They need our support

When the women we love take chances to change their lives, they need our support. It can mean more than anything we bring back from the jewelery store.

Eva Longoria got her support from main squeeze Tony Parker on Sunday night. Longoria thought Parker was flying to Salt Lake City with his San Antonio Spurs teammates for Monday night's game. He surprised her by showing up in Los Angeles. She and the rest of the "Desperate Housewives" cast were honored in LA at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series.

Parker flew back to Salt Lake City late Sunday night after the awards show. In the San Antonio paper, he knew he did the right thing.

"I could buy any gift for her and it would never compare to what happened yesterday," Parker said. "She cried and was so happy I was there to support her."

That support means so much. Abby's on her public journey for her Heartfelt Yoga practice this month, getting publicity in articles about her HeavyWeight Yoga classes. She came to me today and said she needed my support. She'll be famous, and I'll be our point guard. What a team.

Don't tell me it's not true; call it fiction

After gracing the cover of Poets & Writers magazine this summer, James Frey got cashiered out of the nonfiction vanguard by Oprah Winfrey yesterday. Miz O had defended Frey when a blog accused the author of making up parts of his memoir. Turns out it was true that he was being false.

P&W called him "a kinder and gentler James Frey" in the mag's coverline. In the article, he says "I don't particularly care if I'm part of the publishing culture or not." Good thing, James.

Oprah said she felt duped. She dressed down Frey's publisher Doubleday on her show, after Oprah's producers had asked the company if they'd checked on the truth in Frey's "A Million Little Pieces." They said they had, but they hadn't. Apparently that might've gotten in the way of 2 million copies sold.

Frey is a long way from innocent in all this, but said he did submit the book to the editors at his publisher first as a work of fiction. It returned as a memoir. Everything is fiction, really, just our versions of what happened.

But the truth in publishing is that eight books out of 10 printed today are non-fiction. Saying that a story is true seems to get the presses rolling when a well-written tale that's elegantly made up cannot. Now there's lifetime employment for legions of fact-checkers in the offing, according to Mediabistro.com's Galley Cat columnist. The change might slow down the freelance editor business, though:

It's probably impossible to fact-check absolutely everything. One issue that might have contributed to this so-called erosion is the rise in outsourced editing, especially copyediting. Because by saving costs, sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

In my writing group practice, The Writer's Workshop, I follow the tenet of the Amherst Writers and Artists training: We treat everything written in our group as fiction, unless the writer says otherwise. It might be a good practice for Doubleday, too.

Misfire from an elected gun-toter

In Virginia, a 16-year member of the legislature shot a bullet into his own bulletproof vest this week at the state capitol. Jack Reid apologized to his fellow lawmakers in Richmond after his .380 handgun went off in his office.

In Virginia, Reid needs a concealed carry permit to bring a gun into the legislature. Here in our state capital, legislators also need a concealed carry permit, available for $140. The license entered our lawbooks when then-Gov. George W. Bush signed it in 1995. The Texas Rifle Association celebrated the five-year anniversary of the law by taking note of a survey of the law's effect on Texas crime:

[Engineer Bill] Sturdevant compared the arrest records of concealed handgun license holders with the arrest records of the general population. [His 43-page report] found that Texans without concealed handgun licenses are eight times more likely to be arrested for crimes of violence than license holders.

Bill carries a handgun, just like the author of the Web page article on the anniversary. Apparently, if you can cock a hammer, every problem looks like a nail in the coffin of crime.

Apple's got less iPod juice than users want

At last week's MacWorld, Steve Jobs announced with pride that Apple sold 32 million iPods in 2005. "And it still wasn't enough," he said, noting the company will be making more for those of you who couldn't get one in time for the holiday.

What's really not enough is what's included with those $6 billion worth of music players. Most iPods don't come with a charger. You need to plug it into your computer to charge the device, or fork over an extra $29 for a two-inch-square white brick that plugs into a wall. iPod users are livid over this, especially those who used to get a charger, a dock and a carrying case with their older 20GB iPods. True, those iPods didn't show photos, or play movies, or present all the details from the album that's playing in full color. But at least you could charge them without a computer.

The word "shame" is on the lips of lots of iPod customers writing reviews on the Apple site who discover this after they've spent the $300-$400 on their players.

Oregon sheds the Schiavo Effect

The only state in the US where assisted suicide is legal can breathe easier about taking a dignified last breath. The US Supreme Court has struck down the Justice Department effort to kill an Oregon law that lets terminal patients ask doctors for lethal drugs.

From the New York Times:

"Since 1998, when the law was enacted, through 2004, a total of 208 people have taken their lives by lethal injection with a physician-prescribed drug, usually a barbiturate. Critics had said Oregon would become a suicide center, with people flying in to end their lives. They also predicted that the law would be unfairly used against uneducated people or those without health insurance or adequate medical choices. In the seven full years since the law has been in effect and records have been kept, more than 60 percent of those who have killed themselves have had some college education, the state reported."

Smarter people know better than to leave a legacy of debt to their heirs and family when the end is evident.

The Rich Irony of Being a Loser

Being a loser: something to avoid. That's what Maxtor reminded us Macworld attendees about in San Francisco. The company campaigned to get us to buy its One Touch backup system, something easy enough that you might really use it. Because backup is that dirty little task we all ought to do more often, like flossing or walking the dog.

In SF, Maxtor started out with giveaways. As soon as we walked out of the Steve Jobs keynote speech, a fellow on Howard Street was passing out black gloves. In packages of three. "Because we know you'll lose one." The theme went on in the show hall, where free t-shirts carried the slogan "I'm a loser." The bookmarks they passed out bore pictures of glum-looking fellows. "I'm a loser," they all began, then explained "I lost all my best party mixes," or "I lost my girlfriend's best pictures."

While we walked the Streets of San Francisco, we saw posters slapped onto construction site plywood, directing us to loserloserloser.com. Yeah, it's pretend blog run by Maxtor with articles on what to do if you lose data. Kind of a "Stewart Smalley" for the computer set.

The irony, you might wonder? Well, you backup because every disk drive fails, at some point. You're only supposed to use a disk drive to back up if you have plenty of them. They won't all fail at once, will they? The computer pros I write about for The 3000 Newswire use tape to backup, or CD media — something besides more disk drives.

And apparently, you can lose data off a OneTouch II, the very device that Maxtor would have you buy to protect your data. Have a look at this user interview on CNET (note that the editors gave the product an 8 out of 10 rating. Apparently didn't have one crash up on them in Windows.

Living the good iLife by the Bay

I am enjoying MacWorld San Francisco this week for the first time in my computing life (or my iLife, as I guess Steve Jobs would describe it). I spend significant time in my Texas life experimenting, testing and toying with Mac software. I've been a Mac user since 1987, a relationship longer than anything except being a parent and a writer. (I married my lovely bride Abby a few years later, so it's pretty darn close there, but the Mac did appear first. Sometimes Abby must feel like she's got a rival when I disappear into my study to study the Mac. She's a Mac user herself, which has got to help her patience with this passion of mine.)

But I'm not in that study this week. It's been a thrill for a few days to have it all a few steps away instead of on the Internet. I had one experience yesterday on the show floor that paid for the whole trip — because I couldn't have gotten it anywhere else in the world, and I needed it this month.

(If you're a Mac addict or just admire the Mac from afar, you should read the show roundup at Macintouch by Henry Norr. He's been a Mac reporter about as long as I've been covering the computer business — the middle '80s — and his article has got just the right mix of wonder and dismay in his article, shaped by his analysis.)

As for me, I blog quite a bit to practice journalism these days, a lot of it for The 3000 NewsWire and some of it out here using Blogger. But I'm launching my writing workshop practice this year, and I want The Writer's Workshop to have its own The Write Stuff blog. Nothing could be better for branding than to have that blog up at The Writer's Workshop site. But getting that to happen looked like I'd need to install complex software (Moveable Type), then wrestle to configure it. Not my strong suit, but I could force it with enough trial and error. Plenty of time to do that, all keeping me from writing.

Enter iLife '06, the most significant part of this Macworld's announcements for me and my writing career. The iLife software now includes iWeb, Apple's first page layout program and one that includes automated blog-building ability. These days you can create beautiful blogs with very hard software, or ugly blogs with very easy software. Yes, Steve Jobs blew his usual share of smoke at us during his keynote on Tuesday. (Apple even had Intel's CEO enter the stage from a haze of dry ice fog, as if he'd just left a chip clean room. You can see a Webcast of the keynote at the Apple site.) But away from the smoke, iWeb really looks like it can give us Web page cutters beautiful and easy together. How do I know? On the Apple show floor, one of the support team helped me build a test blog and put it up at my own site.

So I got my very own 20-minute primer on iWeb in the new iLife from a first-rate Apple staffer on the floor. We even built a test blog and hosted it on one of my sites (workshopwriter.com) using the tools Apple includes with every new Mac. (Well, almost; we had to download a decent third-party file transfer tool, because Apple’s built-in FTP didn’t want to let us write to my Web site.) The staffer (I suspect he’s in development or support, he was so good) said he's encountered the same FTP problem himself from time to time.

Plainly put, I couldn’t have gotten that kind of experience anyplace else in the world. Surely not even at a Genius Bar at an Apple store on anything except a really slow day. (I visited the Apple Store's mothership on Stockton last night; my appointment to solve a Mac sleep problem started 20 minutes late. They had a queue eight deep.) I believe that at least this month, nobody in Austin's Apple Store would know iWeb as well as Apple’s own staff here in the Bay Area. Especially so early in the product’s life. How early was it? I told a couple of the Apple kids at the Apple booth that I'd just bought iLife, and it was so new they wanted to see the packaging for it. I pulled it out of my backpack to show them. That’s how you can be sure you’re plenty early in the lifecycle of a product.

How much more fun could San Francisco be? Well, last night there was Lestat, the just-premiered musical with music and lyrics by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road's creators, doing a musical together for the first time), based on three Anne Rice Lestat novels. The book for the show — already scheduled for a Broadway opening later this spring — was written by the woman who wrote the screenplay for Beauty and the Beast, then the book for that movie's subsequent musical (already the sixth-longest running show in Broadway history). I was pumped, and bought a great sixth-row seat direct from the theatre's box office, a cast comp turned back. (That's a trick my Abby taught me in London the year we were married, combined with a tip my pal Birket Foster showed me in San Jose at a hockey game. Always ask them if there's any returns.)

But what I saw needed quite a bit of work. This is a tryout town for Broadway. Much like New Haven's Taft Theatre in the movie All About Eve, the Curran now sees its share of wrinkled newborns. Lestat is still pretty wrinkly, though it lifted me up a few times. More on that tomorrow. Even wrinkly, the experience was still worth the $85 ticket, to me.

I miss that bride of mine. But when I'm back home tomorrow, I'll have this week's sandbox Mac time tucked away as a wish fulfilled. To paraphrase my friend Kathy Jacobs O'Brian, the iLife is good out here on the Bay.