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Why I wrote Great Digital Media for Windows XP Excerpted from the preface... In the summer of 2000, our friends Dave and Debbie had a christening for their son Ritchie, and I dutifully drove out to the church with my wife Stephanie and our son Mark, then two years old. Mark was nice enough to fall asleep in the car, so I parked it under a tree, and my wife went inside to make a showing at the christening. I stayed outside with Mark, wished I had thought to bring a laptop, and proceeded to do what anyone would, barring any other distraction. I thought. I thought about how things were going, where I was at, where things were headed. I won't bore you with the details of most of it, but one related thing I had been going over at the time was a variety of book deals. At the time, I was contracted to write a couple of really boring books about technical topics like COM+ and Active Service Pages, but there was something about these titles that just didn't seem right. Sitting there under the shade of a big tree, watching my son sleep, it finally dawned on me what was wrong. I didn't want to write these books. They were technical, and they were boring, and no one was going to read them. Most problematic, I wouldn't have fun writing them at all. So I decided then and there that when I got home, I'd call up the publishing companies, and explain to them why both projects needed to be canceled. And I did just that: Thankfully, I never needed to write either one of them. In the meantime, I wanted to write something fun. Something that people--real people--could be excited about. Not just geeks, or programmers, or IT professionals. Real people: My dad, or that young couple across the street with a new baby. People that didn't use a computer for the sake of using a computer, but did so when it could help them get something done. Preferably something fun. It had to be digital media. Right there, with Mark snoring away beside me, I plotted my family's transition to digital media and decided that I would write about it. We would ditch the SLR camera and slow scanner and get a digital camera first. I would record my hundreds of audio CDs onto the hard drive in MP3 format and lock those CDs away in the cellar like valuable backups next. And we would get a digital camcorder and archive our home movies on the computer, with the eventual goal of recording them on DVD. It was all coming together, right there, under the tree. I thought about who I could contact about doing a digital media book. You have to sort of imagine what it was like at the time: Microsoft was getting ready to release Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), the first version of Windows that would include integrated digital media solutions. It was fairly obvious at the time, however, that Windows Me wasn't going to be a gangbuster release, and I didn't expect anyone to be too interested in a Windows Me book. In the end, I decided it would have to be Windows-based, but not Windows Me specific. The christening finally ended and, almost simultaneously, Mark woke up. But by then, my mind was set: I would write this book. I would write something fun. I would have fun doing it, and people would have fun reading it, because it would open them up to possibilities that they had perhaps never considered. On the way back to Dave's house, I excitedly explained my grand plan to Stephanie, and she nodded along politely as you might expect. She's cute like that. Then she asked how much this was all going to cost. A week later, the two companies that suddenly found themselves sans books from me were not particularly excited about taking me on for something completely different. I don't blame them, but I think they missed the boat on a popular trend. In the meantime, things were heating up with my day job at Windows 2000 Magazine, and I ended up spending the rest of the year being pretty busy traveling and writing. But I bought a digital camera as promised and took it half way around the world, to Israel, on a business trip I will never forget. It took months to record all my CDs onto the computer, and by the time I was done, I had literally destroyed one drive in the process. And we finally got a nice digital camcorder, which Mark insists be used so that he can see himself in the side-mounted LCD display. Months later, at LinuxWorld 2001 in New York of all places, I ran into Deborah Williams Cauley, who had been bugging me for months to write some kind of a book. We sat down and I finally told her about my ideas for a digital media title and how I thought the then-beta "Whistler" project (which became Windows XP) would be a perfect subject, because of its integrated (and surprisingly powerful) digital media experiences. Write up a TOC, she said. Let's make this happen. And happen it did. My first book in two years. A couple of stories about the writing process for this book: Because of my continuous travel schedule, much of this book was written on airplanes, trains, and in hotel rooms. This required me to cart around a bizarre variety of hardware, including portable music devices, USB video splitters, Firewire-equipped camcorders, and a Pocket PC, among other things. I can only imagine what hotel house cleaning thought of me. My favorite form of travel is train and fortunately I get to go this route fairly often: On the Amtrak between Boston and New York, you can often get a table and really spread out, and I travel this route at least once a month, every month. On one trip to New York--for the Office XP launch in late May 2001, I believe--I was sitting at a table on the train across from a woman who was painting watercolors and eating a granola/yogurt mixture that actually looked pretty good. I unpacked a monstrous Dell laptop with integrated Firewire, a Canon digital camcorder, various USB and Firewire cables, and proceeded to record, edit, and product digital video. The woman across from me was extremely curious about what I was doing and kept looking up to catch glances of the set up. Finally, she couldn't stand it anymore. "Sorry, but do you mind if I ask you what you're doing?" she asked. "I'm capturing video from the camera, editing it on the computer, adding titles and background music, and then I'm going to save it back to the computer. When I can afford one, I'm going to buy a DVD recorder so I can record versions of this for my parents and other relatives." Or something like that. She took this in for a few seconds, clearly amazed, and not fully comprehending what it was that I had said. And then she said something that will probably stick with me forever. "You must have a wonderful life." She was met by a blank stare. How do you answer that? I'm not sure that I ever did, to be honest, but I do remember fumbling over an appropriate response. I sort of took this stuff for granted, in a way. But I think this underscores how liberating and exciting this technology can be. How fun it is. And, frankly, how much of it can be had fairly cheaply. We live in a time of great riches. I want you to have a wonderful life too. Think of this book as the tour guide. |
Buy the book! Introduction Why I wrote the book Table of Contents Photo & Imaging Cover design    |
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