My buddy Ivan and I ditched out on work at the last minuted yesterday and tooted down to San Francisco for Macworld. We missed out last year. Both of us had started new jobs and were wary of bringing up the subject of a frivolous day off to our employers. That was completely lame, though. Since both of us actually use, and make/help make purchasing recommendations for just the kinds of things they hock at Macworld, there is an actual professional benefit to us going. So we did, and these are my impressions of the things we saw.
I can't live without xScope. I use it every single day. It greatly increases my productivity and it is a pleasure to use. It does everything I want it to do, and there isn't anything that I wish it did that it currently doesn't.
Hoorah! I finally brought my household into the 21st century. A brand new shiny iMac is blazing bright in the corner of our living room. It replaces a dual 800MHz PowerMac G4 Qucksilver that was the super hotness back in 1999 or something.
I've been waiting two years to justify the purchase of an XBox 360, and justice finally came last Wednesday. Most of my friends have been killing each other on XBox live for years, and have urged me to jump on the band wagon at nearly every opportunity. Being the only breadwinner in a four-person family, it just wasn't an easy thing to work in. But a year of working multiple jobs has paid off ... almost.
Today is November 29th, 2007. 2,285 days (well over 6 years) have passed since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), and it is still one of the most widely used browsers on the internet today.
I installed Leopard on my MacBook today. It took two hours to make a full clone my hard drive. It took two hours to run the upgrade. It took two hours for me to realize there was no way in hell I was going to get MySQL running today. I estimate two hours for my Tiger restore to complete.
We have our business email routed through Google's Gmail with their Google Apps for businesses. I hate Gmail quite a bit. Besides its interface (which I find to be atrociously cumbersome and staggeringly unintuitive), I'm one of those people who likes managing all of my email accounts in a stand-alone email application from multiple computers and my phone. IMAP is the ideal protocol for this, but Gmail only allows POP access. This means that you have to separately download every message to every device you need to view it on ... separately. Even the threads of messages you have already deleted from your other computers and devices.
A portion of visitors to blog.bigreason may notice a pinkish hue to things around here. Your eyes do not deceive you. There is a hue. A girlish hue. This is intentional, for I love girls, and October. And pink, after all, is the color of October — or at least the color of breast cancer awareness. And October is breast cancer awareness month.
13% of my annual income goes to providing health insurance to my family. This doesn't include the money I pay to cover the portion of medical services my insurance doesn't cover. Last year these costs exceeded $3,000. For those keeping track, medical costs for my family exceeded 18% of my annual income last year.
I actually finished something today at work, so I treated myself to a flickr Pro account and geo-tagged a bunch of photos in my account. Let me tell ya, Renfro Hole weren't too easy to find...
I don't believe I've ever mentioned this on The Big Reason, but to those who know me personally, it's no secret that I hate to fly. I would venture to say that I probably hate it more than most people do. I detest every last thing about it with every fiber of my being. I would have to say that the thing I hate most is the ungodly force of terror that gores its way through my body as a result of being blasted through the sky at such an unreasonable altitude.
A new Jacob Nielson article reveals eye-tracking results for recent banner ad studies. As should be expected, there is some really valuable stuff in there. Obviously banner ads do work. People actually do click them. MySpace wouldn't have sold for $580 million if they didn't work. The real issue is that banner ads aren't for simply looking at. The are for taking you somewhere else. You don't spend as much time looking at something you are clicking as you do looking at something you are reading, just like you tend to spend more time sitting on the couch than you do walking through a doorway.
Last night, I got to open up a show for one of my county heros. Last week, the Bottom Dwellers got a MySpace message from some sweet girl in Portland wanting to set up a small show for Dale Watsonand his boys in between a few bigger dates. Naturally we jumped at the chance, despite being booked to play Richard March's Americana Ramble (something we wouldn't normally do, Richard. Honest.).
Ha! The first thing I thought as I read that Jason Santa Maria had moved to Brooklyn was, "Sweet! They Might Be Giants are from there." Then he went ahead and mentioned it, too.
I don't actually know him—so it's none of my business—but if I ever found myself in the same situation, I always pictured myself doing the exact same thing.