Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Alright, I give up, what day is it again?
The most hectic spans of your life can be defined by the number of times you find yourself asking yourself which day of the week it is, and not being able to answer it. In the past four days, I believe I've set a personal record in that regard. Today was supposed to my wind-down day, in which I regained my bearings and settled back into doing such normal tasks as, let's say, checking my email and sleeping in my own bed. But it just wasn't meant to be. Today alone, I've been in two different Apple Stores for two different reasons, been to CompUSA for something that had no connection to today's Keynote, spoke with two different CompUSA Apple Reps (not at a CompUSA, but at an Apple Store, during today's Keynote), set up a cross-platform DSL-based wireless home network (but not at my home), and walked past a still-under-construction future Apple Store (for reasons that had nothing to do with today's Keynote, or with Apple for that matter). I didn't even have time to appreciate the irony of the fact that while I was walking past this store and wishing I had the cajones to open the construction door and peek inside to see just how close this Boca Raton store was to being ready to open, a construction employee approached with an armload of supplies and asked me to open the door for him (giving me a full view of a nearly-complete showroom).
So it should have come as no surprise to me at all that Steve's WWDC Keynote today scrambled the current state of the Mac platform as much as the past four days have scrambled my brain. Safari has finally reached version 1.0, but now iChat is beta. There's a new Finder redesign that screams, "why didn't someone think of all this ten years ago?". Changing among user accounts has been reduced to all the complexity of a Keynote transition. The G5 specs posted on apple.com last week were real after all, and Steve actually made a joke out of it. And I'll never be able to so much as eat at a Longhorn Steakhouse again without being reminded of the other joke Steve made today, the one about the, ahem, next version of Windows.
There's a new PowerMac in town with nine fans and a wafer that's wafter-thin. Something about Al Gore. Several geeks who showed off their geek vocabulary, and one who was quite proud of the three billion that his company spent on a plant. I hope he was referrring to a factory variety, and not the potted variety. At one point, Steve Jobs may or may not have been opening negotiations with the French. Either that, or he bought the Eiffel Tower for $149 and designated it as an "iSight". Apple and Adobe pretended to be friends again. Apple and IBM have apparently had a thing going on longer than they were letting on. Apple and Microsoft are acting like old friends who tried being roommates, found out it wasn't such a good idea and tried to cut their losses, but now can't quite get rid of each other. Videoconferencing is finally real, but the notion that your home directory needed to be four layers down the hierarchy seems to have been a myth all along. Or maybe it was Al Gore who was negotiating with the French?
In all seriousness, today's announcements cranked the "Oh my God" factor back up to eleven on the amplifier, but I need to sleep on them before I can put them in perspective. I'll see if I can't give the whole "serious writing" thing a whirl tomorrow. My brain is as scrambled as that poor PC that choked to death during today's speed trials.
But tomorrow is, indeed, another day. Wait, what day is it again?
The most hectic spans of your life can be defined by the number of times you find yourself asking yourself which day of the week it is, and not being able to answer it. In the past four days, I believe I've set a personal record in that regard. Today was supposed to my wind-down day, in which I regained my bearings and settled back into doing such normal tasks as, let's say, checking my email and sleeping in my own bed. But it just wasn't meant to be. Today alone, I've been in two different Apple Stores for two different reasons, been to CompUSA for something that had no connection to today's Keynote, spoke with two different CompUSA Apple Reps (not at a CompUSA, but at an Apple Store, during today's Keynote), set up a cross-platform DSL-based wireless home network (but not at my home), and walked past a still-under-construction future Apple Store (for reasons that had nothing to do with today's Keynote, or with Apple for that matter). I didn't even have time to appreciate the irony of the fact that while I was walking past this store and wishing I had the cajones to open the construction door and peek inside to see just how close this Boca Raton store was to being ready to open, a construction employee approached with an armload of supplies and asked me to open the door for him (giving me a full view of a nearly-complete showroom).
So it should have come as no surprise to me at all that Steve's WWDC Keynote today scrambled the current state of the Mac platform as much as the past four days have scrambled my brain. Safari has finally reached version 1.0, but now iChat is beta. There's a new Finder redesign that screams, "why didn't someone think of all this ten years ago?". Changing among user accounts has been reduced to all the complexity of a Keynote transition. The G5 specs posted on apple.com last week were real after all, and Steve actually made a joke out of it. And I'll never be able to so much as eat at a Longhorn Steakhouse again without being reminded of the other joke Steve made today, the one about the, ahem, next version of Windows.
There's a new PowerMac in town with nine fans and a wafer that's wafter-thin. Something about Al Gore. Several geeks who showed off their geek vocabulary, and one who was quite proud of the three billion that his company spent on a plant. I hope he was referrring to a factory variety, and not the potted variety. At one point, Steve Jobs may or may not have been opening negotiations with the French. Either that, or he bought the Eiffel Tower for $149 and designated it as an "iSight". Apple and Adobe pretended to be friends again. Apple and IBM have apparently had a thing going on longer than they were letting on. Apple and Microsoft are acting like old friends who tried being roommates, found out it wasn't such a good idea and tried to cut their losses, but now can't quite get rid of each other. Videoconferencing is finally real, but the notion that your home directory needed to be four layers down the hierarchy seems to have been a myth all along. Or maybe it was Al Gore who was negotiating with the French?
In all seriousness, today's announcements cranked the "Oh my God" factor back up to eleven on the amplifier, but I need to sleep on them before I can put them in perspective. I'll see if I can't give the whole "serious writing" thing a whirl tomorrow. My brain is as scrambled as that poor PC that choked to death during today's speed trials.
But tomorrow is, indeed, another day. Wait, what day is it again?
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