The Core Dump

Despite the whole brouhaha about Apple’s switch from .Mac to MobileMe it seems I’m in the mostly-snag-free minority. Which is good.

But there’s one teensy detail it seems the UI wizards at Apple have overlooked, namely the MobileMe preference pane. My account just happened to renew the other day, and here’s what the preference pane had to say:

I don’t know, but maybe somebody could put the Greed-O-Matic in neutral and put in some kind of conditional text there? Like, say, if you have more than 360 days left on your yearly account, it could say something like, “Thanks for renewing.”

I nag because I care.

Writing this in a hotel room in San Francisco, where the 2008 Macworld Expo is underway. Ah, San Francisco. I will admit I was a bit worried about the state of the crazies, panhandlers, and bums in this fair city—had they disappeared since last I was here?

It turns out my fears were completely unfounded—if anything, there are more of the aforementioned than I can remember seeing before, making the daily walk to the Moscone an interesting exercise in Practical Ignoring and Staring Into Middle Distance. Speaking of daily walk, I’m ensconced in the Hotel Adagio on Geary Street. It’s a nice place where everybody calls me “sir” and the Moscone is about a 15-minute walk away. Of course, I dropped $26 on breakfast this morning, so they’d better call me “sir.” (Tomorrow’s breakfast will be ingested somewhere else.)

Ah, yes, nothing like the smell of exhaust, piss, and weed in the morning to remind you you’re in San Francisco.

After attending my first and last Stevenote at last year’s WWDC I decided to be smart and sleep in, eat a leisurely and overpriced breakfast, then go back to the hotel room and load up the live blogging from the Keynote in Safari and sip some coffee. Then, after the keynote ended, it was time to head down to the Moscone.

Met a lot of draggy-looking Mac nerds shuffling off to find food on the way to the Moscone. Getting up early and standing in line can be a bit wearying, it seems.

And yes, this is me being smug…

The Expo was packed to the rafters, and fortunately there was more of a variety among the exhibitors than I had feared—the iPod cases, iPod docks, and iPod earbuds were all there, but were mercifully in the minority. Apple’s setup, as one would imagine, absolutely dominated the showroom floor. Can’t blame Apple for a lack of sense about visual appeal.

All in all, a nice, mellow day. Tomorrow should be much more hectic.

Oh, and yeah, as a card-carrying Apple nerd, I should probably mention something about the announcements at the keynote: Played (briefly—holy jeebus the crowds) with a MacBook Air. Nice rig. As I’m not a road warrior, though, I’m not really in the target audience. iPhone and iPod Touch, nice updates. The winner for me is the Apple TV—I’m buying one as soon as the $229 model hits the stores.

Time Capsule has a nice name and could be a good product for some people, but it’s beyond lame the functionality of the device can’t be achieved with an Airport Extreme N and a USB drive. Seriously strange and disappointing.

Onward and upward.

Or, the morally instructive tale of one man’s first and last Stevenote.

The day started at 5:50 a.m., when it was time to rise and shine in order to go revel in the Reality Distortion Field.

But first the most important meal of the day. Ingested some continental breakfast at the hotel and was flabbergasted to find that no, it was not complimentary, but instead cost $16. Seriously, $16 for coffee and a bagel? Do they ship it over the bay on Larry Ellison’s yacht?

Made it to the Moscone a little before 7 o’clock and was gobsmacked to see the line stretch literally halfway around the block. It was complete with panhandlers and That Nerd with the piercing voice who could not be made to shut up and who kept pestering everybody around him with his misunderstood greatness and the underestimated technological wonders he had brought an uncaring world.

The doors opened and we shuffled into Moscone, a sad parade of excited nerds. And then the line stopped. And then the line started. And stopped. Etc. There were way too many nerds in too little space. Sticky sweatiness.

Zombies or nerds waiting for the keynote? You be the judge.

Then the keynote. It was great to see it live in the flesh, although it was obviously not one of Steve’s greatest showings.

I’m not going to talk too much about the contents of the keynote, since the whole Internet is already aflutter with reading the entrails and consumed with holy anger about the lack of an iPhone SDK.

Apart from the content of this particular keynote itself, the star of the show was of course the keynote itself and the presence of the Holy Steve. Ah, the basking.

Yes, the basking. Get up early, stand in line for three hours in claustrophobic corridors with a bunch of people who need remedial lessons in personal hygiene, and all to behold something that is being live-blogged on the Internet and then streamed for anybody to see in the comfort of their favorite chairs later in the day.

I’m not saying it wasn’t cool; I’m just saying the next time I voluntarily stand in line for three hours, there had better be the best food or the best sex of my entire existence at the end of that line. Or both.

Spent some time upgrading zer blog to the hot-off-the-press WordPress 2.1. Massive kudos to the WordPress theme for creating a platform that is so easy to muck with.

When coupled with the deliciousness that is MacFUSE, the upgrade was eerily close to pleasant. (Please don’t give me a wedgie.)

Thanks to both the WordPress and Google crews for Making Computers Suck Less.

Soundtrack: Ethel on XM Satellite

The MacWorld Expo 2007 keynote is over, and for the first time in years, there is nothing to lust after.

Sure, the Apple TV looks nice, but if you rock it ghetto-style with a non-HD TV, you can’t play in that sandbox. Perhaps after the altar of stupidity in the house has been upgraded…

The iPhone sure seems like a sweet little piece of tech, but it can’t beat the RAZR I have from work on one important count: The RAZR costs me $0.00. And since I already have a Nano and absolutely love the form factor and that I can carry it on a lanyard, the fires of techno-lust are smothered and quenched.

At least now all the iPhone speculation can stop taking up space on the Internet, so that’s something.

Come on, Steve, talk dirty to me about Leopard…

Soundtrack: The System on XM Satellite

Most of my email accounts are mercifully low-spam, including the .Mac account that’s been the center of my online world since way back when it was a wee little free iTools account.

For the last few months, though, several spams a day have crept through whatever filtering Apple is doing … stock spam. Or rather, image files with stock spam. According to this USA Today article, image spam is increasing in volume and confounding spam filters all around the InterTubes.

To add to the annoyance, Mail.app’s heuristic spam filtering also turns a blind eye to this new leech on the scrotum of civilization.

Bastards.

Bought myself a $29 T-shirt today. Actually, it’s a T-shirt and one year of sponsorship for Daring Fireball. Figured that since John Gruber is about the only Mac commentator who’s actually worth reading, and since he had the cojones to quit his day job to produce the site full-time, the man should be encouraged.

Daring Fireball is kind of like NPR in that it provides an oasis of sanity in a waste land of gibbering monkeys, and so just like NPR, it’s worth paying to keep it going.

And let’s face it, anybody who can make you laugh reading about the woes of an anthropomorphized brushed metal interface deserves some cold, hard cash.

Best of luck, John.

Soundtrack: “Cut” by Plumb

The Intel Mini arrived today. You know, people can chart and graph benchmarks all they want—when you go from a dual-gig Windtunnel to a Dual Core, things become pretty damn impressively Snappy™.

So here goes my mini-review after about an hour of poking the Intel Mini: “OMFG ITS TEH R0X0RING SNAPPY!!!1 LOL.”

It’s probably a good thing I’m easily amused…

Update: After logging some quality Mini time, two more impressions:

• Rosetta is the enemy of the snappy. Neither Ecto nor NetNewsWire, the two non-Apple applications I probably use the most on a home computer, have been Intelified, and they both feel like they are running on a mid-level G4 chip. Rosetta is a tour de force of technology, but you very much do feel the difference.

• Sitting three feet from your computer with a remote control paging through your iTunes library with Front Row is, for a few minutes at least, oddly compelling.

Soundtrack: “House of Sorrows” by Funker Vogt

Turns out that Linksys is also joining in Make Steve Richer Day.

The Linksys WRT-54G—a crown for the marketer who thought up that name, a crown, I say—has decided that this whole providing a wireless signal for other devices to connect to is a way too bourgeoisie endeavor for it, and it is now pursuing a career in performance art. Or something. It’s certainly not putting out a radio signal.

Cue Darth Vader voice: You have failed me for the last time, Linksys.

At this point the AirPort Express that has allowed effortless streaming of iTunes music to the stereo in the living room is standing in the for the Linksys unit that is off somewhere finding itself.

It is time to make Steve richer by buying a second AirPort Express.

How are you making Steve richer today?

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad

People of Earth: It’s time we all come together as one to make sure Steve Jobs gets richer.

To this end, I have ordered myself a Mac Mini. Dual Core with the RAM maxed out, natch. Still thinking about a name for the little beastie, but if I continue my tradition of naming my computers after people and things in William Gibson novels, it will probably be dubbed Ashpool.

So, look in the mirror and ask yourself, “What have I done for Steve today?”

Soundtrack: “Can I keep him?” by Marit Bergman