As I mentioned on Friday, I'm off this week. So don't bother calling me, because I won't pick up. And if you e-mail me, you'll have to wait until next week to get a response. (I will still have a column on Thursday.)

In the meantime, and in the hope of not being completely inundated with reader mail on my return -- not to mention our ombudsman's professed interest in having the Post make it easier for readers to reach us -- I'd like to share a few tips about the most effective ways to talk to me in e-mail. (You can also call me at 202-334-6394 or write me c/o The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington DC 20071, but I can't lie: Your odds of getting a response aren't as good, and it's a lot easier for me to point you to a helpful Web site in e-mail.)

First off: Yes, I do read all my reader mail. I try to answer all of it as well, but that's not an instant or a guaranteed thing. If you're writing just to say "great story" or "you suck," you should expect a reasonably quick acknowledgment along the lines of "thanks for the input." If you see the same wording in repeated responses to successive e-mails, it's not because I'm stuck in a rut; I use an add-on to my mail software to paste in these canned replies to save a little time (not to mention wear and tear on my wrists).

If you're writing a "what about this issue?" type of message, that will take a little longer for me to answer, but I can usually come through.

If you're e-mailing me to ask what to buy, give me some idea of how you'd use the product in question. Some of the most frustrating messages for me to read are context-free requests for my advice on "a good laptop" or "a decent HDTV": I'd have to read people's minds and/or break into their houses to give any sort of useful answer to those e-mails.

The tough e-mails are the ones I most need to answer -- the "how do I fix this problem?" queries that keep Help File filled. I've written before about the best way to send me a Help File question, but that was years ago, so let me update that advice:

* First, see if I've already answered your question in Help File. The majority of the tech-support queries I get address old topics. I admit that our archive of old Help File columns is not terribly helpful; fortunately, any good search engine should find what you're looking for, thanks to my distinctive last name (there are other Pegoraros, but I can assure you that I'm the only one writing a tech column for an English-language newspaper). Type a brief description of what you want to do, plus "Pegoraro," into your favorite search site: For example, "copy from iPod Pegoraro" lead to this 2007 item.

* If I haven't covered your problem before, help me help you by providing as much specifics as possible. Don't say "my Web browser is acting funny"; give me the details. Look up its version number (in any Windows program, go to the Help menu and select the "About" item; in a Mac application, go to the top-left corner of the screen, hit the menu named after the application and choose the "About" item there) and copy whatever error message you see. You can also try to take a screenshot and send that to me; instructions on how to do so come after the jump.

* A clear and informative subject header works too. I have received way too many e-mails headlined "HELP!!!" for that all-caps header to get my attention anymore.

* Please understand that there are some issues I can't help you with. I'm a personal-tech columnist, so I don't address office-computing topics -- I'm not the guy to ask about your Exchange server issues. And if you're asking about an extremely old consumer product, your odds aren't good either. On one hand, I'm not likely to have access to the software you're using (it's been years since I've used a Windows 95 system); on the other, time I spend researching a problem that few readers are likely to experience is time I can't spend digging into issues that affect far more people. Finally, there are some situations that I won't help you with because they'd leave your computer in an unsafe situation -- say, going online without a firewall or sticking with Internet Explorer 6.

If I don't get to your message right away, please show some patience. Nagging me for a reply 48 hours after you sent your first message is not a terribly polite way to ask for free help. But if weeks go by -- or if you've got new information to add to your first report -- go ahead and send me a follow-up e-mail.

Years ago, I tried to answer every message, no matter how long it took. I gave up on that a while back and am now trying to stick to a two-month rule; anything I haven't replied to by then gets filed away for reference in some folder besides my inbox. My assumption there is that by two months, either the reader's gotten an answer from somebody else or the problem has worked itself out somehow. If that's not the case, feel free to bug me again.

Does this help? If not, I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments...

Technically speaking, summer doesn't end for another few weeks. But the part of the season in which most of us take our summer vacations expires this weekend. (Note that because I'm chronically late at things, my own time off isn't happening until next week.)

So now seems a fair time to ask you all how much you unplugged during your own summer absences. Which of the following forms of communication did you abstain from during your vacation?

* your cell phone?
* work e-mail?
* home e-mail?
* instant messaging?
* RSS feeds?
* your own blog, if any?
* Facebook, MySpace or other social-networking site?
* Twitter?
* any other daily ingredient in your digital diet?

Sometimes the decision is made for you: Traveling to another country where your cell phone doesn't work is an excellent way to keep your vacation free of online distractions. Sometimes, you have to exercise some willpower or take some action before leaving to ensure that you won't be tempted (like removing your work e-mail account from your smartphone's mail software).

Tell me what you do without -- and what you wish you'd avoided doing online during your trip but succumbed to anyway.

Three times yesterday, I had co-workers ask me to show them one of the "synths" I'd created at Microsoft's Photosynth site, the subject of today's column. I understand why they asked; both the way this application assembles these interactive, 3-D collages and what it's like to explore one take a fair amount of explanation, and I'm not totally confident that today's piece does the job.

So if you're still confused -- and if your computer is running Windows XP or Vista, and if you've got the time to download and install the Photosynth application, and if you've got a Windows Live ID to sign into the site -- have a look at some synths I created while testing Photosynth. Here, for instance, is one assembled from photos shot from washingtonpost.com's Arlington headquarters, while this one lets you walk through the Post's newsroom to a particularly slovenly reporter's cubicle.

I did those two after reading the advice in Microsoft's Photosynth photography guide (PDF), which offers such practical hints as this delineation between good and bad architectural subjects:

Many unique details make it synthy (Photosynth loves Venice)

Repetition and shininess are bad (Photosynth hates the Seattle Public Library)

For a look at what you're more likely to get out of Photosynth on a first try, see the other synths I uploaded. With far fewer pictures linked, they don't offer nearly as much to explore. You may think these overlapping assortments of photos do nothing more than make a poetic visual statement of how poorly any human record can align with reality.

I'm not sure that I will be creating many synths on my own time; taking a panorama shot takes less time and leaves you with something that's far easier to share. The Photosynth site, as I noted, also still suffers from some performance issues (that Arlington-and-D.C. synth took two tries to upload yesterday evening) even if it's vastly improved since it crashed in its public debut last week.

But -- given further progress in both Photosynth's reliability and compatibility -- I can easily see artistically-minded photographers vying to explore this medium's creative potential. I can also see business-minded realtors, travel agents and resort operators using synths to provide walkthroughs of properties.

What about you? Does Photosynth leave you intrigued, interested or just bored?

Earlier today, Microsoft shipped the Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8 -- the first new version since 2006's Internet Explorer 7, which itself marked the first major update to IE since Internet Explorer 6 shipped back in 2001.

IE 8 -- available for Windows XP and Vista -- doesn't look all that different from IE 7, but it seems to pack in a considerable number of helpful, if overdue, usability refinements.

Most of them involve tabbed browsing. In IE 8, this no longer feels bolted on as it did in IE 7; there isn't that same distracting pause while the browser opens a new tab. The "about:Tabs" page that displays if you click the new-tab button now offers useful links (for instance, to reopen tabs you'd closed before) instead of just an introduction to the concept. And if you right-click to open a series of links from one page in adjacent tabs, IE 8 highlights their tab bars in the same color to help you keep track of them.

IE 8 also catches up to its competitors in a few ways. It -- finally -- has a find-on-this-page text search as quick and convenient as the one in Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari. You can also now right-click on selected text to search for those words in your default search engine, but IE 8 also lets you expand this right-click menu with "Accelerators" that provide additional functions (say, directing that same search to a mapping site). Its address-bar auto-complete works much like the intelligent version I love in Firefox 3. And IE 8 provides "inPrivate Browsing," a rough equivalent of Safari's "Private Browsing" feature, which wipes out all records of your Internet activity when you're done. (Some of you may know this feature by another name.)

IE 8's "Web Slices" sound a lot like the Mac version of Safari's Web Clips. But while Web Clips work with any Web site, Web Slices require some extra coding at the site you're trying to clip... er, slice for faster access.

I downloaded a copy and installed it on a Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium to give this browser a quick spin around the block. The install went fine, but IE 8 reported that it couldn't run the installed version of Google Toolbar, and I had to re-authorize Microsoft's Photosynth plug-in as well.

IE 8 includes numerous security and maintenance upgrades, but I haven't had time to try them out yet. So I'll leave that part up to you: If you're trying your luck with this beta browser, how is it working out? Any sites that look or function poorly in it? Any widely-used plug-ins that give it indigestion?

Decades ago, somebody buying a new album would have to decide: Is this good enough to get on CD, or will I not feel like I'm missing anything if I only get it on tape. Eventually, music fans could replace "on tape" with "as a digital download."

Lately, viewers as well as listeners have had to face their own version of this: When some significant event, game or program airs, do you watch it on TV or on the Web?

I'm not talking about incidental snippets of video or everyday shows, but the sort of things labeled "appointment viewing" -- what you don't want to wait to watch, lest friends spoil it for you by telling you all about it.

Two recent examples of that: Olympic competitions and the headline speeches at the Democratic and Republican political conventions. Both can be watched online or over the air at the same time, which isn't always the case with popular programming.

By many measures, Web video can't hope to compare with TV. High-definition coverage is common on the tube (as an aside, "on the tube" seems likely to become one of those functionally obsolete expressions that refuses to die, like the idea of "dialing" a phone number) but rare on the Web and impractical for many people of limited bandwidth. Good old television also provides far better audio than most computer feeds. And you don't have to fuss with installing any new video plug-ins, either.

And yet... the Web has far more room to carry what you want to watch than any channel. You can watch on any computer anywhere with an Internet connection, not just on whatever TV is connected to an antenna or cable or satellite box. (One of the first political speeches I viewed online instead of on TV was a State of the Union speech that, owing to my getting a late start on cooking dinner and my then-home's kitchen being on the wrong side of a wall from the TV, I had to watch on my laptop.) And if somebody else has monopolized the TV for other purposes, you may not have any alternative but to watch online.

So: During the Olympics, were there any events you only wanted to watch on TV? Or did you make the decision based on what screen was in front of you at the time? What about the conventions: Will you gather in front of the TV for Barack Obama and/or John McCain's acceptance speeches, or will the nearest laptop suffice?

Since I reviewed it late last year, few gadgets have drawn as much popular interest as Amazon's Kindle electronic-book reader.

I may still have seen only one in the wild (and that was on a flight to CES, which means I wasn't exactly looking at a representative sample of non-geek humanity), and nobody knows for sure how many have been sold -- 189,000, 240,000, 378,000?. But the comparatively tiny dent this device has made in the consumer-electronics market hasn't deterred people from sending me a steady stream of queries about what it's like to use this thing and whether it's worth the price. I've also been interviewed by other media outlets -- most recently, NPR -- about this device, which is not the case with most of the things I try out.

The concept of reading a book on a device that, like paper, is sufficiently uncluttered to let you get lost in the text seems to resonate with people in a way that many other consumer-tech possibilities don't.

Now that the Kindle is nearing its first birthday, rumors are starting to circulate about what its next version might be like. For example, there are hints of such design upgrades as a new, simpler set of controls. But the most fascinating change in a Kindle 2.0 would be a marketing shift suggested by reports in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Ars Technica: selling the next Kindle to college students as a textbook reader.

I like this idea. Textbooks cost an inordinate amount of money yet are rarely kept for more than a year or two. Their readers, meanwhile, must make room for their substantial weight and heft in backpacks and dorms (which happen to be among the smallest living quarters available in the United States outside of military barracks and prisons). They're also crying out for the search features that come naturally to any computer-driven display system. If an e-book reader can work anywhere, it ought to be on the college campus.

If you're in school, do you agree? If not, what are you hoping to see in the next Kindle -- or any other e-book reader?

Yesterday, some other newspapers' tech columnists reviewed Microsoft's Photosynth site, a free Web service that generates interactive, 3-D panoramas from photos you upload.

When I saw those reviews, my first thought was "hmm, perhaps I should have gone with a Photosynth piece myself." Microsoft had given me every opportunity to try out the site on the same schedule as my competitors -- their PR reps gave me an in-person briefing at The Post's offices on August 4 and provided me with early access to the site.

I opted not to do that, thinking at first that Photosynth might make more sense as a blog post, not a column in its own right. I was also reluctant to try out this Web service -- or any other company's -- in a pre-release state; as recent events have shown, a site's scalability and performance issues may not surface when only a selected group of testers can play with it.

By the end of last week, deep packet inspection seemed a newsier item, and so I wrote about that instead (and have since received a lot less e-mail feedback than usual, so perhaps my news judgment was off).

Anyway, after seeing the headlines on the NYT and WSJ sites, I clicked over to the Photosynth site to check it out for myself and discovered, as many of you may have, that it was out of commission. An apologetic notice confessed that the site was "a little overwhelmed today" and would not allow any photo uploads "while we're reviving it."

Oops. Seeing that page -- which greeted would-be Photosynthers until late last night -- changed my opinion to something more like "Looks like I dodged a bullet here!" Or a more accurate assessment: "There but for the grace of God go I..." More honest yet: "I suppose my editor can't complain that much about me letting us get scooped on this."

This isn't the first time a well-publicized site has melted down in its public debut (though it has to be a little embarrassing to Microsoft, which has a little more resources to put into a new site than the average dot-com startup). These things happen. Still, as a reviewer you hate to send people to something they can't try.

But -- as ever! -- I could be wrong. So let's play a retrospective edition of Marc Fisher's You Be The Editor game: What would you have done, not knowing ahead of time if the Photosynth site would crash or not?

A. Reviewed it in its pre-release state;

B. Held off on that topic to write about deep packet inspection;

C. Written about some other subject altogether.

If you choose C, you have to say what the other subject would be! The comments are yours...