billpalmer.net

Hmm, Apple's .Mac email is currently down. My Mail client claimed so, and webmail.mac.com confirms it. I'm pointing this out not as a complaint, but actually as a compliment; as far as I can recall, it's been at least six months since I tried to access it and found that it was not available. The best part is that in my experience over the years, when it does go down, it's generally only for a few minutes. Perhaps it's gone down at times when I wasn't online, but I'd say it's fairly impressive nonetheless.

When people using "free" email accounts ask me why I continue to pay $99 a year for .Mac, I ask them about the problems they've had with email over the past year, and if they might not be willing pay eight bucks a months to essentially make them go away. And then there's the whole thing about having to change your email address each time you change service providers, or each time your service provider gets bought out by another company. No thanks. Email isn't all that important to a lot of people, but it's certainly worth eight dollars a month to me to ensure an essentially trouble-free experience.

I know there are some folks out there who love their Gmail, or yahoo, or some other service, or even run their own mail server in-house. But I'll stick with .Mac, thanks.

Now, if .Mac would only come back online, so I can get back to work...

Why did Steve Jobs just buy Disney? I'll give you three guesses.

After all the years of rumors, speculation, and theorization, it looks like Disney is finally about to buy Pixar. As an Apple follower, should you care? That depends on why you think it's happening. I'll go ahead and assume that you already know that Apple CEO Steve Jobs just happens to also be the CEO of Pixar. You probably also know that Pixar's on-again, off-again relationship with Disney (with smaller Pixar holding all the cards) has led to everything from the early "retirement" of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner to Disney's lightning-quick decision to offer up its video content through Apple's iTunes Music Store. And you probably have at least some sense of the fact that Disney couldn't buy Pixar without Steve's blessing. What you may not know is that, with the approval of this deal, Steve becomes Disney's single-largest shareholder.

So if you want to understand how any of this might relate to Apple, you have to start with the question of why Steve chose right now to allow Disney to pull the trigger. Best I can tell, there are three reasonable possibilities:

A) Steve got tired of Pixar

This theory says that Steve Jobs simply got tired of running two companies concurrently, and decided to ditch Pixar (where he was reportedly only spending one day a week anyway) in order to either spend more time focusing on Apple or perhaps simply uncomplicate his professional life. Disney was the logical buyer, and Disney was only willing to make payment in shares of Disney stock, so Steve will simply hang onto them for awhile as an investment, and perhaps begin to sell them off down the road when he's allowed to. If this theory turns out the be the correct one, then the whole thing won't end up meaning much to Apple -- except for the fact that Steve will now be showing up to work five days a week instead of four.

B) Steve wants to be the CEO of Disney

This theory has the numbers behind it, if not the logic. Pixar is unique in that the company is majority-owned (73 percent last I heard) by Steve himself. In a company as large as Pixar, one person holding a share of a company stretching into the upper single-digits would be revelation; one person holding three-fourths of the company is something just doesn't happen. If you're wondering how such a fluke came to pass, it essentially boiled down to Steve already being super-wealthy from his first stint at Apple by the time he ever laid his eyes on Pixar, and not needing anyone else's money to build the company into a powerhouse. But what it means here in the present day is that Steve's 73 percent share in Pixar is going to translate to into a not-nearly-as-large-but-still-ridiclously-large share of Disney.

What this means is that at Disney's next shareholder meeting, Steve can more or less walk in and say "Hi I'm Steve Jobs, I have some success at running large companies, and oh by the way, I'm now your company's largest shareholder. I would like to have the title of _______". And whatever Steve decided to fill in that blank with, is the title he would walk out of that meeting holding. Chairman, CEO, President, Chief Dogwalker, you name it. Steve could take over day to day operations of Disney, and do to the company what he did to Apple upon his 1997 return -- except that Disney isn't in nearly as bad of shape as Apple was back then. Which, depending on his viewpoint, could make the whole thing less of a worthy challenge or more of a rewarding opportunity.

I think we've all more or less assumed that Steve wouldn't be able to function as the CEO of both Apple and Disney. But that assumption conveniently overlooks the fact that Steve has been running two companies concurrently for the past eight years. Sure, running Disney is a little more complicated than running Pixar. But then again, Steve is not exactly your typical CEO, either.

What makes this theory seem unlikely, though, is the timing of it. Steve has spent the past eight years at Apple largely trying to get back to zero in terms of company respectability, breathing room to try bold new things, and limitless potential new markets. And now, after all this time, Apple is succceeding in an almost ridiculous fashion, allowing Steve to bring all the innovation to the world that he wants. Why would he choose now to cut back on his involvement with Apple in order to start almost from square one at Disney? Five years ago, when Apple was still wearing something of a straightjacket, I'd have bought it. But now? Nah, it just doesn't make sense.

C) Steve wants to use Disney to Apple's benefit

Let's look at it from the other side. This theory says that Steve is more interested in Apple now more than ever, sees more potential now than ever, and just seized the opportunity to turn Disney into Apple's puppet. Steve doesn't have to become CEO of Disney just to control things; all he has to do is wave that "Largest Single Shareholder" badge in the faces of the people running Disney from time to time in order to remind them that he (almost literally) owns them. Anytime he wants to, Steve can just head on over to Disney's board room and walk out with anything Apple wants or needs, so long as it's not something that's not in Disney's best interests.

What would Apple want from Disney? Let's start with what Apple already has: half a dozen Disney-owned TV shows available through iTunes. That's about the extent of what Steve could wrangle from Disney in his role as CEO of Pixar. But now? Try iTunes suddenly offering every single TV show on ABC and the Disney Channel; every single sporting event from ESPN; and every single full-length movie in Disney's vault. Let's not forget that Disney's movie empire extends far beyond the cartoon classics, and includes hundreds of movies that have been released by various Disney underlings such as Miramax and others. iTunes suddenly begins offering every movie that Disney has the rights to, and then you've got the domino effect of other movie studios joining in on the iTunes action because they're afraid to be the last one in the door (think of NBC raced into iTunes, chasing after ABC).

What else could Apple use from Disney? How about Disney becoming the first major corporation to move nearly all of its corporate desktop machines to Intel-based Macs? Sure, it's not a given that the company could be persuaded to do such a thing. But would you want to bet against Steve if he walked into Disney's boardroom (with his "Largest Shareholder" badge in tow) and tried to make the case for such a move? And let's not even speculate on what use Apple could have for having control over a handful of rather well-known amusement parks. I can't imagine what Apple could do to milk Disneyland and Disney World in its favor, but I'll bet Steve can. And for those of you wondering if a little company like Apple could actually have such pull on a behemoth like Disney, it turns out that Apple is now a larger company than Disney.

So while any of the above possibilities could be the real reason for why Steve has chosen now to allow Disney to gobble up Pixar (and one of the above is actually quite scary if you're rooting for Apple), my money is on option "C" and I have a funny feeling that, for all intents and purposes, Apple just bought Disney.

Why my next Mac will be a MacBook

So we can all stop pretending there's any chance that the iBook will be renamed to something other than "MacBook" when it goes Intel, right? At this point I think there's about as much suspense in that one as whether the next version of iLife was really going to be called "iLife '06"...as if they were randomly going to call this year's version "iLife '09." Even an employee at the Market Street Apple Store absent-mindedly referred to the iBook as the "MacBook" they day after the Keynote during a conversation about the MacBook Pro. It's not that he knows any big secrets that the rest of us don't; it's just that the logical naming convention for the new iBook is just that self-evident.

"MacBook" actually makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. I remember back in 1999, showing off my original iBook to a co-worker, and commenting that Apple had slyly left the word "Mac" out of the product's name entirely, in an effort to work around the perceived plague that the name seemingly carried with it back then. But that was then, this is now, and lots of people actually want a Mac these days, so why on earth shouldn't Apple's laptop line be easily identifiable as being Macs without the potential buyer having to look beyond the nomenclature? I think reasserting the fact that Apple's laptops are indeeds Macs is a great, great move by the company at this time.

But with Apple's impending laptop lineup presumably consisting of the MacBook and MacBook Pro, the more intriguing question is that of whether the two lines will actually join each other to become one solidified lineup. Although the current iBook/PowerBook lineup does make sense once you examine it from top to bottom, it's admittedly a bit difficult to satisfactorily explain to someone why the 12 inch PowerBook costs more than the 14 inch iBook before they go assuming that they're just paying extra for the silver paint job.

So you have to wonder...will the entire lineup become silver? Will we see the laptop line marketed as the following?

1) the 12 inch MacBook, available as either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro

2) the 15 inch MacBook, also available as either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro

3) the 17 inch MacBook, only available as a MacBook Pro

...or are we looking at something less unified, something more like what we have currently?

I've always felt that a laptop buyer should start with screen size (or screen resolution, actually, but try explaining that to a newbie), and then decide on whether or not "pro" specs are necessary. Right now that's kind of hard to do, but the above lineup would make it fairly easy...especially if the MacBook and the MacBook Pro look the same. Let's go ahead and eliminate any misperception that you're paying extra simply for the silver paint.

But then again, with both the iBook and the PowerBook running on G4 processors, we kind of have been paying extra for the silver paint job for the past year or two. That'll change now, with Intel's ridiculously faster processors allowing Apple to make the MacBook fast and the MacBook Pro even faster.

"Yes sir, the 'pro' version of the 12 inch MacBook is twice as fast. Do you want the 'pro' version for $300 extra?"

"Yeah of course, I want all the speed I can get" or "No thanks, the regular one is plenty fast for me."

Seems like an easy decision for each potential buyer, instead of the rummaging through details now required to figure out whether the iBook or PowerBook is more suited for you. Of course I'm oversimplifying it and there's more to it for some users (read: the geeks). Stuff like monitor spanning and card slots (presumably only available on the Pro) will make it an easy decision for those users who actually care about such specs, regardless of speed issues. But then again, those are the type of users who have likely already decided they want the fastest possible model before they get to the part where they find out whether the MacBook has such features.

I know there's some yacking out there about the lack of FireWire 800 and a PCMCIA card slot. Means nothing to me. Nor does it to ninety-nine percent of other existing and potential users. The other one percent of users have a legitimate gripe, especially those who have to wait for the new-style cards to come out and then replace all of their existing cards. But I can't recall a new technology as still-born as FireWire 800, which died about five minutes after it came into existence, and about ten seconds after Apple decided to remove FireWire from the iPod equation. I'm not saying there's a legitimate non-FireWire alternative to replace the lack of FireWire 800; I'm just saying that you had to know this was coming.

As for me, I'm awfully tempted to jump on a 15 inch MacBook Pro the day it hits the market. My iBook is fast enough, but I know how much more productive I could be on a machine whose processor rates out four to five times faster than the one I'm currently using. In fact, now would be the ideal time to part ways with my current G4 iBook, as it's still the current-model iBook and it's still under the original warranty, both of which will sit well with potential takers. If the initial MacBook Pro rollout had included a 12 inch model, I might already have one on order. Now that I've happily settled into a 12 inch life here on my iBook, I have to decide whether I actually want to go back to the 15 inch life. Sure, I could make use of the extra pixels. But I've also enjoyed the lighter weight and (especially) the smaller footprint.

So I've got to think about that. Do I wait until the 12 inch MacBook Pro hits the market, presumably within a few months? Or do I go ahead and wait for the 12 inch (non-Pro) MacBook, which we might not see until mid-year? Or do I just go ahead and take the plunge on the 15 inch MacBook Pro now? Lucky for me, I've got some time to think about it, as it won't see the light of day until "February," which in traditional Apple terms has meant "February 32nd" but here in the Intel age might mean twenty minutes from now. Most folks don't like buying "Rev. A" models, but I don't think it's as much of an issue as it used to be. Apple always used to want to hold something back until the second revision so they could get that secondary sales bump down the road, but what the heck are they holding back at this point? I'd say they've thrown in the kitchen sink this time. This thing's a multimedia iMac with a flip-top head.

In my case, the Rosetta translation stuff is a non-issue for me. I spend probably ninety-five percent of my time in consumer-level Apple applications, all of which are native already, and the rest of the time I'm in something like an FTP client where processing speed doesn't come into play. I don't use Classic. I don't use MS Office except for the rare times someone sends me a document, and in that case only to view it. I don't use Photoshop or any of Apple's not-ready-yet pro apps. I use Dreamweaver about an hour a month, and if it runs a bit slower, than I suppose that's a fair trade-off for having the entire rest of my experience four times faster.

My one concern? Battery life. The lack of anything about the topic stuck out like a wounded appendage during Steve's Keynote, and indeed I've heard from several folks that when the display units on the Expo show floor were unplugged in an attempt to view the battery life, the machines simply dropped into an endless "calculating" loop, almost as if such behavior had been dictated by an AppleScript of some kind. Let's hope that this is simply a matter of Apple having yet to certify the actual battery life, and therefore wanting to keep that particular statistic under wraps for now...and not some impending bad news about the machine only having a three hour battery life or some such nonsense. My current iBook is rated at five hours, and let's just say I wouldn't want to touch a machine that was rated at anything less. So we'll just have to see how that goes.

So at this point, while I don't know whether my next laptop will be a 12 inch or a 15 inch, or whether it'll be a Pro or a non-Pro model, or even whether it'll be white or silver, I do that it'll be a MacBook of some kind. It'll be my fourth Apple laptop, and to be honest, it's somehow comforting to know that I'll finally get to own one that has the word "Mac" in its name.

Make up your own title...

As you can tell by the time stamp, it's nearly five in the morning local time and I'm still trying to finish out the workday. Lucky for me, tomorrow (well technically, today at this point) is the one morning where I don't have an early morning schedule. So much goes on at Macworld Expo that you just don't have time to fit the workday into the day. Sure, this is my sixth Expo, but when you attend as Media, it's a whole different Expo. Press conferences, sit-downs with vendors, meet ups with my counterparts at other sites, multitudes of readers grabbing me on the show floor to say hello. There isn't anyone who doesn't want a piece of you -- and that's a good thing. But sleep? What's that? I feel like a wide-eyed kid running around a new playpen for the first time.

So much good stuff. It's almost as if Apple suddenly decided that it had gone one too many months without publicly acknowledging that the Macintosh is one of their products, and decided to make up for lost time. We're so spoiled as Mac users, eh? It's almost embarrassing how much great stuff they keep throwing at us. Apple gave me a thirty minute detailed presentation of iWork 06, and I've got to tell you, it's right on par with iLife '06 in terms of being a huge update. I'll be picking up both the moment they hit the store shelves (local Apple Store here keeps telling us to come back tomorrow).

So much going on, so much to write about here, as soon as the time magically drops into my lap. For now, if you want Expo updates, check our postings on iPod Garage...

Six years...

It's been six years since I've been to San Francisco. I'll be interested to see how the actual city matches up with my fading memory of it...

One New Years resolution quite possibly solved

One of my biggest personal new years resolutions was to find my way to a beverage of choice that didn't have the caffeine or calories of Mountain Dew. The calories are just a ridiculous waste, and caffeine is generally a bad idea anytime after lunchtime. Every diet soda I've ever tried (especially Diet Mountain Dew) just plain tastes awful to me, with a never-ending after taste, and the caffeine-free diet versions somehow manage to taste even worse. I know plenty of people like it, I'm just not one of them.

I like bottled water, but not with food. Just a thing about not wanting to wash down food with something that has no taste to it. Well, I'm visiting my friend last week and his wife offers me something called lemon-flavored water. I'm convinced I'm not going to like it because I've never liked it when they stick a lemon slice in your water glass at a restaurant, but it turns out that this lemon-flavored water is actually really, really good.

I can't necessarily describe what makes "lemon-flavored water" different from plain old lemondate, but this has a different taste to it than lemonade. It's just like what you might imagine water might take like if it had a flavor. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. There are still some availability issues (at least around here), and it's not like I'll be able to order it in a restaurant, but it'll be beneficial in a lot of instances. No calories and no caffeine is a winner in my book.

Sorry, nothing on-topic today. But hey, it's the weekend.

Bring the Pets Inside

You know you're not in for a good weather report when it starts off with "bring the pets inside." Here in Florida you only hear that phrase about once or twice a year, and it immediately sets of alarms in your head along the lines of "OK, now the weather has actually gotten dangerous." You see, the rest of the year, the only real danger emanating from the weather is the fear of sunburn. If I'd known this weekend's local weather was going to be so awful, I might have just headed out to San Francisco today instead of waiting for Monday. But then again, the weekend does give me the chance to get things a little more squared away in advance. Because my official Expo schedule kicks in almost from the minute I enter city limits.

It's alive!

Although it's still subject to an intense (if swift) beta-testing period, the new all-new iPod Garage site design is finally up and running. The entire new site is right about twice as sophisticated as the old one, but the new logo alone should be enough of a hint:



I'm proud to say that I had nothing to do with any aspect of the new design. Massive thanks to John Monahan for a bang-up job.

Hey, five days in a row with a blog entry!

A lot of interesting responses on the Palm thing. As I suspected, there are a number of folks who both depend on their Palm day-in and day-out and wouldn't know how to get through their day without it, and yet at the same time they wish it was a whole lot better than it is. Doesn't surprise me, as I spent my entire tenure as a Palm user feeling both of those sentiments on a near-daily basis. Just as I predicted, some folks lost sight of the fact that I ONLY NEED THE THING FOR A WEEK, and proceeded to make a case for why I should invest hundreds of dollars into a more fully featured model. I guess the fact that I have no use for the extra features, and the fact that I'll have no use for the Palm at all after a week, didn't register. But the debate in the "comments" section made for an interesting read nonetheless.

I also thought that just the fact that the "comments" thing happened was notable as well. In close to three years of publishing this site, I've never opened it for comments -- until yesterday. Nice job of keeping it professional, useful, and more or less on-topic. I look forward to reading thoughtful comments going forward.

Still firming up my schedule for Macworld. At the start of the week I was looking at a blank canvas without a clue as to how to go about filling it in. But it's actually come together quite nicely. A little over-crammed perhaps, considering that there will undoubtedly be additional items I'll need to find a way to squeeze in once I get there (and throughout the week). Quite a bit of work to be done out there, if any of it can actually be decribed as work.

Thoughts on Palm handhelds?

I used to use a Palm handheld all the time back in my school system days. It was out of necessity more than anything; my schedule was different each day, and often changed repeatedly as the day went on. I can't say that I enjoyed using my Palm, but it certainly beat the alternative of carrying around a day planner or ending up with a bunch of scribbled notes in my pocket. When I left the school system for my current career, I found it easier to simply use whiteboards for both my calendar and my brainstorming (a trick I picked up, oddly enough, from my time in the school system). Even being left-handed, it's always seemed more natural to write on a large board with a full-size marker than to "write" stuff directly into my Palm, or even to type it into something like iCal or Palm Desktop. I guess it's a quirk of mine, but when I want to glance at my calendar, I don't care to stop what I'm doing on the computer just to bring up calendar software. And as far as brainstorming, I spend so much time each day on the computer that when I'm working on new ideas, I like to be (briefly) away from it.

The whiteboard approach could never have worked back in my school system days, because I worked out of half a dozen different campus locations per day, never the same ones, and my office was merely some mythical place that I got to visit a few times per month if I was lucky. But my whiteboard system has worked so well over the past year or two that I've become quite dependent on it. When I travel, I type the salient stuff into iCal before I hit the road. But most of my trips have been of the non-business variety, the kind of stuff you don't need a whiteboard to remind you about. So the whole system has worked well.

Until I realized (just now) that not only will I be spending all next week on a business trip in the name of Macworld Expo, I've got seemingly a hundred different items on the week's schedule, and I fully expect my schedule to change a hundred times once I'm out there. I actually thought about setting up a chart tablet in the hotel room, but I realized that it's not going to do me any good, as I'm unlikely to see my hotel room while the sun is shining, coming or going, if you know what I mean. The bottom line is that, for the next week at least, I need a Palm.

And I have one. Except I don't, because even after I remembered where I stored it, I've come to find that it has no intention of coming back from its two-year hibernation. I've reset it, but it simply won't turn on. Not unexpected, as it's close to four years old at this point (still, it would be perfect for my needs if it were still functional). So I suppose it's time to buy one. Not a big deal, as I see that I can buy one for about a hundred bucks, and when I get back I can probably eBay it and recoup the majority of my investment (or maybe I'll keep it around for future business trips).

My concern is that I went to the Palm website to take a look at the current models (the Z22 is the low-end $100 model), and it turns out that the current models don't seem to look too much like a Palm, at least not how I remember them. I don't care at all about physical styling, but I'm looking at the buttons and some of the screenshots, and it doesn't look quite like the Palm I remember. I was wondering if any long-time Palm users could clue me in as to whether the PalmOS is still similar enough to what it was two years ago that I won't have any learning curve.

My only real criteria is that it's similar enough to what I already know so that I don't have to learn anything new. I don't have time to learn a new interface this week, and I certainly don't want to be learning the new PalmOS on the fly while I'm at Macworld Expo. I also don't plan on putting it to any real use beyond the one week, as it just doesn't fit my current career day in and day out. So any suggestions that I should take a look at some other mobile computing platform, or that I should make a major investment in one of the more expensive Palm models, aren't going to do me any good. I've turned on the "comments" section below for you to share your thoughts.

And the new (day, week, month, year, era) begins...with the Expo.

I think it finally sunk in today that I'll be stepping on a plane a mere seven days from now for a week-long cross-country trip. I'm torn between whether the focus of this week should be primarily on preparing for the trip, or clearing out "other" stuff so that I won't have to concern myself with it while I'm out there. Here's what's on my mind:

- Rather coincidentally, this will be the second time in four months that I've flown out-of-State, alone, only to meet up with other people who hail from a different part of my home State once I get there. I guess that's bound to happen when you live in the part of the State that I do.

- I keep looking at the weather forecast and seeing that the temperatures in San Francisco next week will actuallly be the same as or higher than the temperatures here in Central Florida. But I've been to San Francisco before, so I know that there's a world of difference between forty degrees here and forty degrees there. And I can't even stand forty degrees here. I'll keep telling myself, though, that they've just got to be the same, no matter how much colder one feels than the other -- especially when I'm standing in line for the Keynote in the pre-dawn sub-human weather for hours on end Tuesday morning.

- And you wonder why it's been six years since I've been to San Francisco.

- Speaking of which, Macworld Expo San Francisco in 2000 was a good one. The Keynotee featured the exciting (the first unveiling of the MacOS X interface), the ceremonial (the dropping of the "interim" from Steve's CEO status), the incongruous (Apple investing in Earthlink), and the humorous (the Adobe guy coming onstage and having no idea what to say in response to MacOS X). It was the first, last, and only San Francisco Expo I ever attended...but that was because we still had the summertime New York Expo back then -- and at least at that time, one per year seemed enough for me. If you don't know why I chose the summertime one over the wintertime one, then you haven't been paying close enough attention to the other parts of this entry.

- With New York gone, though, I'm happy to jet out to San Francisco for the festivities. In fact, the last Expo I attended (MWNY 2002) was probably the weakest one (a Keynote full of disappointment ranging from the end of iTools to the high price on Jaguar to iPod for Windows with MusicMatch of all things), so I'm anxious to get back to Expo-land and get a cleaner taste in my mouth this time around. In contrast, I don't think there's anyone who doesn't expect this upcoming Expo to be a landmark event.

- Six days in San Francisco, and you know how much sightseeing I'm planning on? None. This will be a workweek. Reporting all day, editorial duties in the evenings, we're going to try to record some episodes of iPod Garage Radio while we're out there. Having said all that, I have yet to pencil in my "after hours party" schedule. If you've got an event happening and you'd like to do something about that, now would be a good time to holler at me before I begin to cement my Macworld schedule later this week.

Sometimes it's the unlikely explanation...

So I'm watching the Dolphins game today with my friend, and he notices on the crawler on the bottom of the screen that the Cardinals had taken the lead over the Colts 19-17 with thirteen seconds left. It caught his eye because the Cardinals win about as rarely as the Colts lose. But a few minutes later, we see the final score, and the Colts have won the game 17-13. My friend quickly concludes that he must have read the crawler wrong, as there's seemingly no other possible explanation to what happened. I concur just as quickly because, hey, it's not me admitting to having seen imaginary numbers on the screen.

But then I watch SportsCenter tonight, only to find that with thirteen seconds left, the Cardinals did in fact score a touchdown to go up 19-17 with thirteen seconds left, only to have the touchdown immediately taken away via instant replay, thus explaining how a team can lead a game 19-17 at one point, only to end up losing 17-13. My friend saw the score correctly after all. Sometimes it's the unlikely explanation that rules the day. Sure, the obvious explanation is often the accurate one, but not always.

Well there, that's my thought for the day. It's actually one of my (many) resolutions for the new year. Come here. Share something. Do it again the next day. They won't all be gems (some of them may more closely resemble germs), but so be it. I'll see what I can do. Some new years resolutions work out better than others (my lunch today consisting of three donuts was a testament to that), but you know what they say -- writers write.