Yep, the day that I’m off to Los Angeles. Within an hour I’ll be in the car going over to SFO, hoping and praying that I’m not on the “No-Fly List” yet. I will be bringing my laptop and doing my best to keep my Twitter up to date whenever I can get hold of wifi.

Beyond that, see you all later!

Well, I don’t know why I’m saying “Let’s” because I’m going by myself. But yep, Saturday I’ll be going down to Los Angeles and coming back, all on the same day.

Why am I doing this you ask? Well, let’s flashback a bit. As you may or may not know, I volunteer a lot for the PTA and advocate in the area of student involvement, I’m the president/founder of my school’s Peace Club, etc. My parents are teachers, and so about 2 months ago my dad got an e-mail from the California Teachers Association saying that the CTA Peace & Justice Caucus were accepting nominations for their annual Youth Activism award. My mom mentioned it to me, and I shrugged it off, thinking that I haven’t really done much, yadda yadda, and that was the last I heard of that.

Well, it seems that behind my back, my parents got a number of people who I’ve worked with to write letters recommending me for the award, and they sent that in. So, on December 30th, my parents got a phone call, and told me “Hey Douglas, you’re going to Los Angeles!” And I looked at them like they were crazy. Well, it seems that I actually won that award, and on the 27th will be going down to the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles to receive the award at a ceremony at 5 PM. I was in a state of shock for a few days, but I’ve now accepted that I won, except I don’t trust my parents as much anymore.
Unfortunately, education is poorly funded in California, and teachers are poor, so they only had $200 to offer for paying my way down there. So I’m going alone. I will be taking American Airlines, simply because they were the cheapest of the airlines available and the only one who was operating a flight leaving LAX to SFO after 7 PM. I’ll be leaving early in the morning on flight 1558, departing SFO at around 9:25 AM and arriving at LAX around 10:50, catching a Super Shuttle down to the hotel, and then probably hanging out, getting lunch, walk around, who knows. Then after the ceremony, I’m busting right outside to be Super Shuttled back to LAX, then catching flight 7134 leaving at 9:07 PM and arriving back at SFO at 10:30 PM, and that’s my Saturday.

Of course, I’ll have my laptop along, and if I find any wifi and decide to pop online, you may find me. Hard to keep Twitter updated because I have no mobile phone (that really works), but meh, we’ll see. And the camera. Oh yes, that will be along, although I don’t know if I’ll have a lot of pictars to put on Flickr, but we’ll see how I do.

Anyway, that’s my Saturday! Of course, there’s some other fun things going on this weekend on TalkShoe. Tomorrow, I’m interviewing wGEric from phpBB.com on phpBB Weekly, and then Sunday is our LIVE episode of PreviewCast. Stay tuned!

Maybe this is a totally crazy idea, but I’m challenging listeners to my podcast to donate me enough money to purchase a new copy of Windows Vista. If enough money is donated, I will purchase and install Windows Vista and Parallels Desktop on my Mac and force myself to use Vista in full screen mode for two full weeks. Oh, the agony!

read more | digg story

Don’t ask me how, but Larry was able to get Jason Snell (Macworld) to do an e-mail interview. Check it out. Now, if I can just get Larry to invite Jason onto PreviewCast…

read more | digg story

I know this post is a bit overdue, but I’ve been slammed with a lot of homework and haven’t had a chance to get this up earlier. Sorry, boys and girls!

Well, except for a few dissappointments, Macworld was awesome! Again. I got to stay there longer this year than I did last year, because I went with a number of friends and a teacher from my school on a fully supervised, official, legal, field trip. So, instead of me going up on the train after school and getting only about an hour to trek around the expo, I got to be driven up to Macworld, and we got there at about 11:45, giving me about 5 and a half hours to roam around before going to the event at the Apple Store.
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Low temperatures are forecast to get below freezing…this is RARE for San Francisco. And so, I’ll be dressing up in layers as I do my Macworld trek this evening. Hope I won’t freeze.

Anyway, just felt like posting a small post before I’m off to Macworld today.

What can I say? Every single prediction I made turned out to be false. An iPhone. The revealing of the iTV (now either Apple TV or tv, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to write it). And no iLife or iWork updates. No .Mac updates.

You know those five stages of grief we learn about in health class? It applies to keynotes too. I’m currently in the shock/denial stage. I have just one thing to say though…

HOW IN THE UNIVERSE COULD APPLE NOT UPDATE ILIFE OR IWORK?? And the one more thing was an insignificant name change? Apple, how could you???

Update: Well, I watched the keynote, and it was okay. I remember from when the Intel announcement was made that if you think an Apple announcement is ultra-stupid, just watch the keynote. So I did, and to my surprise, I had absolutely no trouble viewing it. It went 100% smoothly, not a single hitch.

So now I’m beginning to accept the iPhone. I do agree that Apple has some great features, but I’m still not a big fan of cell phones, mostly because I hate cell phone companies. Also, I still think that the $499/$599 price tag is astronomical–and that’s WITH a 2-year contract! I don’t care if Apple can justify it, I don’t have that kind of money to pay on top of a contract. However, I think that we should all wait a while for a few revisions to pass. The features will improve and the prices will drop–after all, the iPod photo was originally $499/$599, and then 8 months later, it dropped in price to $299/$399, and then 3 months after that, the iPod nano came out at $199/$249. So I’m holding out until a lot of things improve, and I may still never get one. After all, it’s been 5 years and I’m still an iPodtheist.

I’m still upset that there was no iLife/iWork, but after seeing the keynote, I’m fairly sure that iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 will be making their online debut in a few weeks. After all, we DID see some really fancy Keynote effects during the keynote this morning (hint hint!), and Apple probably didn’t want to dilute its big news. They did that during the It’s Showtime! event–they released the Core 2 Duo iMacs a week early so that it wouldn’t get in the way of their announcement. They probably did the same thing here too. Shame I can’t take it home this week though.

And there was no One More Thing again.
Anyway, on Thursday I’ll be going up to Macworld to do extensive taping on the expo floor (I might actually get to skip some school–with permission of teachers–to do even more playing around with the Apple TV and the iPhone), and of course, taping of the Mac Podcaster’s Meetup for PreviewCast #022, to be released on Saturday. PreviewCast #023 will see me giving my full opinions on everything taking place at Macworld in a more “sane” edition of PreviewCast. So you’ve seen my initial reactions to the announcements here, I’ll be saving the rest of my Macworld stuff for the upcoming PreviewCast coverage. However, subscribers to Webmacster87.info will get to see some still images of my trips prior to the video episode release (expect them Friday evening), so stay tuned.
It’s 7:43 PM now and I haven’t touched my homework! I’m in trouble… Out.

So it seems that the 30 GB iDisk thing was a hoax. Darn shame, because I was so looking forward to it. If Apple DID do this, however, I would certainly give .Mac my money and Apple would finally become a leader in web services–.Mac is sorely in last place behind anything else.

Anyway, view the digg story to see more.

read more | digg story

What better thing to do on the night of Macworld Expo than enjoy some Macworld funnies? Here’s a few good ones brought to you by the editors on YouTube.

–Collection of Bloopers from Macworlds past

–Noah Wyle imitates Steve Jobs as he welcomes attendes to Macworld New York 1999

–Steve Jobs delivers a eulogy to Mac OS 9 at WWDC 2002

Enjoy! (And digg this…)

Yes! I have wanted a Staples Easy Button for a long time. Years and years, I’ve been trying for one. And on Friday, I finally got one of my VERY OWN! It’s so cool. You just press the big red button that says “easy” on it, and this guy says “That was easy.” I love it! And it was only $5 at Staples! And now it’s mine! MINE!

Next up? World domination. (No, I’m just kidding.)