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An ode to the Expo

Macworld logoI got a bit bored last night, after checking in and getting everything set up in the room. Left with time on my hands and not much to do, I started thinking about the upcoming keynote. For whatever reason, the poem 'Twas the night before Christmas started running through my head, but repurposed for Tuesday's event:

"Twas the day before Macworld, and all through the nets
Not a weblog was silent, they were all taking bets;
The photos were taken of posters afar,
In hopes that St. Jobs' stuff would clearly show thar.

I finished a version (although without using every single stanza in the original long poem!), then sent it to my buddy Kirk McElhearn to take a look at. He tweaked a few words, added a couple more stanzas, and we wound up with this.

Somehow, the tie-in with Christmas and the Expo keynote seems quite fitting; I hope everyone gets what they're hoping for tomorrow!



Why I love air travel…

And before you ask, yes, there's a "Why I hate air travel" post coming. It's in progress on my home machine, though, so I thought I'd post this one first.

Early Sunday morning, Portland Oregon: The weather is abysmal. Winds are 20 to 30mph, the rain is falling lightly but continuously, getting blown sideways. It's not cold, but it's far from warm. Sunday morning traffic is light, and 30 minutes later I'm being dropped off at the airport, saying goodbye to the girls (always the worst part of any business trip...they seemingly change so much in a week!).

Although I checked in at home and have my boarding pass, I do have a bag to check (a larger-than-standard bag is requisite for Macworld Expo travel, in order to bring home any potential loot acquired at the show!). So it's off to the United counter, where the lines are non-existent. A few minutes later, I'm in security, where there are also, amazingly, no lines. The only hold-up here is that removing two laptops, coat, and shoes takes a while (two laptops because I need a demo machine in addition to my Keynote slides machine for my presentation; it's hard to demo a hint that requires a logout while running Keynote!).

Boarding starts on time, and I settle into my window seat in the workhorse Boeing 737 (a -300 variant this time). Yes, I know experienced travelers prefer the aisle, but not me--I hate having to stand up every time a "row mate" wants to get up for a restroom break, to reach something in the overhead, etc. I also love watching the world go by, as it makes the flight go more quickly, and there are often some wondrous things to see.
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An expansion in focus…

Given that most of the technology subjects I think to write about are being used on macworld.com (they get first dibs on anything that I want to write that's related to my job), I've chosen to expand my writings here on robservatory to cover other topic areas that I find interesting. I make no promises that you will also find them interesting, but I don't think there are a ton of readers out there anyway :). The first two such posts follow this one.

I'll clearly not venture into areas of "social debate," such as politics, religion, or Wii vs. PlayStation vs. Xbox 360...ok, if someone wants to send me one of each of those, I'd write about them :). Basically, the new entries will cover things I run into in my daily adventures that I find intriguing, stupid, rant-worthy, rave-worthy, or that otherwise tickle my interest. As such, I can't tell you exactly what those things might entail, but hopefully you'll occasionally find them of interest.

Note that I will still cross-post all my macworld.com stories here, and will continue to focus mainly on Macs, OS X, and technology, as those are my three main interest areas. And after Expo, look for a totally new "Robservatory 2.0" to be launched here. The look will be much the same, but I've spent a bunch of time digging around for nifty WordPress plug-ins, many of which are Ajax-ified for easier user interaction. I think you'll like the new tools, and I'll like some of the things they let me do (like easily run polls on various topics).

And now, I'm off to the Expo! Hopefully the realities of the Tuesday keynote meet the incredibly high level of hype they've generated...but really, how could it? I've got my fingers crossed, though, just in case!



Uncommon cents

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This past week, I had the "opportunity" to pay two service contractors--a plumber and a leak detection service--to help with the water leak at our home.

Neither of these services are cheap, but I enjoyed (if that's the right word) paying for one more than the other. Why? Because one of them seemed to recognize the silliness of billing to the penny, while the other did not. The leak detection service charged a whole-dollar amount, $250. Expensive, yes, but it would've taken me days of digging and poking to find the well-hidden leaking valve.

The plumber, on the other hand, billed us $645.50 for the repair of the leaky valve. Again, quite expensive, but there's no way that's a project I would have tackled myself! But really, $0.50 on a $645 bill? That last $0.50 is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total amount charged! Rather than making me feel like the company was accurately billing me for their services, I was left with the opposite feeling: "Geez, it's already $645 and they have to nickel and dime me for another $0.50?!"
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How to run up a huge water bill

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For the last few months, I've suspected that we've had a pretty bad water leak at our home. There was never any sign of water damage, but our water bills were much higher than usual, starting around July. However, it it took the December water bill, which was the first without any lawn watering activity on it, to verify that our usage seemed way out of whack--over 1,500 gallons a day per month, based on the last bill. Yikes! Typical usage for a family such as ours should probably be down in the 300 to 500 gallon range, if not lower.

So last week, I had a number of service folks at the house. First a plumber, who repaired a couple of slightly leaky toilets. However, he told me they wouldn't account for the amount of water we were seeing flowing into the home when there was no water-using device in use. So he suspected there was a problem in the line between the street and the house. But he couldn't find the shut-off valve at the house that every home here must have, and neither could I--I know I've never seen it.
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What are they up to?

They being Apple, of course. If you haven't seen it yet, check out their home page. This from a company who has somewhat of a history of setting a very high expectations bar?

So what's coming? Seems like too much hype for a simple dual quad-core machine, or the iTV, or even any form of video iPod. Is it a 30th Anniversary Mac? A tablet? An ultra portable? Something else entirely? Nothing at all? Feel free to comment with your thoughts...

Whatever it is, it should be a most interesting keynote speech next week!

Macworld logoUpdate: I said I'd get better at this, and I'm off to a bad start. I actually wrote up my predictions for the "big news" in the keynote in a piece for macworld.com last week. My hope? Definitely for something in the ultra-small category, perhaps functioning as a tablet as well as a laptop...and designed in such a way as to be befitting it's title of 30th Anniversary Mac :).

I'm off to San Francisco today, and I'm anticipating a great show, regardless of what Apple may or may not reveal on Tuesday. I've not seen such a great collection of new hardware and software from the other Expo vendors in many years (just based on the exhibitor list and the flurry of press releases thus far). It should be an exciting week. Check macworld.com for regular updates from everyone attending, and I'll try my best to remember to cross-link anything I write over here.





Macworld: 2006 writings

Macworld logoThe following is most of everything I wrote for Macworld in 2006, though there are a few missing…

January
Jan 14 First Look: iWork '06
Jan 24Butler at your service
Jan 25 Review: Apple iPod Radio Remote
March
Mar 2 Top OS X tips
Mar 6 Souped-up Spotlight
Mar 12 First Look: A maximum look at a mini Mac, part one
Mar 13 First Look: A maximum look at a mini Mac, part two
Mar 15 First Look: A maximum look at a mini Mac, part three
Mar 16 First Look: Mini series follow-up: More RAM
Mar 20 First Look: Mac mini series: HD playback issues
Mar 22 First Look: The XP experiment: Running Windows on a Mac
April
Apr 18 First Look: Living in a Parallels universe
May
May 10 Norton AntiVirus 10.1
May 11 Intego VirusBarrier X4
May 12 ClamXav 1.0.3
May 19 What price MacBook beauty?
May 22 Music Store search struggles
May 30 Just the iPod facts, ma'am
June
Jun 2 First Look: MacBook gaming: A graphics concern?
Jun 7 Axis 207W network camera
Jun 7 Summer Gear Guide: Gifts for dads
Jun 8 Something's missing here…
Jun 8 Something's missing here...
Jun 28 First Look: 23 things we want in Leopard
Jun 30 Parallels Desktop for Mac
July
Jul 12 Best of Gems: Shortcuts, launchers, and search tools
Jul 18 First Look: First Look: Firefox 2 beta
Jul 27 Opinion: Which Mac should I buy?
Jul 7 Widgets calling
August
Aug 9 Apple Design Award winners announced
Aug 23 In praise of Senuti
Aug 25 'Not factory recommended'
Aug 28 Cruising for some hints
Aug 30 Google Earth goes golfing
September
Sep 14 Circular arguments
October
Oct 19 Discover Safe Sleep's secrets
Oct 27 My day at camp
Nov 29 All washed out
Oct 30 Leaving Tampa
Oct 31 Cruising the Keys
Oct 31 Sailing into Belize
November
Nov 3 Guatemala, Mexico, and Mac horror stories
Nov 6 All ashore
Nov 15 Hands on with the Mac Pro: Getting started>
Nov 16 Hands on with the Mac Pro: Putting it to work
Nov 17 Hands on with the Mac Pro: Testing the limits
Nov 27 FIOS tech review
December
Dec 8 Microsoft makes a Basic mistake with Office 2007
Dec 13 Should YouTube win an Eddy?
Dec 27 The Mac Pro and Photoshop CS3
Dec 29 iTunes, authorization, and multiple Macs


My opinion on the next version of Office for the Mac

Macworld logoIn case you haven't heard, the next release of Microsoft's Office for the Mac will lack one major feature: support for Visual Basic (VB). This core technology is what allows one to record macros, and it works basically the same on both Windows and Mac. But the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft has discovered that porting the code to Intel would be very hard...so they decided to just drop it completely.

I think this is a really bad mistake, and wrote about why in this opinion piece for Macworld.



My macworld.com content finally cross-referenced

Macworld logoOne of the challenges in keeping this blog going with fresh content is my employment situation. As someone who is paid to write about the Mac, OS X, and all things even vaguely related to those two subjects, my first obligation for article ideas in those areas rests with Macworld. So when I think of something I'd like to write about, I discuss it with our online editor, and he makes the call as to whether or not he'd like to run it on macworld.com. If he doesn't want it, then I'm free to post it here on my personal blog. This has worked out quite well over my first 18 months with Macworld, except that it turns out that nearly every idea I've had for a story has been picked up by macworld.com :). Hence the sporadic nature of the posts here on robservatory.

I had always intended that I'd publish a pointer here to any articles (outside of my thrice-weekly OS X tips column and the occasional product review) on macworld.com, as a way of providing at least some content here (as I know not everyone reads macworld.com regularly). However, despite my best intentions, I've only been moderately successful at cross-referencing...so I decided to finally get serious about it this weekend.

After a bunch of copy-and-paste work between robservatory and macworld, I think I'm finally caught up. I've created a new category here to track my macworld.com posting activities. Somewhat obviously, I've named the new category Macworld, and you can see all 31 entries by simply clicking on Macworld in the category list--or just click here if you want to save the mouse travel.

Having now gone through this painful exercise, I promise I will be more diligent about immediately updating robservatory whenever something of mine hits the Editor's Notes blog section over on macworld.com.