note: raw notes scribbled during the keynote. these will be edited and reposted at some point in the near future.
update: changed my mind. too tired to edit. i will just add the photo and the ‘read more’ link, fix the typos, and leave the ramble as is. To skip the ramble and view the actual keynote, click here.
I am at Moscone Center. Just got my badge for macworld. No lines today. Exept for food! There are endless lines at the 2 food stands. The power tools conferences must have just broken for lunch when I got here and the food stands were just opening. It is a good time not to be hungry. Nothing going on here today besides from registration and the first round of power tools conferences. Even though I am not signed up for any of those, I thought i would take advantage of the free wireless while I am here.
Work has been very busy lately. I have one very big job, and possibly several other smaller jobs coming up. I am hoping to be able to partner with d. We will try a test run with one of the smaller jobs. We have almost completely opposite skills and completely opposite ways of working. I think that is a good thing. She is very organized about the initial process of signing up a client, including managing expectations, writing contracts, and charging realistic prices based on actual time worked, rather than pulling some random number out of the air like I tend to do. She is also skilled at graphic design and has experience making web sites. If I had my way, I would stick to the (x)html/css and back end coding for the site and do technical support for the client after the site is complete. I would leave the business stuff, front end design, and client management to someone else. Could be a match made in heaven if we can somehow merge our oppositeness into a working business.
It is getting harder to keep up with school. The ‘side-effect’ of feeling better lately is that I have lost the super-focus that I was having when I was undermedicated. I have also been very twitchy and shaky which is quite annoying. It is a strange balance. It is still hard for me to get out, but not as hard as before. The main difference is that I am not completely exhausted like before. I can do a wider range of things, but am back to having a one second attention span. Going to see the doc on wednesday, but not sure if I am ready to continue experimenting with new meds and/or doses and timing of meds.
I am tired of waiting and waiting to find the right combination of drugs and going through long periods of terrible side-effects until the next drug or dose kicks in. I will probably keep experimenting, but am thinking of taking a break for a while and going back to figuring out ways to make myself feel better even when things aren’t so good. It has been very hard to do that while continuously messing with my meds, and I am hoping that taking a break will help, at least in the way of keeping things stable for a while. One of my best skills is adapting to life under less than ideal circumstances. It is impossible to adapt to something that keeps changing.
Some of my favorite mac freeware * Adium – multi-protocol instant messaging client Butler – application launcher with many other handy features Camino – mac-like gecko browser. not as many features as firefox, but faster. ClamAV – Antivirus program, because you just never know… Colloquy – GUI IRC client ColorTagGen – Use the eyedropper to …
I have read the mixed reviews. I have looked at the insanely redundant (yet CSS based) code. I have pointed and clicked my way to a pretty cool website! It is definitely worth the $79 price tag, especially considering that the price includes the entire iLife ’06 suite! (iLife also includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band)
This is not a professional web design/development application, and anyone who is looking for that will not be happy with it. Design options are limited in many ways. Programming options are limited to what is built in. Generated source code is mostly lots of divs with tons of repetitive inline styling and NO semantic markup. If you need a pro wysiwyg web app, Dreamweaver 8 is the way to go.
It got here yesterday. 20″ imac
2.0GHz intel core duo. 1GB PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2 memory. It’s fast! The screen is huge! Almost all programs are running fine and in most cases way faster than on my 1.33GHz/768MB G4 12″ powerbook. Firefox is running slow. Safari is crazy fast! Only problems so far are with unsanity haxies, and some mail rules confusion.
I transferred my user accounts from my pb, but am doing the rest manually. I made a web page with pix of the big exciting transfer, complete with slideshow, in about 5 minutes with iWeb. Drag, drop, type, publish.
I made a much better slideshow with transitions (the obligatory ken burns effect) and music in iPhoto in about 10 minutes. Syncing w/.mac is working really well to keep mail, calendar, contacts, bookmarks, etc. up to date on both macs. It is automatic. I don’t even have to think about it at all. Life is good. I am very lucky : )
Macworld is over. I am sad even though I really don’t think I have enough energy for another day there. Maybe another half day… The last day of the expo is cool because everyone is trying to get rid of their stuff so they don’t have to lug it back with them, so there are …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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…
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 …
Today is 05/05/05. Cool!
Today is also my first day w/Tiger. So far, so good. Very smooth upgrade, even though I chose the ‘erase and install’ option. I transferred my user settings and apps from my panther clone on an external firewire drive after installing. Next time, I would install the apps manually afterwards, but truth be told, I was too excited, and didn’t feel like dealing with it. I had already found tiger compatible updates for most apps before the install. Only problem was virex, which i knew wouldn’t work; and I had to get update for sidetrack. I hated not having it, even for the 1/2 hour that it was gone.
Widgets are pretty cool. I downloaded one that is a rubik’s cube for the desktop, one for easy uploads to flickr, one that makes a user defined slideshow from flickr, jiwire hotspot finder, wikipedia lookup, and a color picker. I liked the included weather, dictionary, calculator, unit converter, translator, flight tracker, and tiger tile game, but have not yet figured out how to type on the sticky note.
Spotlight rocks as hard as they promised it would, and as of now, I have retired my ever faithful copy of Quicksilver application launcher. Safari RSS reader is WAY better than anything I was expecting! I’ve still been using netnewswire for subscribed feeds, but I’m using safari for viewing feeds that i click on.
I am SO excited for automator, but haven’t had time to play yet. Also haven’t tried new mail, ical, or address book yet. I wonder if they can sway me from Entourage…
Side Track is a replacement driver for apple ibooks and powerbooks. It adds much needed functionality to the apple trackpad. Coming from the 5 button scrolling mouse on the pc, I was very frustrated with the trackpad on my powerbook. The worst thing was that if I set the trackpad for ‘tap to click’, and …
Smell-o-mints is a very fun, free mac program. It is a periodic table of the elements. You can click on each element in the table for more information, and if you want more in-depth info, you can click a link and go directly to that elements wikipedia page.
I will miss it. A sea of ibooks, powerbooks, clamshells, and even a few pcs. Geeks everywhere. More information than it is possible to process in 5 days. Hardware, software, lots of pens. Tiny hard drives. Tiny macs. Tiny ipods. G5s everywhere. Free magazines. Even a hacky sack. I will miss it.
Wil Wheaton was excellent. He told the story about his first mac, the TI he had before that, frustration w/macs and a trip to the pc dark side, a trip to linuxland, and then back to mac. He is a geek. So am I. AppleScripting the iApps was very interesting. Learned some cool stuff, but …
I am at MacWorld, day 4. So far it has been a blast even though I am completely worn out. Been doing mostly os x and applescript stuff, w/a short break for some photoshop tips. It is great to get to learn so much. Keynote was kind of boring. Tiger, tiger, spotlight, blah blah, ipod …
Got a 12″ PowerBook G4 today. I feel like a novice. I didn’t even know how to shut it down or resize windows. Luckily K used to have a mac!
