Today is, in one sense, the most depressing day of the year: the first day of summer vacation for the kids. For the next nine and a half weeks, peace and quiet will be in extremely short supply. On the other hand, today Morgen and I also celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary. (More accurately, we celebrated yesterday, with a nice lunch on our last kid-free day.) For reasons that would be tedious to explain and uninteresting to read, we didn’t actually get married at our wedding; legally, our anniversary won’t be until December 9. But that just means we have three anniversaries to celebrate: those two plus what I think of as the “real” one, the anniversary of our first date, which is February 24.
The big news this week was the publication of Take Control of Your Digital Legacy, Second Edition. This was the first update to the book since its release six and a half years ago (back when my hair was purple). And it has been just flying off the virtual shelves! So that’s delightful.
Also, and this is a bit “inside baseball,” I finally figured out this week how we can include tables in future Take Control books. Due to complicated technical reasons involving our production process for EPUB format, we haven’t been able to use tables (unless they were just screenshots of tables) for something like 10 years. But I love tables, and I was delighted to make a discovery that gets us over that hurdle at last.
I continue to chip away at Take Control of Sonoma. But my other current project, which should ship first, is the next edition of Take Control of Your Paperless Office, the current version of which is just embarrassingly outdated. The thing I’m liking best about this update is realizing I can cut vast swathes of text that are no longer relevant. But then, I also have to write a similar amount of new text about Windows, so, Win some, lose some.
Tomorrow we celebrate Canada Day, commemorating the date in 1867 on which Canada became a country. There will be sparklers, fireworks, flags, and barbecues, much like what you’ll see in a nearby country a few days later. As I may have mentioned a while back, my son Soren and I will also be joining 1,000+ other people in inflatable dinosaur costumes, setting a Guinness World Record in the nearby town of Dundurn.
That should be enough for one week, I think! See you again next Friday.