OK, at 7 AM I board a plane to Honolulu (Honolulu, Delaware...the first of seven connecting flights that will bring me to Hawaii), which means if I do any sleeping tonight it'll be in the form of a nap on my couch, wearing my travelling clothes. I like the idea of getting a sound night's sleep before flying. I also like the idea of peace among all nations, solar energy, and women who wouldn't dream of throwing a perfectly good drink in a perfectly good man's face, especially after he's just complimented her so cleverly.

So the winner of the Transporting A Pair Of Mac SE's Sweepstakes is to pack them in a Rubbermaid container and then duct-tape the bejeezus out of the thing. I had plenty of helpful feedback from y'all, and it was appreciated. Here's a sampling:

"Why are you trying to bring two Mac SE's to Hawaii?"

"You're bringing two Mac SE's to Hawaii? Why?"

"Mac SE's bringing Hawaii why to two you are?"

Well, I'll explain. I will be spending the next week cruising around Hawaii. When I am not on ship, I shall be goofing around in temperate waters and on top of as many volcanoes as they'll let me. When I am on ship, I shall be endeavouring to complete the Buffet Alphabet.

(ie: Apple pie; Banana-cream pie; Cherry pie, Dessert (aggregate); Eggplant lasagna; Fried chicken...et cetera. It's a noble goal and not one to be mocked.)

And during those rare moments when I'm on the ship and not actively wondering what I'll be eating to fill out the "Q" page — prediction: Queso dip? It seems impossible to be on a cruise ship and not have access to Mexican food — I will begrudgingly give a few talks as part of the floating MacMania convention. It seems only fair: they're bringing me out there and everthing. But if one of my sessions takes place during my last shot at the Ziti bar, all bets are off.

So one of these sessions is "MacQuarium Live!", during which I shall be transforming a helpless Mac SE into a working aquarium amid gasps and applause. Naturally, this seemed like a great idea eight months ago when I suggested it. Back then, it was just my job to come up with great ideas. Today, my job is to transport two Before and After Macs to Hawaii. Now I understand why professors have grad students. "You know what would be great?" the professor says, on his way to yet another debauched, orgy-filled symposium on Reiss-Kaufmann drift. "If suborbital energy could be 'polymerized,' so to speak; wouldn't a lot of important but discredited theories work if such a thing were possible? Well, work on that while I'm gone. And make sure the pink champagne is chilled and waiting for Dr. Joergensen when she checks into her suite, OK?"

It'll be worth the effort, if I pull this trick off. And after all, shipping two computers 7,000 miles is pretty simple if you really don't care if either of them work when they arrive.

I'll be off the air until I figure out the on-ship Internet connection. Hail and farewell!

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Well, I got away with it just fine. The Skycaps at Logan International accepted my Rubbermaid container full of dead (or soon-to-be-dead) classic Macs with a sense of dull routine and no further action was necessary. I had arranged with my ride to the airport that I'd ring his cell when I found out one way or the other but I flashed him an OK before he even pulled out of the check-in area.

(I put as much worry and consideration of contingencies into this simple act of shipping than some men have put into bank robberies and others have put into acts of adultery. Late last night I had to consider what would happen if the container was rejected by the baggage handlers. If none of its contents made it to Hawaii, I couldn't do my presentation. And even if leaving it behind was an option, airport security is sufficiently skittish these days that a taped-together bin filled with questionable electronics couldn't really be left outside an airline terminal without a great many people missing their flights and my very, very awful passport photo turning up on a great many newscasts.

(Am writing this on board the plane. In-flight entertainment is currently an NBC presentation of a PGA tour event. A majestic opening montage sets up the story of these mighty titans of the swing set, their passion for the game, and what's at stake.

However, NBC has made the tactical error of using some of the dramatic score from the movie "Backdraft" under the voice-over. It's a great score — the flick is all about firefighters so the music is sweeping and majestic — and it turns up on a lot of shows. Including "Iron Chef," which has effectively ruined it for everyone. It's hard to get people all excited about a prestigious sporting event when the music is describing an enigmatic billionaire's commitment to assembling the four titans of international cuisine and building a mighty citadel in which they can compete. End of aside.)

Have lucked out twice on these flights. First I tripped from Boston to San Francisco, and by working the self-check-in kiosk like a 11-year-old with a PS2 controller in his hands, I switched my seat reservation to the one remaining empty row. So the flight was a bit of a blur. My dedication to keeping up with current events ensured that I'd make it through this week's "People" Magazine (so if people ask me if Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox are as close offscreen as they are on the set of "Friends," they won't have to wait long for a response). But eleven pages into "The Autobiography Of Mark Twain" I was curling up on my side of the 757 for a three-hour nap.

Now I'm somewhere over the Pacific between San Francisco and Honolulu. When I booked this flight online I chose a seat in front of the 777's mid-fuselage bulkhead. So I've got an intense quantity of legroom here...more than enough to accomodate Lilith and my whim to toss something into my weblog's queue and, later, to kick back with a few Season 2 episodes of "Babylon 5."

I'm glad I didn't exercise my upgrade options on this outbound leg of the trip. Oh, and I couldn't have anyway, so that issue was nicely-settled.

(So this is how it works? You've bought the tickets, you're on the plane, but you're not credited with the miles until you actually land? When I fly it's usually (a) on someone else's dime or (b) through Priceline, so it's taken me years to acquire the 25,000 miles I need for pre-boarding and complimentary luggage massages. Technically, 23,920. But try to tell an airline employee that you've led a pure, chaste life and are worthy of an impromptu rounding-up error.

I reached Premiere Status somewhere over Ohio. Oddly, I feel no different than when I boarded.)

Forms to fill out: a declaration that I won't be bringing any Walking Death Fish into Hawaii, and a slip of paper with my guess as to when we'll be halfway to Honolulu. I build lots of spreadsheets and factor in a lot of variables. Ultimately, though, I calculate the average speed three different times with three different sets of data, find the median, and then do rate/distance.

There are two different kinds of people on any flight to Hawaii: the ones who decided to wear luau shirts and the ones who (like me) decided that they're not entitled to look like such a dorkpile of tourism until they're actually on Hawaiian soil.

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This is also, incidentally, my first flight over the open sea. Which means it's also the first time I've paid close attention to the pre-flight speech detailing all the things within the cabin that can be used as an emergency floatation device. Previously, the only part that's held an interest for me was the demonstration of the inflatable life vests, and even there I was pretty much just wondering how hard it'd be to slip one of them in my bag and stroll off with it.

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Decided to add a progress bar to CWOBber. Let's see if I'm capable of writing Cocoa from memory without having to check online for reference...

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My guess was off by three minutes. Damn and blast.

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Greetings from Deck 7 of the Norwegian Star, and the Internet cafe therein.

Day One. Am depressed and disappointed to find that one of the few things onboard this ship that actually costs you money are Cokes. Fortunately, for $22, you get an unlimited quantity and a cool metal Coke thermos. I intend to make these people rethink the economics of this gesture.

I still don't have any particular sense of being in Hawaii yet. I walked out of the airport and it looked a lot like the area around the airports in San Francisco and San Diego. The cab ride to the pier could have been any seaside industrialized area. And here on the ship, I'm on the ship. I've got my face inside a big bowl of puddin' so it's looks more or less like my living room back home.

Still, I should have this particular issue licked by the end of the week. Tomorrow I shall hike around a volcano. Tuesday I'm going to the beach. Friday I'll be snorkeling amongst the freshest of all seafood. Meanwhile, none of the restaurants and buffets are checking IDs, so a lot of my time is being spent selecting items via tongs and then eating them. "I'll take a third cheeseburger," I thought during my first trip through, "just in case my chair has a short leg." A friend told me that on a cruise ship, you don't stop eating when you get full: you stop when you get tired. I intend to test this. Is man meant to sit in a hot tub eating a strawberry sundae with his right hand while sipping at a blender drink with the left? I intend to test that, too.

Had my first rum drink in a long while this afternoon. That's important: once every two years the riot police have to walk inside a little room and pull the tab on one of their tear gas canisters so they don't lose their respect for that particular experience. Exposing yourself to rum is no less important. Rum is the big fat liar of the bar shelf. Gin, whiskey, and God knows Vodka communicate their potency loud and clear with every sip. You can only drink it as fast as you can breathe, and anyone who's ever drunk a mid-priced whiskey knows that after your first slug, you spend a lot more time exhaling than inhaling.

But I took my first sip of the rum, and it tasted nice, and I take a second sip and that tasted very nice as well. I took a third sip and then realized that this beverage was in violation of Rule 6 of my Liquor Protocol: any drink that tries very, very hard to taste like something other than alcohol is not to be trusted. Nowhere can you find a photo of me standing on top of a pool table buck-naked except for a hastily-improvised Wonder Woman costume: that's because I take Rule 6 very, very seriously indeed.

Attended a welcoming reception for the conference. A buffet was served. Afterwards, six of us were walking back to our staterooms and we passed by a restaurant, so we stopped in for dinner, largely on the basis that while I (for one) had already had three meals, by sitting down and letting the staff serve me a chicken caesar salad and pour me a glass of a very agreeable Sonoma white, I was stimulating the economy and creating jobs.

I'll be posting to my blog irregularly as I go. I don't have to do a damned thing until Tuesday night, and then I don't have to do another damned thing until Friday morning. Surely by the end of the week, the organizers of this so-called "conference" are going to try to sell me a timeshare.

I will close this item by mentioning that I got a genuine glimpse of George Takei today. He was being led into a restaurant while I was walking out of it. Goosebumps, man...goosebumps.

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Cool, man; I'm inside a meeting room on Deck 12 while Sal Saghoian — Apple's Iron Chef of AppleScript — teaches a beginner class on AppleScript Studio.

"But Andy," you ask, "you're telling us this via an application that you wrote with AppleScript Studio. Surely your time would be better spent on Deck 10, where they're inviting grown men to don coconut bikinis and learn to hula?"

"Tsk, tsk," I reply. I am indulgent with you people in a fatherly way. And I hope you appreciate that I mean "fatherly" in the spirit of Ward Cleaver's dad, not Marvin Gaye's.

To explain: I've been scripting for years, but not once have I ever taken a formal class...so there's been nobody to whack my knuckles with a steel ruler and say "Hey, Denny Dimwit! If you encase too much of a handler inside a single 'tell' block, you're going to inadvertantly send events to the wrong applications!!!"

See what I mean? I've never sat down and tried to learn this stuff from ground-zero. It's always been a process of reaching a point in a project when I want to do something that I don't know how to do, and then figuring out how to do it. Step by step by step, you learn and grow competent...and actually, this is how you're supposed to learn AppleScript. It's not a language for people interested in a new religion. It's for people who want to do things and then move on with their glamorous lifestyles.

But there's a hole in this methodology: you can't learn about something unless you know about it first. It's an obvious catch-22. "You know what would really set this app on fire? If I hooked up this button to a Fizbin Collector." Yes, absolutely; the Fizbin is tailor-made for this sort of thing. Write three lines of code that reference two variables, and boom: MacOS starts a new thread that searches for photos of Mary-Elizabeth Mastrantonio and digitally removes her top if necessary.

If you don't know that MacOS 10.2's AppleScript library contains a built-in resource for locating and creating nude photos of the star of such action films as "The Abyss" and "The Perfect Storm," you wind up doing a lot of tedious things yourself.

A simpler example: I'm done using my brand-new "home computer" and I want to turn it off. It occurs to me to yank the power cord out of the wall. I give it a try, and whaddya know: the screen goes blank and the fan on the power supply falls silent. "Cool," I think, and that's what I do three or four times a day for the next eight days, after which I wind up buying another computer. Had I taken a class, someone smarter than me might have pointed out that there's a big illuminated button marked "Power" over yonder...and actually, it's faster just to use the computer's "Sleep" mode instead.

I'm embarrassed to say that this class has already borne fruit. I, uh, didn't know that there's a huge button right in the code editor that builds your app and runs your code. The first time I used Project Builder eons ago and every time thereafter, I did the build-and-run via a menu. I knew there were three fat buttons up in the corner of the window, but I never bothered pushing them.

Now, I'm pushing like a sunuvabitch. Thanks, Sal!

On a non-AppleScript note: "I am on a ship at sea." I need to write that on my hand or something. Last night I was walking around and marvelling that wow, all I drank were a few sips of rum and a glass of white wine, and I'm already a little tipsy. Today, I was worried because geez, all I did this morning was walk around Hilo for an hour or two and I'm still all lightheaded; should I cancel my dinner reservations in the ship's posh Soho Room? I'd hate to be having a stroke and then have to rush through the convulsions and such to ensure that I get to the restaurant on time.

But again: "I am on a ship at sea." It's a huge ship and an extremely steady one, but still, when you take a step you can't count on the floor being exactly where you left it a second ago.

On another non-AppleScript note: I did indeed purchase the Unlimited Access To Coke option. I went to the poolside bar and requested it. The bartender filled up that incredibly cool metal thermos dispenser and handed it to me while he processed the charge. He handed my room card back a minute or two later. I handed him my now-empty thermos, and asked for a refill while I signed the receipt.

The man turned a little pale. The same expression can be seen in the fine feature film "Jackass," when a Hertz franchisee realizes that he has just rented a nice four-foor sedan to Johnny Knoxville.

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Late at night. Finished attending a special dinner for speakers in which everyone was supposed to be wearing tuxedoes, but only I and two other men bothered. And one of those was in a kilt, which only counts for, what, 70%? Can we really trust someone who only dresses from the knees upward?

Which is not to say that I'm sorry I brought the bib-and-tucker. I did not — underscore not — travel 7000 miles to attend a "Black-Tie Optional" dinner wearing the tee shirt I bought at Bubba's Sushi in Huntsville, Alabama.

(Apart from anything else, I wore the latter in the Jacuzzi this afternoon and it's still drip-drying in my shower.)

So now I'm sitting in the game room where speakers from the Mac, Perl, and Trek Cruise are playing a little poker, joined by some fellow from Oklahoma and a newlywed, both of whom were passing by and happened to see a hastily-markered sign hanging in the window. No, I'm not playing. I have a little rule: if before the first deal, none of the players are consulting the little instructional card that comes with the deck, then I know that this is definitely not my sort of table. My kind of poker table is one where at some point, one of the girls asks if shoes count as articles of clothing and if so, if they count as two items or just one.

(A player has drawn "Cowboys With A Bullet," apparently, according to the murmuring around the table. Yes. Sitting out was a very very very good idea.)

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Life Is Hard. I have the photos to prove it:

More later.

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BRUSH WITH TAKEI: Number Three in the series.

Was sitting in on a panel featuring a bunch of former Star Trek castmembers, including Wil Wheaton. Given the choice between a session on Word, a session on iMovie, and sneaking into the CruiseTrek session, well, here I am in the audience listening to George Takei describing the entertainment business as "life, intensified."

(This in response to Wil's comment that he loves acting but hates Hollywood. I read and muchly enjoyed GT's autobiography and am glad to see that he shows as much friendly wisdom "live" as he does after four or five drafts and a rewrite.)

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I am now sitting on the tippy-tippy top deck of the aft end of the ship. I am in an open-air German bar, being served English gin by a Filipino waiter on a Norwegian ship of Bahamian registry headed through international waters; having left the Republic of Kiribati we're now en route back toward America's fiftieth state. As reality-distortion fields go, Steve Jobs would have his work cut out for him to top this one. But he probably wouldn't be prepared to offer me this lovely gin and tonic, so it'd be a bitter loss for Steve.

The rumor (here I cite passengers on the ship as well as the US Naval Observatory) is that sunset will occur in about six minutes. I've been hearing tales of a "green flash" visible on the horizon at sunset; apparently, it's similar to aurora activity. I've no idea whether this is bunkum or not, but at the moment not finding out would require me to leave this chair and the gin and my copy of Ellis Peters' The Confessions Of Brother Haluin..

Apathy is one of the world's leading problems, up there with video late fees that apply before the store's closing time, but when it gets so bad that it leads one to walk away from a perfectly good gin and tonic, it's time to join the Peace Corps.

Oh, another note on Wil Wheaton. I snuck in halfway through his MacMania session on blogging and he said some nicely complimentary things about this here blog. Rock on, Young Geek. Later, he demonstrated a site called Feedster. Many of you will already be familiar with it: it's sort of like a Google for weblogs. So he plugs his own name into it, and the first hit is a blogger's comment that hey! Wil Wheaton is talking about being on a cruise ship and Andy Ihnatko is talking about being on a cruise ship...are they both on the same ship, for different reasons?

The blog has a Comments thingie, and because we both have (a) Internet access and (b) massive inferiority conplexes, we leapt to our keyboards to see who could post the first comment.

Wil won First Post. I congratulated him on that, and left him to discover on his own that while I had a goal in mind, speed wasn't necessarily my prime directive.

For the benefit of Trek fans, I will also point out that during this same session, I lent Chase Masterson my Sanford Uniball Gel Grip pen, and found the young lady to be utterly charming and delightful.

Sun slips below horizon. Sky is resolutely non-green. Probably should have tipped my bartender a little extra to get the sky with the aurora flash thingy. Oh, well.

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Howdy, all!

I'm herre on the ship and I'm demonstrating CWOBber to everyon in my "Programming for Wimps" session.

Say hello to the class, everyone...

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This is a slight pause between two fits of excitement. I spent the morning delivering my two sessions. First up was "Programming For Wimps," in which I discussed, demonstrated and detailed all of the best Rapid Development Environments available for the Mac. (RDE: ie, creating software by drawing pictures of all of the clicky-clickies, scrolly-scrollies, et cetera and then attaching instructions to them, instead of wringing out the code line by line as is more traditional)

I think it went over well. Trouble was, I planned this as a 3-hour session and I had to cut it to 90 minutes owing to a scheduling mishap. I arrived here in Hawaii and got a copy of the final, official MacMania schedule and — oh, fluffernutters — my MacQuarium presentation had been left off. Both myself and the organizers overlooked it when we proofread the sked.

Ordinarily, the simplest thing to do would have been to just allow Fate to play its hand and keep things as they were. But sirs, madams, ladies, gentlemen, and any cats and dogs who have watched enough PBS to have picked up a thing or two, I did not drag two Macs across one continent and halfway across an ocean to just shrug my shoulders and say "Well, what're you gonna do?"

So I managed to edit my presentation down. I hit all of the high points (I demonstrated SuperCard to explain all of the basic concepts of an RDE), and then I ran quickly through REALbasic, AppleScript Studio, and Runtime Revolution while explaining their strengths and their more Adam Sandler-like aspects.

I had hoped to present CWOBber to the group as a case study in non-traditional programming. As it was, I had just five minutes left. I offered the audience some Q&A but they wanted to see how my blogger worked. Proud papa that I am, I complied.

Then I cut a Macintosh to pieces with power tools and converted it into a fish tank. Fun, Fun, Fun 'til Daddy takes the T-Bird away.

Minor Governmental hassles abounded, all associated with the fact that we dock in Maui in an hour or two. Between my sessions I heard an announcement that we all should have dropped off our customs-declaration forms by now. Customs-declaration forms? I ran back to the cabin and found it amongst one of the (great many) piles of brochures and papers that appeared under my cabin's door over the course of the week. I filled it out and slapped it in the slot before MacQuarium Time.

At the end of my second session, I heard an announcement that we were to present ourselves at a certain place at a certain time with our passports so we could be logged back into US soil, the location and time given on the information sheet we had received. Um, we are to present ourselves at...et cetera?

Another upside-downing of the cabin produced no happy results. No doubt my cabin-mate — charming German perl-er — had picked it up and left it someplace where I didn't see it. I phoned the front desk, got my location and time, and was stamped back into my home country.

No, actually, I wasn't. I was looking forward to some big stamping action but was utterly disappointed. This stinks. I technically pounded some foreign soil (the freedom-loving Republic of Kiribati, no less), then came proudly home. That should have earned me two stamps. Yet my passport remains utterly unmolested by government seals.

What will people think? Anyone who sees my passport will think I'm one of those rural high-school seniors who wistfully applies for a passport, knowing that it's all a hollow, optimistic gesture and that they'll be just the latest of four generations of their family who never got out of Duvet County.

So all the bureaucracy is over with. In a half an hour, I quit this place, slip into the ocean, and hassle the local aquatic life with my snorkel and my submersible camera. There seems to be something in all of today's paperwork saying that you're not allowed to ride the sea turtles and if you fill your pockets with exotic fish and try to sneak them back onto the ship they won't let you hear the end of it.

But I bet that's just what they tell the tourists. I'm a licensed and internationally-reknowned oceanographer, at least according to the hat that I had made at the mall last month.

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I dunno; tomorrow is my last full day in Hawaii, and it looks like I might not make my ten bucks.

To wit: The Wager, struck between myself and a friend shortly before I left Boston. Terms are as follows:

IF ANDY IHNATKO SHOULD MEET Jack Lord of "Hawaii Five-Oh" fame, AND he kicks him in the nuts, then he shall COLLECT the sum of ten dollars.

IF ANDY IHNATKO SHOULD MEET Jack Lord of Hawaii Five-Oh" fame, AND he DOES NOT kick him in the nuts, then he shall FORFEIT the sum of ten dollars.

IF ANDY IHNATKO DOES NOT MEET Jack Lord of "Hawaii Five-Oh" fame, the wager shall be declared a PUSH and NO MONEY shall change hands.

SO SWORN BY THE UNDERSIGNED. (signatures)

I thought my odds were at least one-in-eight that Jack Lord and I would cross paths, and I've certainly been keeping my eyes peeled. But unless he's lurking around Kauai tomorrow, I don't think this is going to work out. I had high hopes, but hey, what can you do?

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Greetings from Nawilili, Kauai. I actually have to do a little work this morning before I go off exploring, so I don't have anything to say about this particular island.

But on my way here to the reading room (and the wireless access therein) I passed through the atrium where lots of passengers were preparing to depart. So I will note that when a burly Texan retiree drawls "Nawiliwili" it's one of the most satisfying sequences of vocalizations imaginable.

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OK. I've been in Hawaii for a week now, and while I've made precious little progress in learning the layout of the ship (after days of getting lost, my usual algorithm is now to just pretend that where I wound up is where I meant to go) my Island-Wear Costume has shaped up rather nicely:

Last summer, I commented that I seem to dress like a vacationing clergyman at this time of year. Alas, this photo does nothing to contradict that observation. But try to see my side of this, ladies and gentlemen. Luau shirts come in all colors...at once. If I don't choose a shirt that cohabitates well with the rest of my wardrobe, in three months' time I'll find myself standing behind a folding card table in my front yard and insisting to some stranger that if they took the shirt and the toaster and the bundle of 1993 issues of "Popular Photography," I'd knock eight bucks off the total.

So I'm happy with what I have. But not happy that I'm packed and ready to leave in the morning.

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OK, this will be an experiment to see how good I am at touch-typing. Sorry, I should backtrack: welcome to United Airlines flight 66 to San Francisco. We're in a roomy Boeing 767 this afternoon. The meal is a choice of chicken or pasta; the movie is not really worth your time. ("Shanghai Knights," if you're curious. See? You should trust me more often.)

So the stupid jerk in the seat in front of me heaved a lordly sigh and threw her seat allllll the way back to what can accurately be termed the "luge" position, unaware or uncaring — uncaring. She definitely seems like the sort of person who goes through life wondering why the people around her are always so testy — that there is a human sitting behind her who would like to be able to fill his five hours of flying time with activities other than (a) sitting with his arms tightly folded across his chest, or (b) sitting with his hands raised in the air.

I've finally chosen to extract Lilith from her sleeping bag and am typing with the screen at a 45-degree angle. I can see the keyboard but not the screen, which is the bass-ackward way of writing. But still, new challenges are exercise for new muscles, and it's possible that this new skill will come in handy. Like, when thew judge asks me to demonstrate what I was doing just before I dumped a whole thing of hot tea on her head.

The fact that I'm typing via the Braille method instead of sitting in cushy, leather-upholstered comfort should tip you off that I am not flying home first-class as I had hoped. First was full, so fakers like me — who are neither industry magnates nor fabulous stars of stage and radio — were not presented with the opportunity to use some of their miles.

But am disappointed? Hell, no. By the sort of stroke of random chance that only happens in sitcoms, the seat I chose a month ago is in the middle of the Little Cupertino district of this aircraft. Here I am in seat 22-F. Tom and Dori, my fellow MacMania instructore, are right next door in seats H and J (there is no Seat G). In 21 H and J are Sal, Apple's Iron Chef of AppleScript and his fiancee, who (a) reps a lot of the coolest Mac software out there and (b) has a name that I suddenly am second-guessing myself on.

(Terrible thing, isn't it? I could type her name right now. But something is telling me that no, you idiot, that's just what you've always thought her name is. I'm hypersensitive to this now because in an earlier post I referred to Chase Masterson as "Gates McFadden." You have just seen an effective demonstration of my "Star Trek" ignorance, sensation-seekers. I didn't really watch "Deep Space Nine" (Chase's show) and mentally substituted the name of the actress who played the ship's doctor on "Next Generation."

Not an unreasonable faux-pas. Gates-Chase, McFadden-Masterson. But the woman has a name and she's entitled to expect people to use it correctly. Besides, we've taken the first step in a long sequence of events that shall ultimately lead to our spending a couple of hours in Target selecting a china pattern together, so it's best that I not make any serious whoops-a-daisies at such an early juncture.

(Well, again, I should stress that we are at a very early stage in our relationship. Specifically, she now knows that I exist. But you can't ignore history: many of my most rewarding relationships with women only really got off the ground after the ladies in question became aware that I existed. If that little tidbit isn't in the Millennium Edition of "How To Pick Up Girls," it ought to be.)

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Back home. Imagine my disgust to discover that the City of Boston still hasn't gotten the memo regarding the expected correlation between the month of June and warm weather.

Several people have emailed to inform me that Jack Lord has, in fact, been dead for five years. All I can say is that the old guy I saw in Malaekahana really, really looked like him.

Well, regardless, I fully intend to return my friend's ten bucks. I'd feel really guilty otherwise, you know?

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Home Again, Day 2. On Monday I got back to the house, dropped my bags someplace inconvenient, sloped up to the bedroom and changed out of the clothes that I'd worn in 12 hours' worth of taxis, airports, and waiting-areas. They looked like they'd been pulled out of a dumpster. They smelled like they'd been tossed in there two days earlier, on the body of a state health inspector who had picked the wrong restaurant to cite for improperly-refrigerated condiments.

So I took off my Hawaiian luau shirt and changed into the first clean tee shirt in the drawer: my Alaskan Iditarod shirt. This had been a public service message from your local Chamber of Commerce. Remember, folks, Cheap Irony remains your greatest Irony Value.

It does remind me of one of the many benefits of having done the MacMania cruise. It was my first experience on a cruise ship, yes, a free luxury vacation, that's another good one, hanging out with friends for a week...surely there's nothing greater than that. But now that the cruise is behind me, my eye is drawn to the fact that I've already been to Alaska. And once you've knocked off Alaska and Hawaii, you've got the two most difficult-to-get-to states behind you.

I couldn't help getting my map case off the shelf and pulling out my laminated Rand McNally EasyFinder map of the United States. Alaska: check. Hawaii: check. Massachusetts, obviously. California, Texas, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia...I'm well on my way. Even if I decide that a state doesn't count unless I've spent the night there, and even if I choose to include Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, I'm a quarter of the way to having slept in every state.

(Why include U.S. principalities? Because that'll give me 52 which means I can say "I have now completed one entire suit in my Deck Of The United States Playing Cards." The diamonds are behind me. Onward to the clubs.)

The only true hitch in completing this task is the fact that I live in New England. If you're from, say, Wisconsin, New England is a dream site. Fly to Boston. Have your picture taken in front of the Cheers bar and then spend the night. Rent a car. Overnight in Maine, get lobster. Overnight in New Hampshire, hike in the White Mountains. Overnight in Vermont, look at cows. Cross Massachusetts and overnight in Connecticut, where you look at white people. Onward to Rhode Island where you get a bad tattoo, and the next morning you're back in Boston where you return the car and board a plane, having crossed six states off your Life List in as many days.

Of course, I live here so it's hard to justify taking a hotel room just an hour away from my house. The only way I can really do it is to get drunk in every New England state and decide that I'm in no shape to drive home. And what fun is that?

Well, anyway. Maybe I'll finish my deck of cards, maybe I won't. I have put a little red dot on all of the states I've already hit. With time and with luck and with a lot of groups in Midwestern states eager to bring me in to give talks, who knows. It's a worthy goal, and a productive one. As you make your way through life you're writing the first line of your obituary, whether you know it or not. Visiting every state or creating the World's Largest Ball Of Twine or becoming Secretary of Agriculture will bump anything else to Paragraph Two or Three, which is an important thing to keep in mind if at some point in your past you were at a Red Sox game and the beer guy over-served you and you became the first spectator to vomit over the side of the Green Monster onto the head of an outfielder.

The process of unpacking and decompressing continues apace. And now comes the wonderful new tradition of modern travel: the daily arrival of digital photos from people you met and hung out with. For instance, here's me on the boat to Molokini Crater, demonstrating the wrong way to put on a mask if you're snorkeling, but the right way to do it if you're the Boy Wonder (photo courtesy of Close Personal Friend Bob LeVitus):

And here I am on deck with Lilith as the ship's docked in Maui. We are just about to take a massive group photo of the MacMania bunch. Note that I am manfully managing to have a good time despite the fact that I'm in Hawaii on a luxury cruise liner (photo courtesy of CPF and CP-Editor Jason Snell):

More to come, after I fold my laundry, pick up my mail, and fight off the slings and arrows of outrageous deadlines.

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Greetings from the Pour House, a slightly dive-ey little bar/restaurant on...on...well, I don't know the name of the street but it's the one that goes from the Berklee College of Music past the Hynes Convention Center, the Boston Public Library, the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and ultimately the Public Gardens and Boston Common.

(Between the end of that sentence and its punctuation, a very reasonably-priced Turkey Club platter is delivered by a very reasonably-cute waitress, which gives the place twice as much of a recommendation as any sensible person would require.)

Yes, I'm in downtown Boston. Yes, I'm a native Bostonian; if you stop someone for directions and they can name every street and every intersection, thank the man and then go ask someone else. A true native navigates through experience and landmarks, not through map learnin'.

Spent the morning in a meeting with the VP of a Well-Known Company, who showed me a Very Cool Thing that will be released shortly. I am under NDA on the VCT, so I must hide behind acronyms. But I'll tell you that as soon as I saw the VCT I felt confident that I was wise to invest $6.25 (MBTA parking plus Green Line fare both ways) in keeping this appointment.

(And I damned-near didn't. There I was, sitting in one of the sumptuous leather chairs in the lobby of the Westin Hotel at Copley Place. I had Lilith in my lap and was answering email. My freak-flag was flying rather high...so why hasn't the VP/WKC spotted me? He was...golly...ten minutes late, and usually these people are right on time, and that's roughly when it occurred to me that I was the idiot in this particular equation. Copley Place is an enormous retail/hotel complex, and I was actually supposed to be meeting him in the lobby of the Marriott across the way.

"It's an honest mistake," I thought, as I tossed Lilith back in her sleeping bag and started jogging. Speed wouldn't make me any less late, of course, but it would ensure that I'd be disheveled and out-of-breath when I got there, which is all I truly expect by way of apology from a late person. I don't know why, but it seems like everyone who comes to Boston to give me a briefing meets me in Copley Place. By coincidence, I have another meeting in that location with a different company. Hence the brain-burp; I was thinking of my next meeting, not my current one.

Still, it all worked out OK in the end. I got my brief, thanked those in attendance, and withdrew from the conference room, quickly finding myself right in the hornet's nest as it were. Providing that the developers and marketers of electronic sensors and actuators (holding an industry conference elsewhere on that same floor) can be compared to hornets, which is admittedly a bit of a stretch. I may be making a snap-judgement, but I think if you introduced a dragonfly into this environment you'd have about a hundred spectacled geeks in cheap suits running around, flapping their arms frantically and desperately fishing through pockets for their inhalers.

I'm not often in a position where I can say "I am the true badass of this group," but I must be fair and honest in my reportage so there it is.

It turned out to be one of those Lovely Days that makes you want to never move away from the Boston area. It's gray and overcast and those of us who've lived in New England for more than 14 months were able to smell a certain whatsit in the air and are carrying umbrellas. But I exited Copley Square to hear the distant strains of "Rhapsody On A Theme By Paganini" and after briefly following the flow of traffic I found myself near a grand-piano set up in the plaza adjoining Trinity Church, as part of a series of lunchtime concerts sponsored by a local classical station.

Lots of folks seemed to be enjoying tubs of steaming Legal Seafoods Chowder. Again I followed the traffic and found myself standing in front of a covered table and gratefully accepting an ample free sample. By the time I applied a shot of Tabasco and exited — LSF chowder is good, reliable stuff, but it lacks a certain ambition and benefits from a little liquid heat — the pianist was joined by a violinist and was playing something I couldn't identify but of which I heartily approved.

And so I now find myself sitting here alongside a (cooling) sandwich and fries. When the Good Lord (apply this term to the deity or non-deity of your choice) sends you consistent, clear signals, it's best to obey. I shall take my time returning home, and will do my utmost to play the part of the idle downtown boulevardier today.

Thy will be done!

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Oh, for God's sake. No. Tell me that I'm not considering implementing Moveable Type's TrackBack protocol.

I don't use it. I'll be honest and say that I don't even completely understand it. I know it allows folks to follow discussion of a topic across multiple blogs but it doesn't scream out "Man! This makes my blog 10^23 times more effervescently cool!" like RSS did.

But I have just learned that it's an open standard, and not something that can only be done on Moveable Type blogs. And someone's just punked me out for having a blog without trackback.

Rrgh. I probably won't move on this anytime soon. I'm committed to improving CWOBber's infrastructure and tossing in more features for its operator.

(Like, I want to change the way CWOBber stores or indexes blog entries. I have misspelled "TrackBack" as "TrakBack" so here I am, editing the file manually in BBEdit. And because it's the newest item, I also have to apply this change to the blog's "top" page. Oh, what a dream world it would be if CWOBber kept the text of every single item, and I could edit and refresh the blog with a single click. )

Still, I hate having access to all of the details concerning a popular open standard and then just letting it sit there. As an influential industry pundit, it's my duty to champion open standards, just on general principle.

(But OK, chiefly it's a stupid Guy Thing about being punked out. Damned punker-outers...)

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The PR sheet claimed that these handsets have three watts of broadcast power, resulting in an maximum optimal range of about...yikes...seven miles. What's a geek to do?

I can tell that you're a step ahead of me. Yes, a geek goes upstairs to his equipment locker and extracts the pouch contining his MiniDisc gear. Ten minutes later, one of these handsets was sitting on my front porch with a lavolier mic taped to it, while its twin was in the front seat of my car as I drove off, barking out time, distance, and landmarks as I went. I kept this up all the way to my self-storage unit, some five or six miles off.

Later in the day, the MiniDisc was in the front seat and I listened to the playback through my car stereo. The verdict: its transmission was clear as a bell up to about three quarters of a mile, and then it started to taper off. Up until a mile and a quarter I could still make out what I was saying.

Not bad. Naturally, the advertised range info on a radio is only literally true when you're operating within line-of-sight of the receiver. It also helps if you're communicating within line of sight and between two orbiting spacecraft with nothing but hard vacuum between you. In a real-world test, getting a clear signal through a mile of dense New England hills, trees, and suburban buildings ain't bad. And I've never used a GMRS-band radio before so it's entirely possible that I had it set to the wrong mode or something.

But wait: I haven't gotten to the important bit yet. The signal went away after about five or six minutes of driving, leaving about forty minutes of backyard noises.

I listened to every last minute. Why? Well, just in case someone had been murdered in my neighborhood while I was out. It's a really good microphone and if I accidentally recorded the only evidence that the crime had occurred, I could be tumbling headfirst into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. And the sooner you get cracking on that sort of thing, the better.

OK. I think you've got everything you need. Keep all that in mind as you continue to read through the archives. So: welcome. And y'all come back now, y'hear?

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Welp, the good thing about a heavy travel schedule is that packing for a trip is a snap. Take the clothes out of the dryer, stick them back into their mesh packing cubes, and toss them back into the suitcase where the shaving kit and the Bag-O-Chargers-N-Cables(tm) have taken up permanent residence. Zip, snap, and you're back out of the house.

This trip came upon me like the activation of a National Guard unit. I was well-prepared to give MacHack 2003 a miss. Take a look at my bed or my sofa if you don't believe me: both are in perfect working order and well-set for four days of intense loafing, with the occasional interruption by the need to maybe write a little something from time to time. I even flopped all the sofa cushions over: yes indeed, I intended to make a thorough job of not attending MacHack.

This Era of Good Feelings lasted until Friday, when people started asking me to attend. Before I could say "You couldn't pay me to leave the house right now," they offered to do just that and during that moment of weekness that always follows the promise of filthy luchre, I consented.

So off I go to Detroit, having swapped one tropical paradise for another. "I really don't feel like I'm back from Hawaii yet," I told a friend the other day. Well, a few hours in Michigan ought to solve that little problem.

(C'mon. Take that puss off your face. If one of you Michiganers were still taking fond, lingering glances at the Maui keychain dangling from your ignition and Wanted To Go Back To Your Little Grass Shack In Kealakekua, Hawaii, and you found yourself headed for eastern Massachusetts instead, you'd feel the exact same way. And if you told me about it, I'd be nothing but sympathetic.)

As if that weren't bad enough, I have to protect myself from that thick purple cloud of insanity that occasionally blows in through an open window and causes people to do stupid, stupid things. Apple has invited me to Steve Jobs' keynote at WWDC. Monday morning. MacHack ends late (late) Saturday night. There's a snowball's chance in hell that I could find a dirt-cheap flight on Sunday and actually attend the thing. And (no doubt due to faulty weatherstripping around that closed and bolted window) I'm thinking "Well, a snowball's chance is better than no chance at all, isn't it?"

Apple has also been very aggressive about my attending the opening of their new store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound: I could go from Detroit to San Jose to Chicago. Make a mini-tour of it. I was planning to go to Chicago later in the summer anyway, y'know, and with the frequent-flier miles that I didn't spend on first-class upgrades on the Hawaii trip...

I really must fix that window.

The packing took a microsecond but there are bigger hassles ahead. My ISP's security certificates are screwed up, which means that if I use the (megahypersuperdouble-plus-good) MacHack wireless network, I'll be sending my passwords in cleartext. Which is megahypersuperdouble-plus-ungood at a conference filled with clever people. No ETA on the site certificates, which gets me steamed because usually, The World gives me way better service than this.

And of course, until it's all fixed I can't get my email in Detroit unless I'm tied to dialup access. "Shouldn't," actually, but in this case Can't and Shouldn't are interchangeable. The Prime Directive of security is to always assume that (a) evil lurks among you unseen and undetected, and more importantly (b) it's smarter than you are. So while there are workarounds to the problem, I shouldn't trust that they couldn't be circumvented.

Oh, well. MacHack is always fun, and with no real responsibilities other than to jot down a thought or observation if I don't think I'll remember when I sit down to write up my column later, it amounts to a working vacation. I'm inside a bubble of kick-butt high-speed Internet, I have access to as much sugar and caffeine as can be safely metabolized under Earth gravity, and I'm with cool people who lead compatible lifestyles. They're certainly not the sort of people who'll overreact if you return to your room at 3 AM, tune your new ukulele, and spend the remaining pre-dawn hours trying to finally nail down the chords to the intro of "Pinball Wizard."

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Well, here's one for the record books: I'm at MacHack, and my access to the 'net is even worse than it is at home.

Every year the organizers and volunteers do a bang-up job of taking a moderately-priced Holiday Inn near a highway offramp and turning it into a veritable fulcrum of megahypersupermodern intra and extra-net connectivity. But every year they have to start from scratch, and they have to start with what's there when they arrive. I don't know what changed here at the Holiday Inn Fairlane between last June and now, but whatever it is, the best connectivity anyone can manage is easily surpassed by the hiring of local schoolkids as runners.

(Updated version of the last act of "A Christmas Carol." Scrooge, having finished his component of a piece of software due to be demonstrated at tonight's Hacks Show, calls down from the balcony in the hotel atrium.

"You! You there, boy!"

"'Eh?"

"Do you know the server in the ballroom? The big dual-G4 Quicksilver tower?"

"Wot, the one as big as me?"

"(Such a wonderful boy! Such an intelligent boy!) Yes, the one as big as you! I want you to take this disc I've just burned and put it in its upper CD tray! Come back in less than five minutes and I'll give you a shilling! If it's on the server in less than one minute, I'll give you half a crown!"

"Glory be! Whoosh!")

So the connection is slow, and it's occasionally clobbered entirely due to the presence of many, many Very Smart People here at MacHack. Many of them have a Clever Way of getting a solid, stable connection. Alas, about five dozen other people have equally clever ideas, and these Clever Tricks are bonking heads like the Three Stooges two seconds after spotting a half-smoked cigar on the sidewalk.

Complicating these matters is the ongoing trouble with my ISP's security certificate. Viz, they ain't got one. This means that if I use the show's network, I'll be exposing my email password every time I connect. And because I never bothered to implement secure FTP in my blogger app, I can't post to my blog, either.

Back home, I have piss-poor 'net access, but I get 56K and full functionality anywhere in the house or the yard. I only have that sort of thing here in my room.

In a word: Oy. I'm so flurmed by this that I elect to use the optional postscript "gevalt" as well. The lesson here is that net access has two and only two important characteristics: speed and reliability. If you have to choose between a slow network that's rock-steady and a zippy one that keeps blinking in and out, Reliable wins every time.

So I hope I'll be able to post more stuff later. Until then, I'll just tell you that this is Jumpsuit Week at MacHack. I came up with the idea. I also implemented it and am the only one who's doing it, probably because I'm the only one I actually went and told. So while maybe it's a little foolish to be the only one here dressed like a member of a prison work detail, I can take serene pride in the fact that my overall response rate was 100%...with a 100% of all leads resulting in a sale. This is a dazzling feat of targeted marketing which any seasoned businessman should respect.

(Photos? Not until Jumpsuit Week is over.)

Two notes, though: I still don't know if I'll be headed to California for WWDC, or on to Chicago for the opening of the new Apple Store. The game definitely has a new dimension, however. My connecting flight from Philadelphia to Detroit was one of those little Buddy Holly-style commuter planes, and after everyone climbed on board and put on their leather helmets and goggles, it was announced that the flight was over-weight. A call for volunteers was raised and I shot my hand up so fast that my fingernails tore through the doped muslin cloth making up the roof of the aircraft.

Yes, a 70-minute wait for the next flight out resulted in a free roundtrip anytime in the next year. My policy regarding free roundtrips is that they absolutely must be used foolishly. I use my miles to go visit friends, or see if there's any good ice cream in Oregon, for instance. I certainly do not use apply them towards a trip to the Seybold conference.

That would be wrong. There, I've said it.

It looks very much like Apple won't be sending Steve Jobs' Gulfstream here to pick me up. Which is a shame, because it also looks as though Steve's gonna deliver the big Last Days of Babylon-style keynote which by all rights he should be giving at Macworld Expo next month. But making it to Chicago for the Apple Store opening is a real possibility.

Hmm.

Those of you who have access to the four main broadcast networks might find this Sunday's edition of "CBS Sunday Morning" of interest. A producer was on there on the Geek Cruise a couple of weeks ago and was shooting material for this upcoming story. He shot a troubling amount of footage of me. One possibility is that I exude the sort of quiet yet unquestionable power and confidence that translates convincingly to audiences.

But it's rather more likely because I decided that I wasn't about to let a guy with a video camera ruin my luxury cruise around Hawaii. Was I not going to end my first big presentation the way I'd planned to? Was I not going to enjoy myself during Karaoke Night? Was I going to stay out of the Jacuzzi?

So suffice to say that with selective editing, I might come off looking like a major snickerdoodle.

Still I say that my logic was sound. If folks come up and comment on my rendition of "I Got You Babe," I will quickly state that I was on one of the largest cruise ships in service, travelling around some of the most beautiful waters on the planet, and having a marvellous time. It will be said with such assuredness as to refuse any argument on the point.

But if I had to tell people "Well, I wore my suitjacket whenever I was outside my cabin, and while there was this really inviting-looking pool on the ship, I was worried about what my hair would look like on national television" I leave myself open to the most intense abuse. And if someone merely nodded agreement, simple honor would require me to hand him or her an index card with selections of pre-written ridicule and invite them to dive right in.

Well, I've read and answered all of my email. By delightful coincidence, the PBS station here was airing "After The Thin Man," which is certainly one of my 20 favorite movies. It has now ticked over into "Are You Being Served." The Hacks Show begins in about an hour so I must reboot my interpersonal conversational interface, get back into Jumpsuit Three, and rejoin the land of the Humans.

One last comment: the reason why every hotel in Dearborn is completely booked out this week — sending me into a panic, as I didn't commit to this trip until last Friday — is because Detroit is hosting a national convention of Baptists.

Which has lead to one or two changes here at MacHack. Usually, there are enormous tubs filled with ice and cans of Coke scattered around the lobby. Well, they've been moved inside, next to the servers, to defend them from little Baptist kids who react the same way little Catholic kids do when they see an unlimited supply of unguarded ice-cold Coke within reach. I speak of my own upbringing. My parents and my Church brought me up right, but extremism in the name of folic acid is no vice, surely.

I had an alternative suggestion: if all these people are Baptists, couldn't we just replace all of the soda with beer and hard lemonades? If they're real Baptists then they won't be drinking, and if they do grab one of our beverages, we report him to the Head Baptist, he gets thrown out of the hotel, and then we have another room available. A win-win.

I was told that this was an excellent idea and that they would totally get to work on it right away. See? Captain Helpful...that's me.

This has also led to two handy catchphrases. The first was something that I came up with somewhere during the taxi ride to the Holiday Inn. I was listening to the local news through my pocket TV-band radio, and learned that parts of Michigan were under martial law owing to ongoing rioting. "Ten days ago I was in Hawaii," I thought. "So why am I here?"

But that quickly gave way to Catchphrase Two, usefully employed whenever you're doing something that's attracted suspicious attention.

I am not currently engaged in any uncommon activity. I am merely a simple Baptist, like yourself.

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Autumn must give way to winter; Baseball season becomes football season; the little plastic deli container of seafood salad that you accidentally left on top of the fridge inexorably progresses from Tasty to Weapons-Grade as the days stretch on. Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy; nothing gold can stay.

To describe it in terms that can be understood by people who are ignorant of adolescent fiction: Change blows.

TiVO continues to dutifully record The Bob Newhart Show for me each and every day. But when I came home from Michigan I discovered that Bob's apartment had changed...and it was no upgrade. The classic edition certainly looked a bit dated, sure, but it certainly wasn't so Seventies-ish that it forced you to you take a moment to reflect upon what life must have been like during the Ford-Carter Era. And why should it have? If you were watching the show during its first run, you could just raise the window and listen to the sound of exploding Pintos. If you're watching it on TV Land like me, you can go to Blockbuster and a few hours later you'll realize that damn, even with $60,000,000 budgets, modern digital effects, and extended running times that allow for complex stories and deeper characterization, "Scooby-Doo" and "Charlie's Angels" are still silos of unmitigated, high-density crap. Whether you live in the Seventies or in the 2K's the sentiment is the same: "Man, I can't wait for the Seventies to be over."

Dr. Robert Hartley's new digs are like what a modern art director would design for a film that takes place in the Seventies. When a scene shifts to Paris, a director can't resist cutting in an establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower; the same quirk of neurochemistry compels set designers to put a random fake-brick wall, a milk can full of enormous floofy dried grass-things, and a big pelt-like slab of macrame into every Seventies apartment. There are pills you can take to counter this problem but they inhibit cerebral vasomotor reactivity and thus they're only prescribed to those most severely afflicted.

So at least the modern set designers have an excuse. What explanation can the guy who redesigned the Bob Newhart Show set offer? "I asked myself 'What would be a good expression of conservative, smart style for a successful psychologist?' and I must confess that this was indeed the answer I came up with" is one. A better one would be "Back then, pot and cocaine were thought to be in the same recreational category as beer or wine. We just didn't know."

Ghastly stuff. And a fairly melancholy sight, besides. A quick look through a Bob Newhart Show Episode Guide reveals that this new set was built when Newhart unexpectedly decided that he wanted do a sixth season after all. So the enormous rust-colored sofa isn't just an abomination of interior design: it's like the alien mothership hovering over the White House in "Independence Day." As if the mere sight weren't distressing enough, you also know that in just a few seconds...boom.

Oh, well. I'm resigned to the fact that in just a few weeks, my relationship with The Bob Newhart Show will undergo a fundamental shift. The entire show's about to reach "Wunware" status. "Oh, this is the one where Bob's college buddy comes into town." "Isn't this the one where one of the members of Bob's therapy group dies?" "Hot diggety! This is the one where Bob spends Thanksgiving with Howard, Jerry, and Mr. Carlin!"

(And yes, Episode 83 merits the use of that phrase. If anything, "Hot Diggety" is woefully inedequate for conveying the grandeur of Episode 83.

In fact, for the rest of the summer you can look forward to hearing me saying things like "That's good choweder. I mean, Episode 83, man...this is gooood chowder!" I think anyone who remembers the scene where Bob gets hammered and then tries to order Chinese food will understand that any observation which invokes Episode 83 must have some pretty powerful emotion behind it. End of aside.)

A great sitcom will always be a great sitcom, of course, but the sight of Bob Newhart in a Zorro costume (Episode 124) only has its proper impact when it comes as a surprise.

The new opening-credits sequence makes up for the aforementioned melancholia, though. You get more of those wide shots of Dr. Hartley on the sidewalks of downtown Chicago, walking to work. It's all shot during normal commuting hours, by inobtrusively-sited cameras placed across the street. Dr. Hartley walks through sidewalks filled with unsuspecting Chicagoans and here and there you'll see a few people snapping out of their numb commutes. Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish...wasn't that Bob Newhart?!?

There's another shot that interests me, although it's been in the opening credits for a long while. Dr. Hartley is standing at the curb. The light changes, and he crosses the street alongside dozens of other people. But just before that, a man in sunglasses leans over and says something to him, provoking a smile. I imagine that it was something along the lines of "Hey, did anyone ever tell you that you look a lot like Bob Newhart?" but it's still interesting. He also gets credit for being the one guy out of nearly a hundred who (a) thought it was pretty cool to be bumping into Bob Newhart but (b) was able to make that comment without ruining the shot. He should have won a two-year lease on a new El Camino or something for exhibiting that sort of gumption and clear-headedness under fire.

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For the past couple of days I've smelled like Gillette Foamy, which is dashed distracting because it's not my normal scent and I keep wondering if there's a murderer standing right behind me. I switched to an electric shaver years ago and never looked back; I discovered that when you eliminate 80% of the steps from the standard Wet, Lather, Shave, Rinse, and Dry procedure, you get a few extra minutes each and every morning. And before you email me: yes, I could have achieved the same effect by adding several hundred million tons of mass to the planet, thus decreasing its rate of spin. But this little Norelco thingie only set me back about fifty bucks. I put that other solution out for bid and you wouldn't believe what a contractor expects to get for that kind of job.

The one big hitch with electric shavers is that sweaty skin reacts to them about as well as it does to a floor buffer. So during these days of punitively-high humidity spend a few days rekindling my analog shaving skills. And I smell like Gillette Foamy for half the day, instead of a mixture of ozone and Coke.

I'll be back on the electric soon enough, I hope. Every afternoon I dump a couple of spoonfuls of Lipton Iced Tea Mix into a glass and leave it on the kitchen table. If it isn't ready to drink in ten minutes, then I know the humidity has subsided to a reasonable level and I can reclaim those few minutes of my morning.

I think I'm gonna get a travel-size thing of Foamy and put it in my satchel's little red pouch of aspirin and earplugs and other emergency stuff. It could easily save my life if I ever get lost in the Yukon and am twelve seconds away from succumbing to hypothermia: I'll just pop the top off the can and smear some of it under my nose. See, the smell ought to bamboozle my brain into thinking it's 95 degrees outside with 82% humidity. "Why am I shutting down vital organs?" it'll think. "It says right here in the Ops Manual that in weather like this, Andy needs to be awake and alert so he can maintain a relentless barrage of bitching about how damp and uncomfortable he is!"

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Okay, I'm sorry about last week's false alarm re: your ability to see me on CBS Sunday Morning on Sunday morning on CBS. I was given bad information. It's still on CBS Sunday Morning, but it's Sunday morning, not last Sunday morning.

My apologies to anyone who was confused by last week's announcement. The broadcast date has changed but I'm pretty sure that they didn't spend the extra week trying to make me look less like an idiot.

(That is, assuming that I made the final cut at all. But given that TV is a visual medium and the phrase "Mac Geeks" is right in the title of the piece, I think it's a pretty safe bet.)

In other video news, my Director/Producer on the TackyShirt project informs me that he will have the finished, final, shipping product in his hands next week. Said product being Volume 1 of a multi-part DVD instructional series on Mac OS X. It's been a long, hard haul — for Sam, not for me — and so if you'd like to hit the TackyShirt site and regale him with uplifting tales of life in the outside world, hey, that'd be swell of you.

"Two griddle cakes with the taste of maple syrup baked right in."

The first time I heard it, I barely processed the words. Chiefly, I was distracted by this breakthrough in Calories Per Bite technology. I mean, don't get me wrong: put me in front of a 2,000-calorie breakfast and I'll know exactly what to do with it. But why would I want to combine gluttony and efficiency? Pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage and cheese are meant to be lingered over. If this meal is going to take four days off of your life, shouldn't it be worth at least 90 minutes of your morning?

The second, third, fourth, and fifth times I saw the commercial for McDonald's new McGriddles Breakfast Sandwich — all during a single episode of "American Chopper," incidentally — I grew increasingly concerned. Why would anyone try so hard to avoid saying "pancakes with syrup" directly? Why are they sort of dancing around it and using qualifiers?

By now I've seen the ad about thirty times and I'm pretty sure that they say "griddle cakes with the taste of maple syrup" because "the sweet flesh of the unliving" didn't test well at the Mall Of America focus group.

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Home from another trip, though this one was rather less ambitious than what I've become used to. It merely involved a forty minute drive to the home of two-thirds of my existing inventory of nephews. No luggage, no passports, no complicated connecting flights...really, it was all a little discombobulating. I didn't feel secure with this mode of travel until I made a quick pit stop at a 7-11 and returned to my car with half a can of Pepsi, four mini-pretzels, and the sense of calm that only descends upon a seasoned traveller after he's spent ten minutes waiting in line behind a parade of complete idiots.

I brought Lilith along for the ride. My nephews have incredibly good broadband and this was a great chance to test out iChatAV and the iSight camera that Apple sent me the other day:

I'm not normally a fan of chat, AV or otherwise. I've always felt that chat combines the worst aspects of email and the telephone. You get all the hassle of having to write out everything you want to say, with none of the emotion or inflection that's built-in with the human voice. "A real geek doesn't use chat," I insist. "A real geek gets so much email, and answers it so quickly, that IRC is utterly superfluous."

I can see how iChatAV can become addictive, though. I clicked on Bob in my buddy list. At some point during the evening, he came into his office, saw that there was a chat pending, clicked, and we're videoconferencing. Though "videoconferencing" seems like a shabby term. Audio and video are incredibly crisp and the only thing vc-ish about the experience is iChat's difficulty coping with Bob and me talking at the same time.

iChatAV is the first videoconferencing that's been worth the effort. IE, there's not a whole lot of advantage to being able to see the person you're talking with, so this thing had better be bloody trivial to set up and operate. It is. It's like something out of "Aliens," or some other sci-fi movie in which the art director chose to say "Holy Cow are we ever in the future...golly!" by having characters communicate via videophone. Click, talk, hang up. Yeah, that'll do.

It also has to be said that the iSight has one important feature that truly sets it apart: you twist a ring in front of the camera and a bright-white shutter irises over the lens, physically blinding the camera and leaving no question that one is now free to get naked and start clog-dancing with all due abandon.

Oh, and I finally burned through the rest of the film on my analog camera. There were shots of Copley Square, and pasting 'em together resulted in a semi-panorama that wasn't totally boring. So it's been scanned and attached to the appropriate item in this month's archives.

Speaking of naked clog-dancing, the "CBS Sunday Morning" segment on the Mac Geeks Cruise aired today and your correspondent escaped with dignity quite intact. The karaoke didn't make the cut, nor did the cameraman catch me in Sal Saghoian's class with a plateful of buffet hamburgers in my lap. And while they did show a bit from my big Tuesday-night presentation, it was a dignified, professorial shot that ran under a voice-over identifying me as a Celebrity Author, not a shot from the end, in which I was conveying a rather dramatic level of enthusiasm for my topic, shall we say.

(That alone didn't concern me. What concerned me was that for complicated reasons I had to wear my tuxedo pants, which had to be worn with suspenders. I haven't seen the footage in question but I imagine that you can't wear suspenders and bounce around the stage like that without someone assuming you'll be smashing watermelons with a giant hammer later on in the hour.)

So I'm happy with the way the thing turned out. It's wrong to be too concerned with appearing on television and it's wrong to be overly non-concerned in a situation like that. What I got was an excuse for plenty of friends to say "Hey! I saw you on TV this morning!" so it was a Big Win.

The strangest thing happened, though. This is the first time I've seen video from the trip and it really filled me with a melancholy feeling of whatsit. It put me back in Hawaii, where the sky was so blue and the water was even more so. How the ship made a constant sound of sshhhhshhsSSHHSHHHSHhshhshhshsSHHHSHHSHH as it plodded through the Pacific. How the birds and the trees were all dead-common as far as tropical varieties go, but distractingly exotic to a lifelong New Englander. How even the simple act of ordering a take-out cheeseburger in Kauai made me feel happy and at peace.

Convenience stores keep the cheap tatty things next to the register because you're only five seconds from drinking that lovely bottle of Coke and thus your sales resistance is at a low ebb. Convenience stores in Hawaii are no exception, as my new Kauai keychain attests. Even before this latest addition, my key-ring looked like a slightly downscaled version of what would happen if you only had six minutes to disassemble and pack a Christmas tree; it's a large and fairly dense ball of shiny things and blinking lights. But the Kauai keychain swings freely under the main tangle and it almost always provokes a little smile when I spot it dangling from the ignition.

Trust me...I came home with a bunch of souvenirs. I'll never know how profoundly my life would have been affected if I'd actually bought the concert-size ukulele that I spent so much time admiring. But as-is, the keychain is an absolute world-beater in terms of mainland lifestyle-enhancement.

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Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents copyright © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.