The term 'Geek' has become so broad in the last few years, encompassing those who use the web a lot socially and for content, like webloggers, on one end, and those who are die-hard coders, and can handle operands with greater ease than adverbs.

I smiled when I saw the result of one person who intersects these two worlds: Weblog Major Mode for Blogging in Emacs.

I'm sure the seven of us will be so happy with this tool.

N'Sync cameo scene dropped from Star Wars: Episode II, reportedly because fans at TheForce.net raised such a stink.

How many fans will it take to edit out Jar-Jar?

Hey! The Bloggie Awards are back for 2002!

The categories have been announced, and for the next three days (until Sunday) they're accepting nominations for the various categories.

(so here's the part where I lobby for votes)

Sure I may not have the funniest content, Fury may not be the best-kept secret, or the best Asian site (err, yeah) but I think it just might stand a chance in the category of "best programming of a weblog." If you agree, heck, why not nominate me? Those who are nominated most often make it as finalists, and who wouldn't want that?

Obligatory bulletpoint list of cool things techie things about Fury:

• The Timeline
• Fury 3.1 codebase, which brought Read by Topic, and enhanced google indexing among other things.
• Cell-o-scopes
• Qwer.org (explained here)
• Dynamic Look Ahead module
• Pseudo-static links which are nice, short, and dynamic.
• Half a billion whiz-bang sitelets in beta (Metacookie being a particularly relevant example, war as a timely one, and AOLiza as a timeless one)
• and all the normal niceties like permalinks, comments, and archives...

And that doesn't even get into the coolest innovation, 'Furynodes', an object-oriented, on-the-fly page rendering system so cool and dynamic it was used in the recent reprogramming of LinkStew and the forthcoming redesign of In Passing... Soon I'll have it documented and make a public release for those who are interested in a really powerful content-delivery and management system built on top of PHP.

Okay, that's my speil. I hope you agree it's worthy of a nomination, so head on over and nominate away! And while you're there, I'd also recomment LinkStew in the same category, for Benjy's supercool 'possibly related entries' mechanism, as well as In Passing for "Best Topical Weblog" and Wockerjabby for "Best American Weblog."

Okay, all done whoring for now. I'll talk about something totally differnt later: Reflections of an Expo (many of which have nothing to do with the MWSF Expo at all, but that's where I was when I had a thought and scribbled it onto paper).

Went to expo. Took a few pictures. Went to work. Busy-busy-busy.

I'm having a little blog de-focusing time. What the blog is for, how it should look, work, who it's for, all that stuff. It's quite likely that at the end the blog will fission into two weblogs, for different purposes. I hope that doesn't insispose too many of you who'll want to read both...

Hey, how's your week going?

So hey, how about those Apple announcements yesterday?

Of course I feel a little let down. I mean sure, the iMac design is really cool and yes, if I didn't have a desktop I was really happy with I'd buy one, but frankly it didn't live up to the hype.

"To boldly go where no PC has gone before" - Where? The nightstand?

"Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond." - The only thing the rumor sites agreed on over the last few months was that there would definitely be a flat-panel iMac, with a radical industrial design.

Okay, that said, the new iMac is very cool. I didn't expect them to move to the G4, and I certainly didn't expect them to include a Superdrive in the top model. Actually, no matter which feature was decided first, it likely drove the other one, since a G4 is required to do the MPEG-2 encoding in iDVD, and what good is a Superdrive without iDVD? Similarly, it seems silly to include a G4 processor and not offer as an option the only hardware option that requires one.

I wonder about the hinge arm. I'd have to see one, but I know that every desk lamp I've ever had with a spring-arm like that has broken or grown feeble. Of course, I have to tell myself it just looks like a desk lamp. One thing is clear though, this is a consumer and business computer, not a computer for the educational market. Apple is clearly using the iBook as their educational vehicle now. There's no way a school would buy this computer. I mean, you think *I'm* hard on my spring-arm lamps...

I'm also fine with the prices. Actually, the timing is perfect. My uncle got an iPod for Christmas and my dad and I spent several hours encoding a bunch of his CDs and uploading them because my uncle doesn't have a Mac. He's been anti-Apple for the last 18 years, ever since he bought 10 Apple Lisas for his office at $10,000 a pop, then Apple came out with the Mac for a quarter the price and abandoned the Lisa. He loves his iPod though. He loves his iPod so much that he's buying a Mac to use with it! I told him to hold off until after the keynote, and now he's going to get the model with the Superdrive. I might just win him back into the Apple camp yet.

Other thoughts on the Apple presentation:

• The 14.1" iBook - Barely a blip in Steve's presentation, this is clearly a concession to market needs, as opposed to Steve's vision. I get the impression Steve doesn't like this machine, even if it's what people want. Anyhow, they didn't mention that the extra 2 inches of screen space come at the cost of a significantly larger iBook (over an inch wider and nearly an inch deeper; only the thickness stays the same), and an extra pound of weight.
• The switch to OS X as default - It had to happen sooner or later. Just because most people I know are waiting for Photoshop to make the switch before they do is no reason to assume that new Mac buyers feel the same way. The OS is really stable, there's a lot of software for it, including the 'digital hub' suite, and considering the learning curve going from OS 9 to OS X, it makes a lot more sense than teaching new users OS 9, then telling them to toss that out the window and move ti OS X six months from now. When you think about it, those users who would want to use OS 9 are those who already know it. Presumably these are the same people with the savvy to know how to switch the default OS in the Startup Disk control panel anyhow. And then, of course, there's the fact that iPhoto is an OS X only application...
• iPhoto - Second to an iPad, this is the thing I've been waiting for from Apple more than anything else. It's great. I take pictures almost every day. I keep my Powershot s100 with me pretty much all the time. This is just the tool I need to keep these pictures organized. I'm writing a review of iPhoto at the moment, either for Fury or possibly one of the Mac publications. I should have it done on the train ride home tonight. Suffice to say that I've imported over 2800 of my archived photos (2.1 gigabytes worth) so I feel like I'm putting it through its paces. The software's not perfect, it can crash, but the power and flexability it offers are really great, with a few glaring exceptions.

Okay, so where's the iPad? Listening to Steve speak, I got the impression that Apple thinks it's fulfilled its Digital Hub vision; this coming the day before Microsoft announces forthcoming pads to integrate with TVs, PCs, and even X-boxen. So what's Apple's next big thing? We can probably expect a G4 tower speed bump around March, and G5 processors for 'the fastest Mac ever' at Macworld New York. Frankly I'm more excited about a July Photoshop X announcement. And of course iPhoto 2, which will include brightness/contrast and color adjustment functionality. Think the equalizer on iTunes. You'll be able to set default contrast and color adjustments for different types of photos, outdoor, night, sunny, flash, etc. with the ability to override and customize settings on any given photo.

Anyhow, I think the new iMac is cool. It's gone from 'Yum' to 'Mmm' and I can't wait until I start seeing them on receptionists desks everywhere. I bet the design will also make it on to a lot of professional desktops as well, especially for people who use a computer as as a secondary tool and want to reclaim both their desk space and their swankiness. How many days before someone starts selling clip-on additions to the screen, to cover the lucite border (they call it the 'halo') with velvet leopardprint?

I got up early, didn't dawdle on the web, left the house about 6 minutes earlier than usual, was planning on stopping at the cafe to pick up a chai on the way to my car (no scone, long story), but a little voice inside said 'wouldn't it be nice to drive into the Amtrak station without having to worry about whether the train will be sitting there, or had already left?' So I decided to go straight to my car.

On the 10 minute drive to the train station, I heard that 880 South was a mess in San Leandro, partly due to an overpass that dropped concrete on the freeway(!) and my alternate route, the Dunbarton Bridge, was also backed up. Snug and smug on my way to the train, I happily drove on in the pre-dawn hour. I also found out that Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's, passed away early this morning. Sad, that. Weird though, that putting yourself into commercials for your company is enough to ensure a little immortality. Does anyone know when the founder of Burger King died? Did they mention it on the radio? It's interesting how we pick our heroes (or anti-heroes).

Anyhow, I pull in to the station and, inexplicably, so is my train. A flashback to the train story and having to get the parking right the first time, I rush over, asking the conductor if they're early today, and he looks at his watch and says "Hmm, I guess we are." but when I get up to my seat and power up, my powerbook says it's 7:11, just like it should be. I don't know where the time went.

Anyhow, I really needed to be on the train today. It's so nice to relax in the morning instead of sitting in interminable traffic for a couple hours.

This is the best Chai I've never had.

(note: I wrote this before I saw the iMac leak on Time Canada. [mirror]. I still think Apple's got something besides the iMac and iPhoto up its sleeve, but we'll just have to see. Also, check out the latest (and probably last) mock splash-page.)

Okay, so we've had months of speculation, and one final harried week of exposes, debunkings, guesses, taunts, and teasers. Tomorrow we find out what's in Steve's magic bag.

Rather than write another long document of educated guesses, rationales, and scenarios, I'll just put my bid in before the buzzer:

As you might guess, I think Steve is finally unveiling the iPad, but as to what the iPad is, I think the iWalk hoax videos got people thinking along the wrong lines.

I don't believe that the iPad will be a PDA. (It's amazing how everyone's forgotten that Scully coined the term 'Personal Digital Assistant' or PDA, back in early 1993... It's been quite a while.) While a PDA is a device you take with you everywhere, to take notes, to lookup and input PIM info like contacts and appointments, the iPad will be closer to a PADD.

A PADD is essentially a portable interface, as opposed to a portable computer or a portable digital assistant. Mark Noble wrote an excellent write-up of the differences between a PDA and a PADD, and I encourage you to read it.

So, if not a PDA, what is the iPad? Let's start with a set of possible specs:

Likely:

• 12.1" active-matrix touchscreen
• One Firewire port
• One USB port
• One Audio-out/headphone jack
• Airport installed
• OS X Thin Client lets you use the iPad as a remote terminal for a machine running OS X.

Possible:

• 5gig Toshiba mini HD (like the iPod's)
• Infra-red transciever
• Light version of OS X that can drive the iPad away from a 'server' computer.

Well, that's it for me. I'm going to bed and see what's up when I get to work in the morning.

Or, as Apple puts it, 'one more sleepless night'. Though I wonder if they're referring to the thousands waiting for tomorrow's keynote, or the dozens of engineers who are frantically working to make beta hardware perform without a glitch on stage...

Anyhow, new tagline up.

October should be longer, and february should be shorter.

Not the actual months themselves, of course, but their names. October is already too long (though any shorter and we'd miss Halloween), and of course, someone already took a hatchet to February.

No, look to the right-hand nav, where you can view by date. Note how there's a gentle undulation of the length of these links (note also that Fury's code not only adds month archives in realtime, but automatically appended '2001' to each of the 2001 links the picosecond 2002 rolled around, and I didn't even think to check if it worked until now).

Wouldn't it be nice if the months made a nice, clean curve? (Wouldn't it be nice if JASON wassn't always staring at us from the calendar? At least in reverse chronological order he's upside-down.)

Working tonight on another couple Apple pieces to go up tonight and tomorrow morning, so be sure to check back. :-)

And you thought Christmas was over. Looks like Santa Jobs has other plans...