I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. The big bright shiny iMac is calling my name. The screen is so big and bright. I can picture it filled with photoshop and firefox and textWrangler ALL ON THE SCREEN AT THE SAME TIME! I can imagine testing a website on 4 different browsers at once. It is not the 12″ screen I know and usually love. Just one more day of being surrounded by hundreds of them. I will miss that.
I have a new favorite widget. Panda Cam is a widget from the San Diego Zoo. It is a live camera feed to the pandas, with options to switch to elephants, polar bears, and orangutans. When the pandas are around, the camera sometimes follows them. At night it is dark, and day or night, it is not very exciting if the animals aren’t around. When they are in front of the camera, it is way cool! This morning I got to watch a zoo employee change a garbage bag. Not very exciting, but about an hour later, I got to watch two pandas playing. It is an excellent diversion if you suddenly need a moment to clear your brain.
My brain is fried. Deep crispy fried. But I will do it again tomorrow and probably Friday. Macworld is a combination of my best dream and my worst nightmare. Techies and geeks everywhere. State of the art computers. Endless cool hardware and software. Some of the best product design that there is. And… Wall to wall crowds. Sounds from every direction. Colors. Lights. Stuff. People. People people people people people. And so many sounds! Everywhere. There was more good than bad by a long shot, but it drains my energy completely.
Root picked me up and we took BART into SF. A relatively quick stop at the apple store. No new macs yet. We played with iLife ’06 on a new 20″ iMac at the expo for at least an hour. I saw the future. It was the future as it looked in my past happening in the present. It was the Jetsons. Video conferencing made easy. Excellent quality even at full screen. Click on the little video icon and you are talking to someone on another continent like they were in the same room.
The new iApps are fun! Just like Steve Jobs did in the demo, me and root made a cool dvd in minutes and a web site in another few minutes, complete with blog, podcast page, rss feed, and photo gallery with a subscription link for photocasts. Click a button to see all of your media; photos, movies, audio. Drag it into your movie, dvd, web page. Type. One click publishing if you use .mac. Done. I swear that apple isn’t paying me for this. It all really IS that cool! It is creative computing for the masses. It is easy and fun. I am still not sure how some things work if you don’t have a .mac account.
So much stuff. Endless. Overwhelming. I can’t wait until tomorrow 
This morning I woke up at 5am because I was too excited to sleep. The rest of the dreamweaver power tools was better than I could have even imagined. I learned ALL of the things that I have never been able to understand about using PHP and accessing MySQL databases in dreamweaver.
Today, I will finally get to see the expo. I am still resisting the iMac, but it is not easy. I will get to play with them and the MacBooks at the expo. There are all kinds of fun things going on for the next few days. Lots of free workshops and demonstrations.
My brain keeps compiling a list of mostly ridiculous reasons why it would be good to get an iMac. There are many. There is only one reason not to, but since that reason is money, it is a hard list to balance. Thanks to the magic of credit cards, there is a pretty good chance (80%) that the iMac will win.
The list so far:
Steve Jobs is a marketing genius, and I am an easy target. Time to go the expo now.
No doubt that Steve Jobs is an excellent speaker who can make people excited about something even if they don’t even want it. I have very little interest in having an ipod, but was completely captivated by the ipod video demo. Of course watching the video on a very magnified ipod on a giant screen looks much more impressive than if had been on an actual ipod. It just kept getting better after that…
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It is only the first day, and I am already having a great time at macworld. The expo doesn’t even start until tomorrow. The keynote is tomorrow at 9.
Day 1 of the dreamweaver power tools conference was great; even better than I was expecting. Dave McFarland (the guy that wrote the ‘missing manuals’ for the last few versions of dreamweaver) was running the presentation. He is a good speaker; very knowledgeable, interesting, entertaining, and flexible.
This conference is geared towards intermediate dw users, and I was afraid the level of the first day sessions would be too basic, but for the most part, I was wrong. I even enjoyed hearing about things that I am very familiar with, like CSS.
The way Mr. McFarland explained CSS to the people who were new to it, made me excited all over again about css. It’s great! I am a web geek, and would happily praise css to anyone who will listen, but in my usual life, most people I come across do not know or care about css.
I ended up learning much more than I thought I would. I still think it may be faster and easier to hand code basic page styles than to click through the dw menus and dialog boxes, but once the stylesheet starts getting longer and more complicated, I can see where using the new CSS tools in DW8 can save gigantic amounts of time, and make things much less confusing than trying to muddle through a giant css file looking for the cause of a style over-ride problem, or even just all the CSS that is relevant to a particular element or selection.
I was going to write more, but it is already the 2nd day and I must write about the keynote now.
If anyone has ever wondered what I am doing when I am ‘geeking out’…
List of famous failures in science and engineering
List of songs whose title constitutes the entire lyrics
I hope that 2006 will be a good year for the world and the people in it. I have been very lucky, and so far 2006 is no exception. Me and K started out the year at Bill Graham auditorium in San Francisco with Phil Lesh and Friends. It was SO GOOD! John Mayer played a set of amazing blues guitar. I know he was singing too, but it didn’t really register. I can’t even really remember what he looked like, but that boy sure can play guitar! And now… the ramble…
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Alex: WordUp! Thanks for the Tip, Lori. =) …
Lori: Hi Alex,
Glad you got it working :) Didn't notice that yo…
Alex: Hey Lori,
Thanks for the reply. That snippet didn't work fo…
Lori: You could do something like this:
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alex: How would one modify this so that you could remove post meta…
