January 2007 Archives

Hopefully I'll have them back up soon, but for the time being they had to go. I had written them before all this DNS stuff was worked out, blah blah blah, everything's better now.

Peace out.

After dealing with my sporadic internet connection over the last several months, I've decided to host my entire website on real servers, i.e. not the old mac in my office. I'm still working out some of the kinks (and uploading 1.3GB of data sure took a while), but hopefully we'll be seeing much more reliable service in the future.

I was getting a little bit sick of how my website looked, so I decided to change everything up. This is a default theme from the movable type website, so there are definitely things that will requiring tweaking.

On another note, I've updated my photo page a bit and adding pictures of this last Christmas as well as our cat.

It's that time of year again, when little girls shamelessly sell a wide variety of tasty and oh so delicious cookies. That's right, it's girl scout cookie time.

Now, as wonderful as these treats are, I think there is one significant flaw with their packaging - specifically the nutrutional information. You see, I was munching down some Peanut Butter Patties, and after the seventh one, I thought I'd check my Caloric intake. (My first mistake.) The problem, aside from the vast quantities of saturated fat, was that I had to do some math to make this work.

Clearly, no one could eat just two of those cookies. So I vote for changing the nutrition info to have a serving size of, at the very least, "1/2 box." (I'd say "1 box," but I know some people are dieting this time of year.) Alternatively, on the Thin Mints, you could have a serving size of "1 sleeve," which would be very acceptable. Seriously, Girl Scouts of America, it's time to be a bit more realistic.

One of my favorite pianists is coming into town in a couple months - Murray Perahia. I'm quite excited to see him.

Well, that isn't particularly my enthusiam, but rather our cat, Rusty's excitement coming through. At PetsMart this evening, while getting some more food for the little bugger, Carrie and I saw something in the checkout aisle that couldn't be passed up-the laser pointer. He had so enjoyed chasing various reflections of light that we inadvertently flashed on the wall, making the oddest noises in the process, that we knew this would be a special treat. As it turns out, he really enjoyed it, and wore himself out a bit. Enjoy.

Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field (RDF) is legendary. According to Bud Tribble, who is credited with the first use of the term relating to Steve, "In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything." With such charisma, Steve's keynote addresses are extraordinarily effective, and I've only seen them online. I can't imagine what a full-fledged dose of live-action RDF could do to me.

But what is it about these presentations that makes them so effective? I can sit and watch a State of the Union address, produced by the largest entity in the country, spoken by the most powerful man in the world, and still not experience a tenth of the RDF that a MacWorld keynote can produce. (Maybe Presidents should use Apple's Keynote and live performances by John Mayer.)

For the first time, though, we in the mac community have gotten a glimpse into the inner workings of the RDF. Thanks to the folks over at SpyMac, we can now see close up the notes Steve used during his iPhone demonstration. (As of publishing time, spymac's website was down. The link is to a Flickr copy of one of their photos.)

Apparently, one important element of a powerful RDF is preparation down to every last detail. Everyone knows that Steve Job's is a bit of a perfectionist, to put it mildly, but even I was surprised by the detail of his notes. For example, when demonstrated Google Maps in the iPhone, his notes read as follows:

• Moscone West in bookmarks
• Starbucks order 4000 lattes to go
• Washington Monument
• Show satellite
• Eiffel Tower, Colosseum

Every element of his presentation was scripted, down to the Starbucks joke. Clearly, if you want to bend the very nature of reality to your will, the first step is to plan everything out to perfection. Then, quite naturally, buy a black mock turtleneck and wear it constantly.

Now that all the flurry that is MacWorld has fully subsided, it is time to examine what was perhaps the most crucial announcement made during the event, though no official Press Release marked the occasion. I am referring, of course, to the dropping of "computer" from Apple Computer, Inc.

For many, the name change was simply the next logical step for Apple. The now ubiquitous iPods have long since outstripped their mac counterparts in terms of revenue. According to last quarter's 8-K filing, iPods brought in over one billion dollars more than portables and desktops combined. Granted, this is all old news, but the discrepancy is only growing more pronounced.

Turning to the keynote address, one finds two main product announcements - the AppleTV and iPhone. If the buzz around these products (particularly the latter) is any indication of future purchases, the mac's slice of the revenue pie will continue to shrink, and it isn't hard for old school mac fanatics like me to start getting nervous about this continued mac marginalization.

For many, myself certainly included, the draw to the mac is the intuitive and powerful operating system and seamless integration with the underlying hardware. Allow me to restate that: the mac "just works" because of the wonderful software and its integration to the hardware. Are you starting to get the picture? Sound like any other products Apple sells? While some may view the decrease in importance (at least financially) of the mac as something to fear, I prefer to see it as the macintosh experience beginning to penetrate more aspects of our everyday life. Personally, I have no particular use for these latest gadgets at the moment (no HDTV or cell phone, gasp), but the thought of Apple-izing new things does get me excited. So fear not, Apple devotees, for the mac experience isn't going away any time soon.

I've been away for a bit due to some internet connection problems we've been having with SBC. I suppose one of these days I'll just cough up the dough to have someone else host my websites a bit more reliably.

In more exciting news, I'm applying to be a staff writer over at Infinite Loop. I'll post my two samples for you to see. Here's hoping!