I Was Wrong About the Keynote

Turns out there is no iAir in a can. What there is, is the Macbook Air the newest and most portable Apple has ever put out. Sure I want one but it's one of those things that wouldn't change my life all that much. The iPhone changed the way I did things. My present computers did too. The Macbook Air would be nice to own but I wouldn't want to sign the check to pay for it. 

Now the Time Capsule is a different story. I'm getting myself one of those. I'll wait for it though. To tell you the truth I'm thinking more about a new camera with my tax refund. That's been my plan for the last year and I didn't see anything new from Apple to change my mind about that. 

Last Minute, Fearless Keynote Predictions

The tag line of this year's MacWorld is "There is Something in the Air". Conventional wisdom is pointing to an ultra portable MacBook or a delivery upgrade for the iPhone. I'm going to go completely off the page on this one. Last night I kept waking up thinking about that phrase. I tried to put myself in the shoes of The Steve. For starters I've got a bunch of rabid fans. The iPhone proved that they would pay a premium to replace what has really become a need in modern life. If I had a captured audience what would be the ideal goods to sell–what are the most basic needs of humans? That's when I realized that there was no puzzle to this year's motto. The answer is right there in the copy. If I could corner a market it would be on air. Air and water. Then maybe food and oil, but first air and water. What does this have to do with technology? I'm betting it's all in the delivery system. It's not all about air quality, it's about how you breathe it. 

Christmas Eve

Well, the real Christmas Eve is upon us. We're only 9 hours away the Macworld keynote speech. I'll be asleep for most of that time anyway. 

Twas the night before macworld

and all along cyberspace not a peripheral was stirring 

not even a mighty mouse.   

Getting Excited

I know I'm a geek, but I'm all excited about my trip to the Apple Genius Bar tomorrow. I'm finally getting off my butt and having the top case replaced on my macbook. The hand rests went black pretty much the week I got it and back in October the front edge started peeling off. The warranty is up in February so I decided if I was going to do it I should do it soon. I have a 10:30 appointment at the Burlingame Apple Store. By noon tomorrow I should have a bright and shiny new look to my laptop. I can't wait. 

Filling In Some of the Blanks

Tomorrow is my last day in Kansas and I guess I should catch you up on
what I've been up to. I think I left off with spending the day at a
café called Mokas. I have in fact just come from there. I'm presently
sitting at a picnic table I discovered in a grove of trees in Burke
Park. I spent most of my afternoons last week here or a hundred feet
or so up the river lying in the grass lisenting to music and writing
in my journal. (Both activities facilitated by my iPhone)

I may not have kept up with the blog but I am happy to report that
I've managed to journal like I was locked in a prison with nothing but
pad and paper. The distance from my daily cares, a little fresh air
and a new toy have done me wonders. I needed this badly. I wonder how
many people who live in heavy tourist areas vacation in the most
mundane places they can find. This world of Wal-Mart, Long John
Silver's, lawn space and being the only pedestrian is such a novelty
to me. I've already vowed to expand my vistas when I get home. I
haven't even bought a monthly bus pass in a year. If I couldn't walk
there, there needed to be a pretty darn good reason why. I wasn't
leaving much of a carbon footprint it's true. I wasn't leaving any
kind of mark at all. I won't go so far as to say that I've recovered
my voice but I might say that I'm starting to remember who I am.

Mokas

Mokas

Before I could takle the aforementioned hill I needed to refresh
myself. As luck would have it my all time favorite fast food was at
the corner at the bottom of the hill: Long John Silvers. I think that
it is criminal that I have to go from San Francisco to Kansas to get
good, cheap, fried fish but that's the way it is.

After lunch I crossed the street to Mokas Cofee which is the only Café
with wireless I could find in town. That it was so close to my mother
and sister's apartments was just pure bonus. Despite the strip mall
exterior it turned out to be a wonderfully comfortable establishment
with good strong coffee, a friendly and attractive barista and
virtually no business on a week day afternoon. I stayed for an hour
and a half writing in my journal. After avoiding my daily pages for
most of the last two months it has been gushing out, out here.

Part of what made it such a sucessful day was the presence of my
latest Apple goodie. Last Tuesday I went to the Apple store to get a
new iPod for my trip. I thought it would be easy. See if the weight an
form factor of the Nano was worth giving up the ability to back up my
entire MacBook with a classic. The problem was that while both devices
were nice they were nothing like holding and using an iPhone. Not even
in the same ballpark. So after much deliberation (and a break for
lunch) I got the iPhone. It has been my single device companion ever
since. Right now I'm sitting on a riverbank typing this. Yesterday I
was sitting in a Café cheerfully typing out a thousand words in an
hour and a half. When I wake up on the middle of the night its right
there to take down my dream notes without getting up or balancing a
five pound laptop on my chest while straining my neck all to hell. As
a person who lived his life on foot reducing my personal tech gear to
a single five ounce gadget is major. More than I wanted to spend for a
phone? Yea, it was. I was hoping when I bought it I wouldn't have any
regrets about the expense. After a week of use I can honestly say it
exceeded my already high expectations.

Venus and Mars Are All Right Tonight

Every once in awhile I find myself missing my vinyl. My mother had passed down the first albums that I had truly loved when I was still quite young. Highway 61 Revisited had already changed my personality for good by my tenth birthday. But it wasn't until high school that I started collecting albums seriously for myself. At that point I was more of a Paul person than a John person. I loved Wings. It brought back the AM radio days of being a child in the seventies.

I don't actually remember when and where I bought Venus and Mars. I know I bought it used and as it would have been over ten years old so the stickers and poster were long gone. I probably bought it as a cheap single for "Listen to What the Man Said" a song that had spent some time on the radio and still got some soft rock airplay in the eighties. But there were all kinds of gems I had never heard before: "Venus and Mars", "Rock Show", "Magneto and Titanium Man" and my favorite "Spirits of Ancient Egypt".

A couple of months ago I started missing this album. I gave my records to a friend for safekeeping years ago. She is notoriously hard to pin down so I haven't actually seen any of them for over a decade. Now Venus and Mars is just obscure enough to make finding tracks on a P2P difficult which is usually my cue to check on itunes for the odd tracks. Of course I ran into the Internet Beatle Wall as none of their music existed in a purchasable electronic format. I found a couple of the songs on a share site but not all of my favorates let alone the whole album which plays well as a single piece.

Cut to this morning when after prolonged negations the iTunes started selling unprotected, high quality music files including much of the Wings catalog. I shy away from buying music. Until the music industry stops suing their fans for the sake of "starving artists". I want very little to do with them. They could stop peer to peer tomorrow and it still wouldn't make me give them any of my music. I'll listen to what I've got till they change the business model. But when one of them makes a move in the right direction I willing to send a little love their way.

It wasn't easy though. Apple's servers are getting hammered right now. I've never had a more difficult time downloading from Apple. Not even last February when everyone was jockeying to be the billionth iTunes download. If that is any indication it would seem that Apple and EMI have made the right choice to stop making it difficult for people to enjoy the music that they pay for. The wonder of it all, baby.

Top 10 – Why Blogger Kicks iWeb's Ass

It hasn't yet been a week since I abandoned my previous blog and moved from using iWeb back to blogger. Already though I'm a much happier and productive blogger.

1. Unlike Apple's iWeb, Blogger just works
2. Updating a post on Blogger takes seconds instead of minutes on iWeb.
3. When I forget a period and have to edit a previous post it does not re-create every page I've ever written. (see #2)
4. Moving between my laptop and my mini is effortless because Blogger is accessible from the Internet. Iweb requires the master domain file to be moved between computers in order to use a different computer.
5. If you lose your current domain file you can't recover your site from Apple's servers. Blogger emails me every post including the media automatically which for me means all my posts are saved locally on two machines and remotely on Apple and Google's servers.
   
6. Space is no longer an issue. With .mac I had 1GB to share between my web site, pictures and email. Google is limiting the photos to 1GB and nearly 3GB for email. Of course all of that extra space doesn't come cheap. Apple charges me $100 a year for that 1GB while Google kicks back the 4GB for free.
   
7. I got to use all of the widgets and code I wanted to. I have my flickr badge and my lastFM widget and my del.icio.us tags and feeds on my page and it all took less than a minute to set up. Apple's plug-ins pretty much constitute a counter and a link to Apple.
   
8. Blogger lets me change themes on the fly. If I want to change to way my whole site looks I just change the theme. With iWeb that meant recopying every entry into the new format one by one.
   
9. While five days is not enough time to call Blogger more reliable I do know that every time I do a security update on my computers I'm not going to lose control of my website.
10. Blogger is simply more intuitive to use. Whatever I've wanted to do I've found the tool close by and easy to use. (see #1)
    

The thing is, I didn't want to write this post. I'm a crazy Apple fanboy. I replaced the Brita filter on my kitchen sink with the iWater which only dispenses the Apple cool-aid. I put up with more than a year of frustration with iWeb, wanting it to work, waiting for the cure-all update, waiting for Leopard , waiting for the new iLife. Instead of getting better it got worse. So I got out.

My Movie Collection

I have updated my public list on the imdb to reflect the current state of my movie collection. I'm rather fond of my set up with several external hard drives all plugged into my mac mini and accessible through itunes. I have all the original poster art in itunes too so it is a real pleasure to flip through all the movies. I like sorting by year to watch the history of film go by. Beginning in 1920 I only have five years where I don't have at least one movie to represent. Anyway you can use the link to the imdb in the new "Where I'm scattered on the Web" section on the right side of the page.

Zombies Invade Union Square

I spent most of my day off yesterday at home. When I did venture out it was to the west to see Pirates on Van Ness. So for the first time in over a week I was not in Union Square at all during the day. So I missed this years Zombie Invasion. Crave has the story of the invasion hitting the Apple store with some pretty good pictures. I did venture by the Apple store on my way home from the movies (I'm agonizing over buying a mighty mouse). On my way back up the hill I passed a guy whose face was covered in blood talking with another guy on Stockton. I remember thinking, "I hope the zombies are in town or that guy really needs to go to hospital".

Rebuilding the Lacbook

It's getting late and I haven't eaten anything. I am suffering from that particular kind of mania that strikes me when I'm working on a computer issue. Tonight I am re-formating the hard drive on my laptop. It's my own fault I guess. This morning while messing around in my keychain trying to save my iWeb site I hit the wrong check box and before I knew it my keychains and all forms of using .mac were lost on that computer. Actually I'm not that unhappy with doing the re-format. I had transfered everything over automatically from my mini and had brought all my desktop settings and programs over to my laptop. I had all sorts of bizarre programs and settings especially since the mini had all my settings and programs from my ibook. All of this means is that there was a lot of garbage on it I didn't really use or want.

The problem is of course that I start working on these issues and I can't stop. I don't even take a break to eat. Which is dumb and makes me crazy and I realize that it's five minutes to twelve and I'm starving and batshit insane, listening to Supertramp and thinking hey this sounds pretty good.

Yes, I guess I Am

Well I made one last attempt to get my iWeb site to publish without giving me errors and spiking the comments. Not only did I fail but I managed to wipe out my keychains on my laptop and now my laptop won't sync back up to .mac. Apple is not on my happy list right now. The problem with that is that for the most part I'm a pretty cynical person. Usually Apple is the only one on my happy list. Now I just have a very long sad list. Wait, there is still Lupica and their day-brightening Earl Grey Renaissance tea that I pretty much drink whenever I'm not sleeping. I'm going to make another glass right now. Ah, yes, that's better.

This week I've decided to revisit del.icio.us. I had played around with the service about a year and a half ago and really didn't get into it. Mostly I think because I hate labeling things. This presents a bit of a problem since I love having things labeled. (Yea, I know, welcome to my world.) I had been struggling with this with my Devon database until I simply stopped using it. (I still use Devon to write and store my stuff but I don't saving all my clippings there anymore) And I wanted a better way to share what I was reading and thinking about. For a little while I had used Newsvine. I like the way Newsvine is set up and it does everything that I would want a social news site to do. The problem is I have with it is similar to my main problem at my job. Randal from Clerks hit the nail on the head when he said "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers." Newsvine would be great if it wasn't for all the people that use it. This goes to two parts of my psychology. Number one, I'm not that much of a people person. Really I don't hate people or anything, it's just that I could really take them or leave them. Number two, I can't stand the flanks of either side of the political spectrum. I'm a moderate because the far left and the far right are completely divorced from reality. It is those people that scream the loudest on the Internet. I just find all that screaming demoralizing.

So that's why I'm liking del.icio.us. Let the content speak for itself. Of course when I tried to integrate my del.icio.us tags into my iWeb site there was no good way to do it, and iWeb had started spitting out errors whenever I tried to publish, and comments were no longer working, and iWeb has always been a pain in the ass to use on more than one computer, and fixing all of this had managed to screw up my laptop. Most importantly this isn't the first time I or a large block of users have had these kind of problems with this program. Well that's it I'm gone. I'm taking my ball (brain) and going home (using a web based tool).

So far so good. I've had to switch back to Firefox from Safari to get the posting form to work correctly but that's fine because there are some very cool extensions for del.icio.us on firefox. Blogger is much better now than the last time I used it. Smooth, flexible, sexy, everything a man looks for in blogging software.