Okay, the coolness factor at Comic-Con just went up a notch. It turns out that the Obama campaign is exploring the idea of having their candidate show up at Comic-Con. There isn’t a lot of information beyond the fact that an exploratory call was made, but I can see how an appearance would appeal to the youth vote.
Or at least the geek vote.
And I bet that’s a much bigger demographic than most folk realize.
MacWorld is probably the coolest of the geeky events I’ve attended so far this year. Harriet and I spent a day and a half (January 17 and 18) checking out how the (for me) other half (8% more precisely) lives.
We’re a mixed family: Harriet is an Apple disciple and I’m a member of the PC Priesthood. However, I admire the Mac’s style, I love my iTouch, and I envy every photo book my Mac-Ninja neighbors casually produce from iWhatever. So, it is with a distinct lack of snark (okay, maybe a little) that I visit MacWorld each year and anxiously await Steve Job’s BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.
By now, most of you know that this year’s talisman was the MacBook Air. And yeah, it’s cool. It’s thin: really thin. And light. And surprisingly full featured with a comfortable keyboard and a great display. I’m not going to do a review of it here since there are a lot of good reviews available on the inter-tubes, and they include descriptions of the device’s limitations. But damn it’s cool. And they looked impressive on that wire, hanging like a mobile (we didn’t try the ones on on the wires since Apple had a lot of them set up on counters for us all to play with).
MacWorld has been getting a little bit smaller from year to year. But this year it was about the same size as last year, and it was laid out much better. It wasn’t just iPod World, and Harriet had a good time checking out the cool accessories, as well as sitting in on some Photoshop and InDesign tutorials.
Plus, there is a mighty fine dim sum restaurant right next to the Moscone Center.
We stayed at the best B&B in San Francisco. The Herzfeld has been recently renovated and now boasts the finest dining facilities in the city. And their fruit salad is to die for. Pretty reasonable rates, too: a bowl and a dreidel and they treat you like family (and yeah, this paragraph has a lot of inside references – sorry).
Wow, it’s been 5 months since my last entry. I was definitely having trouble getting back in the habit of blogging again, so I thought a quick note of catch-up would help unblock the muse.
The last entry indicated we were having trouble with our inter-web access from Guatemala. That problem wasn’t resolved until we got back to Santa Barbara, and then events just kept us from finishing the last entries about our trip. At some point, Harriet and I will make those final entries and complete our Guatemala trip report, but we’ve named the old homestead Casa Mañana for a good reason. We’ll get to it … tomorrow.
In the meantime, we’ve been busy with quite a few projects, activities, and trips, so I’ll be interspersing current events with ‘retrospectives’ on what’s been happening the last few months. We’re all friends (and family) here, so let’s keep it informal. I’ve got other blogs for the formal stuff.
Okay, that’s the ‘just get started again’ entry. Now on to the more interesting stuff.
Fair warning: I’ve been doing a lot of travel the last couple of months, and much of it is pretty nerd/geek centered. My favorite quote came from Debbie, who responded to my dilemma of trying to decide between a slide-rule collectors’ convention and WonderCon (a comic book convention) with “That’s the geekiest thing I’ve heard you say.”