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).

This annual trek always takes place the week after Easter (I typically fly on Easter Sunday), and this year Denver had snow. I don’t typically travel in this sort of weather, so I was fascinated (disturbed) by the de-icing equipment. We didn’t have any problems going through Denver on the way to Orlando, so I suppose this is all pretty routine for them.

This is the one conference where Santa Barbara Infrared, Inc (SBIR) has a significant presence. We go all out with a large booth, and several of us presenting papers. Here, we are building part of the booth, with Greg W., Steve, and Greg M. assembling our banner.

This is another view of the show area as several companies are assembling their booths. We’re looking across our booth to the Indigo booth, and the car on the right is a new BMW. It has an infrared (IR) camera installed as a high end option. The camera was built by Indigo, but we built the equipment used to test and align the camera for production.

I don’t often talk about my work, and I realize that my friends and family have a hard time describing (or understanding) what I do. The company that I work for – SBIR – builds and develops instrumentation for testing infrared cameras. We don’t build the cameras that see in the dark; we build the equipment that’s used to make sure those cameras work properly. We also build equipment for testing multi-sensor platforms, but that just gets us into severely geeky territory. Nowadays, my job is the lead architect and developer of a program that automates the testing process, and it is cleverly named IRWindows (yes, the standard abbreviation is IRWin and I was the instigator for the name). It’s used all over the world, in a variety of production facilities, laboratories, and testing facilities – both military and civilian.

Back to the symposium, and here is a shot that I took at a presentation before I realized that photography was banned in the conferences. Yes, the presentations are really this exciting. Next year, I’ll probably be chairing on of these sessions. The fun just doesn’t stop.

This symposium is put on by SPIE- The International Society for Optical Engineering. SPIE originally stood for Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, but was renamed in 1981 and is not really an acronym anymore. The organization is very international, and I attended papers presented by scientists and engineers from England, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Russia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Egypt, India, Israel, and many others. But keep in mind, this just means we’re all world class geeks. We pretty much define the Geek Olympics.

Just to further illustrate the hedonistic nature of this conference, here’s the no holds barred party atmosphere on the first night. Whooeee!

And yes, there are women at the conference. There’s even a Women in Optics group who had their own luncheon. You can tell from the pictures that they’re a little hard to find.

So, here’s the annual IRWindows user’s group. There were 19 of us at a very nice restaurant in Orlando (Jeffery’s). The bill ended up being about $2500, all paid by SBIR. As I said, this is a very high end application program. And, once again, note all the women in that group. If you count the three waitresses from the restaurant, there was a total of three women in the room.

This is our booth just before the doors opened on the third day. There’s a variety of equipment on display, and the IRWindows station is in the middle, towards the back. I don’t want to go into why it says IRWindows 2005, but this shot really is from a week ago. On th table at the right is a giant bowl of M&M’s. They’re special ordered to just be black and red. Could you tell that those are our colors? Subtle is not valued in the harsh world of photonics.

And what would a booth be without a special give away. We had a drawing for a couple of iPods. You had to find a special word hidden in our signs to be eligible for entry, but if you look at that bowl you can see that your chances were pretty darn good. I think we all agreed that it’s time for a new game. Pictured here are two of our three Gregs: Greg M. and Greg W.

I flew back on Friday, coming through Denver again. The weather reports made it looked like there would be trouble, so we were all ready to find alternate flights. But, I ended up having pretty smooth flights. Dallas ended up being the travel nightmare for that day.

It was a very good symposium for us, and I’m actually glad that I went. This sort of event serves as a nice alternative to my usual daily grind, so even though the days are very long, it almost feels like a vacation.

Almost.

EM-SEC Technologies, a company in North Carolina, has developed the paint and has successfully tested it. I don’t have info on pricing, but it’s currently available and meets National Security Administration’s (NSA) TEMPEST (Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions) requirements. Since it’s intended for corporate and government security, my bet is that it’s pretty pricey.

However, the article where I originally saw this (afterdawn.com) suggested that it could be used to jam cell phone calls in a movie theater. Just put on fresh coat of paint!

Good lord, I was a smart kid but I was happy to read and tinker with some electronics. What are Jory and Monica going to come up with? And is Artemis going to transform time and space?

“Cool,” I thought (at first).

So I tried another entry. That produced the same error message, but something was still posted. This process is a pain, but there was enough benefit that I thought I could work with it. Well, not so much. The entries weren’t formatted right, and when I tried to change them, the system crashed, and blah, blah, blah (insert technobabble). So, I deleted those entries and will shortly repost them in my usual (more time intensive) format.

I generally track over 150 blogs (not as intense as it sounds, and real blog-hounds track quite a bit more). A lot of the postings catch my interest, and I’d like to note those that fit my eclectic interests and dilettante lifestyle. I’ll still be making manual posts about those items and providing links to the information source. Those kinds posts serve as an annotated reference/bookmark tool which I can organize by tags.

Of course, this year the big news was the iPhone. And let me say, right off the bat, Harriet and I were very impressed. We both want one, although I’m more willing to try out the initial release than she is. We sat through a demonstration and were just amazed at how lovely and well designed it is. The user interface looked very easy, and I mean Tivo easy – the kind of easy where Harriet is confident she can use it. And it’s gorgeous. The large, color video screen allows them to do some beautiful screens, icons, and animated displays. I won’t do a review here since there are plenty of other sites that review the iPhone (CNet, ZDNet, and Engadget to name a few) and give opinions on its merits.
The only real hesitation I have right now is that we couldn’t actually touch the thing. There were a couple being used by the demonstrators, and there were two on the exhibition floor, but they were behind Plexiglas cylinders. There was always a crowd around them, as shown in the first picture. In this one, I’m just another member of the craning neck crowd.

Of course, there were other things of interest at MacWorld. This guy is Russel Brown, a very well liked demonstrator of the Photoshop program. Harriet had a chance to sit in on one of his demonstrations which she tries to do every year. I’m assuming the wig was a new feature in his presentations.

I also checked out the new AppleTV, and was somewhat underwhelmed. It basically turns an HDTV display into a very large video iPod, which is cool but not a killer app in my book. You can check out the features list at the Apple website.

There were other things that would appeal to Mac users. There’s some new flavor of System X – Civet, or Aardvark, or some such nonsense (and by the way, System X always makes me think of some X-Men super villian). iLife has added even more i-Organs, and loads of people were disappointed by various unfulfilled i-Rumors. But despite all of the Mac-Smack, this li’l ol’ Windows user is enough of a gadget geek to have found a lot of things that kept my interest.

And overall, I’m always impressed with how cool most things look at MacWorld. It’s clear that the Apple products appeal to designers, and good design is a big part of the Mac culture.

Damn them.