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Mac Mania VI / Aperture Aura blogs

Macworld logoI wrote a few weblogs for Macworld during our journey to Alaska last week. Here they all are, in order based on our cruise's destinations:

I had a lot of fun on the cruise, though I felt I didn't have as much to offer the attendees this time (as I couldn't discuss Leopard, which was the original plan). For anyone who might be contemplating one of these, I can say that they are quite a lot of fun, for two reasons. First, it's a great way to get some quality instruction in reasonably small class sizes. There's also a lot of out-of-class contact with the speakers, including dinner each evening. Second, the cruises themselves can be fun. I'd never been on a cruise ship before last fall's Caribbean excursion, so I'm quite new to the whole thing. I think cruises are a great way to see a number of places quickly and relatively inexpensively--which can help determine where you'd like to go back for a longer, more personal stay in the future.
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Home from Alaska…

Macworld logoAs some of you may know, I spent the last week on the Mac Mania VI Geek Cruise, cruising from Seattle to a few spots in Alaska (and one in Canada), and then back to Seattle yesterday morning. (You can read my blog posts about the journey on the MacMania blog page over at Macworld.)

Alaska picThe blog posts contain a few of the images from the trip, but given that I took over 700 pictures, and that our boat's connection speed was slow (and the cost was high), it wasn't feasible to run more than a handful or so in the blogs. I've now looked through the whole batch, and picked 55 that I felt were most interesting, and tossed them into this photo gallery. These are basically unedited images--I haven't done any cropping, color correction, or other such tweaks as of yet. I just thought it'd be fun to share a bit more of the Alaskan and Canadian scenery from the trip--even based on the limited experience one gets from a cruise ship, Alaska really is a most interesting state (this was my first visit of any sort there).

Click the first image to view the larger version of that slide, and you can then use the arrow keys to advance from one large image to the next. (You can also use the Index Page buttons at the bottom of the main screen to just view each of the three index pages.)

If you'd like a full-size version of any of these photos, just let me know the file name, and I'll send you the original (no watermark, either--I just put that there to stop the casual image lifters). My favorite shot is probably the orange sunset, though a couple of the glacier/ice in water shots are interesting as well.

I'm home for a week, then it's off to see what interesting things are revealed in the "feature complete" Leopard beta that Steve will (hopefully) be discussing at WWDC--and maybe we'll even see some cool new hardware, if recent rumors turn out to be true.



Why context matters

I receive a lot of junk mail, most of which is captured by various levels of filters. But sometimes, some messages make it through the traps, such as this one which came in last night:

I would like to buy advertising on your web page:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=2051.

The ad would be for an airport parking web site and consist of a couple of lines of text with links to the parking site. I can pay $35 for the ad via PayPal, or send you a check. Would you be interested?

Yes, that's right -- this person would love to run an advert for his airport parking lot website right in the middle of our forum thread titled "Stranded at the Airport," which opens this way:

I am having no luck setting up my original Airport and WaveLAN silver card on my W.Steet 266. I am using the drivers I got with the card on the OWC site...

It seems this particular spambot's context parser is incredibly basic (if (site or post) contains word 'airport,' then send advert request message). But really, I'm not complainaing about the parser at all: it gave me a little chuckle before I pressed the Junk button!



Driving lessons from a four-year-old

"Daddy, I've told you before: keep two hands on the steering wheel!"

'You're right; sorry Kylie!'

"If you don't listen to me, we'll have to pull over and let Mommy drive home!"

Or some words very close to those; she told me this during our drive home last night, causing an eruption of laughter from the front seat.



A (messy) parenting lesson learned…

Our daughter Kylie has, on three occasions now, gone to bed perfectly happy and fine, only to wake up vomiting in the middle of the night. By the morning, though, she'd be fine again, and acting like nothing much had happened.

I figured it was something in her food that was triggering the events, but the first two times it happened, there was too much overlap in the meals to figure anything out--she basically ate the identical dinner. When the third incident happened this week, however, I was able to note only two overlaps with the prior meals: on all three occasions, she'd eaten some small cherry tomatoes and some banana with her dinner.

After I related this story to my friend Kirk, he wrote back "yea, tomatoes and bananas don't go together. Acid and starch = boom!" Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I hadn't ever heard this before. I've certainly seen it in action often enough now, however, to believe it. So as much as she likes both, Kylie's days of combining the two are now over!

As an aside, sorry it's been so quiet around here lately. We moved a couple weeks back, and between packing, moving, and unpacking (not even close to done yet), I just haven't had much time to write.



An unexpected accolade

Macworld logoA few months back, I received an email from Macworld's head honcho, Jason Snell, telling me that my multi-part look at the Intel Mac mini had been nominated for a Neal award in the Best Online Article or Series category. The Neal awards are designed to recognize excellence in business media publications, and I guess they're fairly well known in the industry (although I'd never heard of them). I read the email then didn't give it a second thought, other than "hey, that's kind of cool."

Well, last week, Jason sent a quick text message from the awards ceremony: "Holy cow, we won!" I was both shocked (wow, someone actually read the whole thing?!) and thrilled--because the mini piece represents exactly what I wanted to do when I made the decision to join Macworld full time: to have the time to look at things in a more in-depth manner than I was able to when running my site as a hobby.

I was given the chance to delve deeply into a then-new Intel-powered Mac, see exactly how well it did a number of different tasks, compare it to my G4 PowerBook and Dual G5, and then write about my experiences. That the end result was recognized with a Neal award is really thrilling, and speaks highly to the editorial team at Macworld that converted my 15,000 word opus into a well-paced and easy-to-read multi-part series--it's not easy taking a piece that long and making it into a coherent multi-day story, but that's just what they did.

So thanks to ABM for recognizing the article, thanks to the great team at Macworld for making it work so well online, and thanks to the person who submitted it for consideration for the Neal awards. It was a lot of fun to write, and hopefully was useful to those who were interested in learning abou the new Intel-powered Macs.



When updates overlap

On Thursday of this week, we had two interesting software update announcements:

  1. Microsoft released an update to Vista that fixes a problem with Apple's iPod corrupting when ejected.
  2. Apple released the Boot Camp 1.2 beta, which adds support for Microsoft Vista (among other new improvements).

So on the same day, Microsoft patched their OS to prevent Apple's iPods from corrupting on disconnect, and Apple released an update to enable its customers to use Microsoft's Vista on Intel-powered Macs.

I just found it somewhat humorous that both Microsoft and Apple released patches to fix issues with the other's products on the same day...and I'm thrilled that it happened, as it shows that companies realize how important it is for our hardware and software to play well with others. (My own Vista upgrade is in the mail, so I'll see how well the updated Boot Camp works in the near future.)



What’s in a name? Nothing major…

Quick--name the four "major" titles on the men's and women's professional tennis circuit. Easy, right? Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. OK, do it again for the golfers on the PGA tour. Also easy: The Masters, US Open, The Open Championship (that'd be the British Open to most US fans), and the PGA Championship. Now, quick, name the LPGA's four major championships.

Not so easy, is it? I can name three with relative ease: The LPGA Championship, the US Open, and the British Open (though the British only became a major for the women in 2001). But what about the fourth? It's this week's event, the Kraft Nabisco Championship. I didn't know that until I read about it earlier this week. (I knew there were four, but I had no idea what the fourth was called.)

The history of the LPGA's majors is somewhat convoluted--this article explains it all fairly well. But the bigger question here is, if you take the 12 event names above, can you quickly tell which one doesn't belong? Another easy answer, of course: the Kraft Nabisco Championship. And why doesn't it belong? Because it's the only "major" event that has a sponsor's name (Nabisco is owned by Kraft, so I'll just count that as one sponsor) embedded right there in the event's title.

So what happens in three (or five or whatever) years when the Kraft sponsorship is up, and they decide not to renew? Will the fourth major then become the Ford Explorer Championship or the Wal-Mart Championship or perhaps the 7-11 Championship? Whatever happens, it won't make it easy for the LPGA's fans to remember all four of the majors. To me, and perhaps it's my old-fashioned traditionalist side, major event names shouldn't have a sponsor's name directly attached to the event. Once the TV time starts, sure, all bets are off--I have no issues with "The US Open presented by IBM," for instance, as the tag line used on the air. But not as part of the event's official name--getting noted in the record books every year, and subject to change at the whim of some corporate bean counter (I used to be one of those!) somewhere who nixes the $10 million sponsorship contract.

Come on, LPGA, do the right thing: name your major something non-vendor-dependent, and then sell the TV sponsorship rights for the broadcast. The Tradition, The National, whatever--I really don't care what you name it, just name it such that the fans won't have to remember a new name every time there's sponsorship turnover. That's hardly the way to build mind share with the fans for one of your four major championships.



Ten things to do in the next twenty years

Over the weekend, I was thinking a bit about the next 20 years, and things I'd like to accomplish within that timeframe. Nothing practical like "preparing for retirement" or "funding the girls' college accounts" or even "remembering to mow the lawn weekly." No, it's always more interesting to think of the fun things one might be able to do in the future.

So here's my list, focused on those things I think would be the most fun or most interesting. As with lists of this type, there's a good chance that well over half my list will remain unaccomplished--family, work responsibilities, and economic realities always seem to get in the way of our dreams. However, I will do my best to check off at least some of these items while working within the confines of reality.
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Random header images for WordPress

I've finally migrated my family's site over to the latest version of WordPress, and installed pretty much the same batch of plug-ins and widgets as I use here. However, I wanted something else, too--a randomly-selected image for the header of the site that changes each time the page is loaded, as seen in these four sample pictures:

montage

(The header images are just sections I've snipped out of photos we've taken, with an artsy Photoshop filter of some sort applied.)

I searched the web, and there are a few plug-ins that offer this ability, but they came either too feature-rich, or required some additional JavaScript to work properly. I wanted the most simple, basic, and functional header image rotation solution I could find...so I wrote my own, which required all of two lines of code. I'm posting it here so that (a) I remember how I did it, and (b) in case anyone else wants a simple solution, they'll be able to find it with some help from Google (our family's site is access restricted, so posting it there wouldn't do much good...and it would confuse my relatives, who are used to only seeing pictures of our kids there!)
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