Our news media is already difficult to follow when you’re listening to it normally, but what if you’re watching it somewhere without any kind of volume, voice, or sound for context. Then you get this hilarious result, which was exemplified by The Daily Show in this awesome sketch called News at the Gym.
Tags: funny, gym, Jason Jones, Jon Stewart, media, News, The Daily Show, Video
If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.
Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.
As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.
However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.
I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.
I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.
There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.
However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.
Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info
Hallelujah my prayers and feedback comments from the last eighteen months have FINALLY been answered! Google has just launched IMAP access for Gmail, bringing the revolutionary service into the 21st century, finally, and I’m just so excited that at last I’ll be able to enjoy fully synced up access between the Gmail web interface and my Mail client. I am happy happy happy! 
Only one problem now. I’ve still got 113 message in my Mail.app account, and if I end up replacing the POP sign in with the IMAP sign in, what will happen to all my old e-mails? Hmm, I’ll have to figure this one out after I get back from Long Beach…
UPDATE 10/28: I’m going to have to take all of that back. Gmail’s IMAP integration is rather clunky and ended up causing more problems than it solved. I’m back to using Gmail POP, which I’ve kind of gotten used to.
Tags: announcements, excitement, Gmail, Google, IMAP, Mail, News, prayers
Jon Stewart is awesome. I will never understand why a silly show like this can actually find and report the actual news of what’s going on while the rest of the US media acts like a big propaganda machine, but this clip of Jon Stewart covering Dave Petraeus’ Iraq Report has to be the best Daily Show clip I’ve ever seen.
Tags: Daily Show, Dave Petraeus, funny, Iraq, Jon Stewart, media, News, Video, YouTube
Most experienced internet users will tell you that if you really want to harness the power and purpose of RSS newsfeeds, little browser add-ons like Safari’s RSS viewer, Internet Explorer’s RSS viewer, and even Firefox’s live bookmarks aren’t the way to cut it. The real purpose of RSS is to serve as a “lite” version of a website’s regularly-updated (syndicated) content so that feed readers can regularly check the RSS feed for updates while being quick and light on bandwidth. To really harness the power of RSS newsfeeds, you need a dedicated feed reader.
NewsGator’s NetNewsWire seems to be the most recognized feed reader for Mac OS X. I personally haven’t had the opportunity to use it since the older NetNewsWire version 2, which was pretty clunky. NetNewsWire 3 looks a bit better, and in fact, many of the new features and much of the new interface in NetNewsWire 3 comes very much from my personal feed reader of choice, NewsFire.
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Well, if you know me, you know that I enter various stuff at the San Mateo County Fair every year, and if I recall correctly, this is my 10th year to enter. However, this is the first time where I actually found out what I won before I went to go see it for myself, but sure enough, the San Jose Mercury News apparently reported on one of the brand new divisions this year: Website Design. There were three award-winning entries in the new division, two of which were mine. At least someone else did enter, when I had called the County Fair office a month ago to ask for entry details for websites, I got a “That’s the first time that question has been asked!” response, which got me worried that I would be the only one entering.
Anyway, congratulations to Taylor Hansford who does the website for Pacifica 4-H (it’s the county fair, after all!) and won 1st place. My own Webmacster87.info won the red ribbon, and the 17th District PTA Website, which I maintain and entered under the class “Website for a Business or Organization”, took third.
Thanks, by the way, goes to Larry and Anthony who sent me the link and asked me “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I haven’t been to the fair yet, so honestly, I had no idea that I’d won until they sent me the link.
There are some things slightly ironic about the San Jose Mercury News article. For one thing, San Jose isn’t part of San Mateo County, but I’ll let that slide since our fair is open to all the neighboring counties as well. However, they said that “Neither boys were available for interviews.” Besides that being bad grammar, I wasn’t even at the fair today, so of course I wasn’t “available” for an interview! 
The article also claims that they were looking for me and the other kid in the livestock section. I can’t speak for Taylor, but I’m not part of 4-H and don’t spend very much time in the livestock section. I might spend 5-10 minutes in there during the fair to look, but I don’t exactly hang around there waiting to be interviewed, if you know what I mean. 
Now, I did get a phone call today from the fair saying that the San Mateo County Times wanted to interview me, albeit about my being a judge for a contest in the Culinary Arts division, but they have setup a time to meet me there at 4:30 PM on Monday. So, San Jose Mercury News, if you’d like to say hi to me, I’ll be there on Monday willing to answer questions.
Anyway, I am glad that my websites received the recognition from the judges (hopefully they didn’t try to view this website in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t work that well), and I’m glad to have helped the San Mateo County Fair get their technology entries going. Who knows? Maybe next year they’ll have a division for best podcast. Stay tuned next week when I’ll post a full list of everything I entered this year and how well I did!
Tags: Awards, Bay Area, Blogging, event, interview, News, Personal, PTA, San Mateo County Fair, Technology, web design
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