California every week (which was exhausting!) but tight budgets have kept me at home for nearly two years!

That's left me more disconnected than is good for my work -- I write the user documentation and kibitz on improvements in our super-spiffy network accelerator, Branch Repeater (and if you were wondering, no, I didn't write the product description the link points to).

Actually, I've spent my whole career in something of a stealth mode — a computer engineer by training, technical writer (or writing manager) by job title, general guru and architect by inclination. When I was at Activision back during its glory days, my job was discovering all our game designers' design secrets, duplicating them, and distributing what I'd learned to our other designers. Heaven! Pretty soon I wasn't just writing up what had already happened, but was making things happen. And it's been like that ever since.

(Trivia note: I wrote the last piece of code for the Atari 2600 game system ever shipped by Activision.)

Karen will be holding down the fort while I'm gone. I used to live in the Bay Area, where Citrix is, and I'm sure I'll be hooking up with some old friends.

I upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 7, which I'm very happy with, but it gave me more grief than it should have. I've owned computers since 1980, when I got my first Apple II, and I'm a bona fide computer wizard, so it should have been easy, right?

Well, not quite. The first hurdle was dealing with Windows 7's insistence on wiping out your "Documents and Settings" -- the only indispensable things on most PCs! Do you have any idea how much data I've accumulated over the years? Messing around with backing it up and restoring it was Not Fun. It was just as hard as if I were transferring my stuff to a brand-new computer, which I wasn't.

The other hurdle was with mirrored drives. The more spendy versions of Windows 7 allow you to do disk mirroring, so all your data lives on two drives simultaneously. If one dies, the other keeps going, and you can slap in a replacement drive and get back to mirroring. No prob. And it doubles the speed of disk reads, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Disk mirroring is also called "RAID 1." Don't ask.)

But it's amazingly difficult to figure out how to set it up. Why, Microsoft, didn't you provide step-by-step instructions?

Some motherboards have the same capability in hardware, but they, too are always incredibly ill-documented.

But I'm up and running again, and Windows 7 seems quite a bit snappier than XP, though it seems to have some teething troubles, with the occasional odd bit of behavior.

A while back I bought a bargain-basement computer for under $300 at Staples to use as a secondary computer, and even el cheapo machines are pretty usable these days. So you might want to do it the easy way and get a new computer when you decide to switch to Windows 7. That's called a "forklift upgrade" in the biz.

The only cell phone tower near my farm is slowly getting masked by trees as the forest next door grows up, and the cell phone reception in my house is dreadful.

I just bought a Verizon Network Extender and couldn't be happier. This is a device that looks like a wireless access point but acts like a miniature cell phone tower, using your DSL or cable modem to reach the cellular network. Our phones went from zero bars to four! Woo-hoo!

This is a zero-config device: I plugged it in and it self-configured within about 20 minutes. I didn't have to set a single parameter.

And it not only covers the whole house, but extends quite a way beyond it, even to the mailbox on the other side of the road. Generally speaking, reception in the house is worse than anywhere else, so it completely covers the problem area.

The retail price of this technological wonder (called a "femtocell" in the biz) is a wince-inducing $250, but I found a "$50 off All Accessories" coupon online, and, much to my surprise, found a $50 rebate form inside the box that's good through most of January, so it really cost me only $150. There is no monthly fee.

It doesn't handle 3G traffic (though your 3G devices will fall back to the "1X" standard, which it does handle, though slowly). and I don't know if non-Verizon subscribers can roam through it or not. But sure solved my problem!

There are similar devices out there that work with other carriers, plus a wide variety of cellular signal boosters that use an outdoor antenna to talk to the cell phone tower, and an amplifier and an indoor antenna to talk to your cell phones. The main difference is that boosters don't work in areas where you have no signal at all, while network extenders that use your cable or DSL links do.

These devices will probably turn out to be a must-have for rural residents everywhere.

[Update: the links actually work now!]

I invited all 4,400+ subscribers to my monthly poultry newsletter to join the Grass-Fed Eggs discussion group, and then the fun began.

It turns out that Google Groups will let you sign up without having a Google account, but if you do, you can't change your subscription options. And the default subscription option is "send me every posting as a separate email message," which -- because the group has become lively -- is too many email messages for most people.

And to add insult to injury, Google Groups managed to double-subscribe a lot of people under two different email addresses. How, I have no idea. People who were dual-subscribed could edit the options of only one of these, leaving the other one blasting them unwanted emails. Sigh.

This has pretty much blown over now.

In general, I think the problem revolves around bugs in the "invite new members" feature, and there are similar problems for people who subscribe via email rather than through the Google Groups Web site. If you use the Web site, you should have no problems.

So when you join the group, do yourself a favor and subscribe via the link, using the Google Groups Web interface, and not with the hokey email subscription mechanism. This requires that you have a Google account. If you use more than one email address, set the email options in your Google account to let Google know this, and you won't have any trouble. And set your subscription to "Daily Email Digest." It's the best compromise for most people.

It turns out the Google Groups are notorious for being sadly neglected, as discussed in this article from Wired. I had decided to put my discussion forum on Google Groups because I was tired of the long, slow decline in quality in Yahoo Groups. Just goes to show.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, as I do, you'd probably like to have one of the spiffy high-tech monitors like the Omron HEM-790IT Automatic Blood Pressure Monitor with Advanced Omron Health Management Software

This doohickey runs off four AA batteries and gets an accurate blood pressure reading in less than a minute. This particular model comes with a USB cable and software that will keep track of the readings over time. This is the top-of-the-line model and cost about $75 on Amazon.

I found this particularly useful because I've lost a lot of weight over the past year and I suspected (correctly) that my blood-pressure medication was excessive for my current weight, and my blood pressure was actually lower than desirable. My doctor is a great guy (Dr. Shawn Foley at Philomath Family Medicine), and he more or less turned me loose to tune my medication so I'm within his guidelines.

Another thing I found out was that I was a little intimidated by the process of having my blood pressure taken, and this tension made my blood pressure rise! So my medication had been tuned to deal with an anomalously high blood pressure. Taking reading a zillion times with this automated machine got me used to it, so now I get a truer reading.

Having the machine lying around allows you to check things like, "I wonder if this decongestant really is spiking my blood pressure like the warning says it might?"

The machine is a snap to use. Put on the velcro cuff, press the START button, and relax.

Classics never go out of style. I still use the same type of programmable calculator today that I did thirty years ago.

It seems hard to believe, but thirty years ago I plunked down $299 for an HP-41C calculator, which had just been released by Hewlett-Packard. I was a penniless college student at the time, and for the life of me I can't remember where I got the money.

I was living in Corvallis at the time, attending Oregon State University. The HP-41C had been designed across town at the Hewlett-Packard campus, and many of my classmates were HP employees.

The 41C was seriously programmable, had the then-revolutionary ability to display text, was indestructible, and had a nearly infinite battery life. Friend used its alpha display functions to create cheat sheets, but I never bothered. Setting up handy programs before midterms was a lifesaver, though.

Karen also had a 41C, which died about ten years later when her backpack fell off the luggage rack of her motorcycle and was run over by a motorist. Much later, my original 41C developed a crack in its display and became generally flaky. So we bought several of the slightly newer model, the 41CV. We got them used on eBay. They're still going strong in spite of being around 20 years old. They stopped making the calculators in 1990, sad to say.

I use these calculators at the farmer's markets, and people are constantly noticing. "Hey, I worked on that project!"

To commemorate these durable bits of local history, I've created a T-shirt, available through Zazzle.com below. Keep those 41C's running!

Thirty Years of HP-41: 1979-2009 by artsyandroid

When I worked at Activision, one of the vice presidents told me that when he suggested a new feature to a game designer, there was a three-state process:

1. "It's impossible!"
2. "It's too hard."
3. "It's on your desk."

Note that the process doesn't have anything to do with getting a commitment out of the game designer. Just plant the seed and occasionally ask if he's figured out how to do it yet. If the idea is a good one, it will gnaw at the designer, and eventually a solution will appear as if by magic.

That was great management. The designer's own desire that his product be cool was the only tool required.

I took Dan to Sakuracon over the weekend. Sakuracon is the big anime (Japanese animation) convention in Seattle.

Anime fandom sure has changed since I first encountered it in the mid-Eighties. The Eighties boom was fueled by the introduction of the home VCR, which made possible the widespread piracy of laserdiscs and videotapes from Japan. Fans bombarded everyone they knew with low-quality tapes of their favorite shows. These were in Japanese, without subtitles, but many of the shows were so visual that understanding the dialog was unnecessary.

The surge of interest this generated allowed real, licensed versions to appear with English subtitles or dubbing. The industry has grown and grown, and anime is a major cultural force among our young people. A lot of its appeal is that most of it is aimed at older kids than American cartoons are, so there's far more plot, romance, violence, mystery, horror, cuteness, crazy comedy, and sex appeal -- often all in the same show. The basic approach is to take every knob and turn it up to "eleven."

Karen and I are particularly fond of the works of Hayao Miyazaki, the "Japanese Walt Disney."

At the conventions, practically everyone is in costume. This trend is more pronounced every year. I was definitely an oddball because I didn't even make a token effort. Dan at least had a cape and an attitude:

The costumes can be almost anything, including non-anime characters. I saw an Edward Scissorhands, a guy dressed up as a whoopee cushion, and an Abe Lincoln in addition to the usual anime characters, including legions of girls dressed as "Japanese schoolgirls with magical powers" characters, of which anime has an infinite number.

So that was fun, and I'll be doing it again next year. Need a costume, though. The peer pressure is getting to me.

I started writing seriously (that is, "for money") when I was in college. For me, the keys to mastery were:

• Write a lot. I became much more fluent during the course of my first book, Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers' Handbook, (Reston Publishing, 1981) which covered how to play Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games in general. When I started out, I set myself a quota of 1,200 words a day and just couldn't do it. At the end, I'd upped my quota to 4,500 and beat it every day. (I have since had a number of 10,000 word days.) Going over my old work, it seems that the extra speed was a free bonus, involving no loss of quality.
• Big works are easier than small ones. I think that's it's infinitely easier to write a 100,000 word novel than a hundred 1,000-word short stories or even four 25,000-word novelettes. Similarly, it's easier to write a nonfiction book than a series of articles that add up to the same length. Coming up with new themes is harder than running with what you've got.
• Write for a reason. I come from a storytelling tradition, which means that connecting with my audience is important to me. If I lose them, I've screwed up. I also wrote for money from the beginning, because I was broke. Writing is hard, so you need a goal in mind.
• Writing is hard. It's harder than anything. After a hard day's writing, I sometimes lose the power to speak coherently. If that happens to you, you're doing something right.
• Pick up the nuts and bolts as you go. Perfectionism is for editors. Just keep going. Get to the end before you rewrite. Keep notes, but leave the earlier passages alone. A lot of people use perfectionism and revision as an excuse to never finish anything -- or to never start. There are editors everywhere, so your stuff can be professionally washed, waxed, and detailed after the fact. So get to work!

I approved the proof of my SF novel, "One Survivor," today, which means that it's technically in print already. However, it takes a couple of days for the news to spread. Amazon and Ingram (the world's biggest book wholesaler) ought to figure it out at more or less the same time.

It's a 258-page trade paperback and retails for $16.95.

I've posted a new One Survivor page on the Norton Creek Press Web site, which has background information about the book.

I've also published a lengthy excerpt, which consists of the first third of the book. If that doesn't hook you, nothing will.

When was the last time you read a science fiction book where an alien spacecraft gets repaired by a group of teenagers?