Just when you thought it was safe...

Pat's still under the weather, so Pirillo's back for the Halloween edition of The Screen Savers. I lobbied for Kate Botello, but they decided to go with Chris again. How scary!

Blog in your inbox

I've added a nice new feature to the blog - thanks to Ben and Mena at Movable Type. If you want you can have new entries e-mailed to you directly just enter your address into the form at the bottom of this page. As always, I promise I won't sell or use your address in any way except to mail you the blog entires. Unless I hear an uproar to the contrary, I'll also start sending new entries to the members of the Laporte Report mailing list. So if you're signed up there no need to sign up below. Goodness knows the mailing list needs some new content from time to time.

Poor Leo's 2003 Almanac

I met with a bunch of folks from my publisher, Pearson/Que Publishing, on Friday. They were very positive about my book. They said its sales continue to rise, which is very unusual. We're doing about 100 copies a day on Amazon alone. In fact, I'm currently Pearson's best-selling book on Amazon.com. Their number 2 book is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Wow! Actually it's pretty amazing that Strunk and White is still selling so well after five decades. I've got my copy and use it religiously. It's a must have book for writers. So I'm beginning work on the next edition of Poor Leo's Almanac. I spent some time talking with them about how I'd like it to be different this time. There will be much more content, including personal tech like cell phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. It will also be more like an almanac with a table of contents up front and folksier production. They seem to agree that it should be a Leo book - not a compendium of other people's stuff. They really liked the personality and voice of the book. They also like the page a day idea so it will be somewhat thicker. We may include a CD or DVD, as well. But we all agreed to keep the price where it is. All in all it was a very satisfactory meeting. They think the book will become a very successful series - with a new one each year. I'm totally thrilled. Thanks for all your support (and putting up with the incessant plugs)!

Next Year Already!

Alas, book sales are dropping off and it looks like we're pretty much out of steam for the first edition of Poor Leo's Computer Almanac. Que will have sold 35,000 books in five months which I'm told is very respectable. Thanks so much to those of you who bought copies! On the strength of this year's sales, the publisher is planning a first printing of 50,000 for next year's edition. I hope to sell even more. I can tell you that it's going to be much better with a lot more content. Laura and I are working our buns off on it already. She's doing the "this date in history" stuff and I'm collating existing web content and writing a bunch of new material. I'm using Movable Type, this blog software, to create an online database that she and I can use to collaborate on the book. (She's in the South Bay and I'm in the North Bay so we can't work face-to-face.) In fact, I've just imported nearly 3,000 web articles from Call for Help and The Screen Savers into the Poor Leo blog. I'll use Movable Type to edit, categorize, and assign articles to each day of the year. MT's calendar interface will make it easy to access one day at a time. Laura will add her daily bits to each day. And then I can export it to a big text file and use Perl to process it for the publishers. We're scheduled to finish the book by the end of July to get it into bookstores by September. The new title is tentatively, "Leo Laporte's 2003 TechTV Almanac." Meanwhile, if you'd like me to autograph the 2002 edition, send your copy to me with a postage paid self-addressed mailer to: Leo Laporte TechTV 650 Townsend St San Francisco, CA 94103 I'll sign your copy and pop it right back in the mail. I've done this for several dozen folks so far and it seems to work pretty well. I can't be responsible for copies lost in the mail, but as long as you're willing to take that chance and pay the return postage, I'm glad to put my John Hancock on it.

Where's Leo?

It's a beautiful day in New York City, a little breezy but a balmy 75 degrees. I just had brunch with my long time director, Chris Adair, and her husband Marty. Chris directed both Call for Help and The Screen Savers for years. She left us last November to take over NewsNight with Aaron Brown for CNN. She's doing so well in the Big Apple, like other former TechTVers, Kate Botello, and our beloved booker, Casey Fisher. It's good to see that there's life after TechTV. In Chris's case a pretty good life, too! After brunch I visited the National Museum of National History ' it's incredible. I can't wait to take the kids there the next time I come out. I'm in town to do two pieces for World News Now, ABC's overnight newscast. I'll tape both at around 11p tonight, one for air tomorrow around 3am, the other for a month later. It looks like I'll be doing this every other month from now on. I brought some very cool new gadgets to show. Monday, 6/3 I'll be showing: * Logitech Pocket Digital credit card sized digital camera. * Panasonic SV-AV10 mini video camera * POGO Flipster portable Windows media player * Wave Industries Olympia Soundbug that turns any flat surface into a microphone * Nyko Airflo Controller, a Gamecube/PS2/Xbox game controller with a built-in fan * and those cute Tomy Bit Char-G mini RC Cars Next month I'll show: * the new Sony/Ericsson T68i cell phone * Motorola's beautiful new v70 cell phone with swivel cover * Good Technology's G100 Blackberry killer * the Handspring Treo 270 color PDA/cell phone * the Sony Clie NR70V Palm PDA with keyboard, MP3 player, and camera built in This visit I'm trying a new hotel in the Upper West Side ' closer to ABC, and just across the street from the museum. I picked the hotel because it claimed to have high-speed Internet access. Hah! Their idea of broadband is Web TV. There's no way to hook up my laptop. Fortunately, I brought a little program along called MacStumbler, a port of the netstumbler program. It searches out 802.11b or WiFi wireless networks. I stuck my iBook out the window and found not one but two, unprotected connections. You'd be amazed how many of these there are. I'm finding that I can get online almost anywhere. I'm 'borrowing' one of the connections to post this. I have to sit near the window, but otherwise it works great. I guess the hotel does have high-speed Internet access after all! I'm flying back tomorrow morning, but instead of going to the studio I'm going home to take a one month sabbatical. That's right, I'll be off the air until July 8! My publisher came to me last Thursday and asked to move the publication date back two weeks to September 1, which means they need a completed manuscript by July 1. I told them I could only do it if I took the entire month of June off, never expecting that to happen. But it turns out that the book is very important to TechTV, and they really want to get the benefit of the promotion (and resulting sales) that can happen if the book ships by 9/1, so they agreed to do it. I'll be using two weeks of my vacation time, and a two-week sabbatical I earned in 2000 but never took. In order to make the deadline I'll have to write about 7,000 words a day. This blog entry is just under 700 words so multiply by 10! Fortunately, I'm seldom at a loss for words (have you noticed?) and much of the material comes from stuff I and others have already written for the TechTV web site. It's going to be like pulling 30 consecutive all-nighters nonetheless. Come July 8 you're going to see a guy very anxious to get back on TV! Well I'd better post this and give Mr. Hartmann back his WiFi connection. I've got to run out and get a slice of pizza and then come back and rehearse for my segment tonight. It's my last day of freedom before I have to get down to it and start writing. I'll try to post once in a while, but you'll understand if you don't hear a lot from me until next month. Wish me luck!