Megabytes

I wrote a report on Civil Rights when I was a freshman in high school. The year was 1972. The Civil Rights Act had been passed less than a decade before. New Hampshire College’s commencement speaker that year was Julian Bond, founding member of SNCC, founder of Southern Poverty Law Center, and elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives.
Wouldn’t it be cool if I could interview Mr. Bond for my school report? Luckily, my father was the Academic Dean at NHC (now Southern NH University) and was able to arrange for me to talk with Mr. Bond after the graduation ceremony!
It was exciting to meet him. I don’t remember what questions I asked, but I did quote him heavily in my report. All of my other footnotes referenced books, magazines and encyclopedia articles. Then there was this footnote: Interview with Mr. Julian Bond, at New Hampshire College, May, 1972.
This is a fond and special memory from my youth. Now I will have the opportunity to hear him speak again.
Reed College is promoting a series of events in celebration of Black History Month. This Friday, Feb. 2, Julian Bond will be speaking. His topic is “Civil Rights: In the Day, Today, and Tomorrow.” It’s free and open to the public.

Technorati Tags: Julian Bond

I will be sharing my first-time MacWorld experience with my local user group (PMUG) at our Feb. 12 meeting, providing more detail than this simple list below. For those local readers, this will whet your appetite. Other readers, I will post the complete article on Feb. 13.

My reasons for looking forward to next January’s MacWorld are:
10) It’s held in San Francisco
9) Get free stuff
8) Meet Mac celebrities
7) Compare products from multiple vendors
6) Meet developers of your fave apps
5) Receive first-hand experience of products’ attributes
4) The Apple consultants booth
3) See/touch/taste latest Apple products
2) MacWorld Live! with David Pogue
1) Learn new skills at free workshops

And here are my links for most of the places, people, and organizations I mention:
Les Joulins Jazz Bistro
Hotel Union Square
BART
Lefty O’Doul’s
Parallels Desktop
MacWorld magazine
Mac | Life magazine
Mac Tank
Blondies Pizza
Quark
MacUpDate
Christopher Breen
Tonya Engst
stm bags
Higher Ground Gear
MacHeist
Disco
PhotoRecovery
Apple Consultants Network
Apple
MacWorld Live!
FotoMagico

Technorati Tags: macworld

I’ve experienced about a day and a half of MacWorld and thought it is time to share some of my impressions and thoughts, however disorganized they may be.

David Pogue

Wednesday morning, I went to David Pogue’s talk show, MacWorld Live. Kind of a Letterman meets Mac fanatics. David is an entertaining man who talks about Macs and the people who use them. He created a television show for the Discovery Channel that will air in February, “It’s All Geek To Me.” He shared with us his ‘Not Coming Up Next…’ segments (instead of ‘Coming up next…’). These 20-30 second spots are geeky comedy sketches that the producers will not air as they felt the television-viewing audience would not get them! Too bad. They are hilarious.

David had three guests: JF Doucet, musical director for the Cirque du Soleil show, “O”; Phill Ryu, creator of the MyDreamApp contest and the MacHeist Bundle; and a fellow whose name I missed, from Space Adventures.

Disco Developers

Later, I met the developers of Disco, a disk burning app (watch for a review from me coming soon), Jasper Hauser and Austin Sarner. Disco was one of the apps contained in the MacHeist Bundle that I wrote about recently. I asked them about John Gruber’s assertion that the developers got ripped off by the MacHeist folks. Jasper said that they got a lot of visibility from the promotion. The bundle had the intended effect of bringing their app to a wider audience. “We definitely noticed a spike in sales after the promotion,” Austin agreed.

User Group Lounge

I spent a couple of hours in the User Group Lounge. This is a small meeting room with some organized presentations and other hours just open to networking. Among the speakers I heard there: Dave Marra, Apple Senior Engineer; Adam and Tonya Engst, Editors of TidBITS and Take Control Ebooks; Chuck Joiner, Editor of The MUG Center; and Christoper Breen, Senior Editor of Macworld magazine. This was a great venue to meet some folks in an informal chat.

Photos Saved!

The smart media card on my Olympus digital camera became corrupted mid-day. I had taken almost a dozen pictures that I thought were lost. Then I went to the friendly folks at the PhotoRecovery booth. Ray was able to recover all 11 images from my card and put them on my thumb drive for later downloading to my laptop. He was very helpful, suggesting that my AA rechargeable batteries were running out of juice in the midst of writing to the image storage card, thus corrupting it. I changed to a fresh set of non-rechargeable AAs and the images appeared back on my previously corrupted card! Thanks, guys!

Late in the day, I perused many booths and checked out lots of cool apps and devices. I didn’t know you could play games on an iPod. I played sudoku.

While not a MacWorld experience, another highlight of my day was finding a little jazz club for dinner. My fellow traveler, Brad, and I had a fine dinner at Les Joulins and listened to the Charles Unger Experience. Unger is a fine tenor sax player and accompanied by a talented bassist, drummer and pianist.

Mozilla Firefox is my browser of choice. As a website developer, I need a browser that displays CSS in a most standards compliant manner. Firefox renders web pages the most properly of all the browsers.

There are some great add-ons and plug-ins for Firefox. One of my latest discoveries is the Cooliris Previews. This little gem has a small footprint - a 15×15 pixel icon in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. When it is enabled, the icon is a blue checkmark; when it is disabled, the icon is a red X.

What does it do? Hover your cursor over a text link and a preview window of the underlying content pops up. You can see if you really want to go to that link or not. No more back and forth, trying to save the page you’re on. Preview where you might go! And once the preview is up, you can preview links in the preview!

One of the best uses is on a Google/Yahoo search result list. You can customize how and when you want the preview window to pop up.

I’ll be attending my first ever MacWorld Conference and Expo next week in San Francisco. To prep, I’ve downloaded the floor plans of the exhibitors hall, printed them and marked booths I want to make sure and visit.

I’ll miss Steve Jobs’ keynote speech. As a matter of fact, I’ll be flying into SF during his presentation. However, I expect it will be posted online in a number of spots soon after. Last year, I took part in a chat during the speech, with people reporting from inside the hall.

Some MacWorld veterans have told me the Expo is enormous, easy to get lost in. Others told me it is overstimulating; too much to look at and take in. Hence the need for a plan.

Besides visiting booths and drooling over the latest gadgets, apps, and accessories, I’ll be reporting back to my user group in Oregon.

Newly-downloaded widget above shows 6 and a half days to go as of this post.