Talk talk Talk talk Talk talk TALK...

Sunday, July 10 2:24 AM

Took a drive tonight, during which I ran through the keynote I'll be giving at Macworld Expo on Tuesday morning. I've written a brand-new show; up until Friday I was going to include a little tried-and-true thing I refer to as "The Killer Finish" but now even that's been thrown out. This is going to be 100% new material.

Which is why I've performed the keynote twice this week, for an audience consisting exclusively of the Richard Nixon figurine on my dashboard. It's good stuff from start to finish but I won't have the foggiest clue about how long it'll take to run through it all until I actually run through it all. Audience reaction tonight was mixed. No audible cheers, but no booing and not a single walkout, either. Let's declare that one a Push. Time-wise, I'm still in trouble: my hourlong keynote clocked in at about an hour ten tonight, which means that in a real ballroom filled with hundreds of people, I'd probably have gone at least twenty minutes over.

So! Away goes the Killer Finish, no matter how absolutely reliable it's proven in the past. There's another section that's green and glowing all of a sudden, so I suspect that it won't be long for this world, either.

I spent part of last night reading Ernie Pyle columns and I find myself identifying closely with the infantrymen fighting in the European theater of WW II. They arrive with packs filled with gear that seemed absolutely necessary during basic training, but as the reality of carrying your entire world with you from battle to battle sets in, the mess kit and the entrenching tool and anything else that cannot serve the soldier's Prime or Secondary Directives of "Staying alive" and "Killing other people before they can interfere with the previous Directive" get tossed away and forgotten. And is anybody raising money to build an enormous memorial to me in downtown DC? There's a reason why technology pundits are referred to as "America's Invisible Heroes."

One bit of terrific news came this afternoon, though: A Certain Something that I fervently wanted to show off during my keynote will indeed be finished on Sunday, given to FedEx on Monday, and will be delivered at 8 AM on Tuesday, the very morning of my keynoate. I had a Plan B in place just in case it wasn't going to be ready in time, but I'm now I'm so happy that I could spit gravy.

Getting it in my hands before I leave for the convention center will be a bit tricky — in the worst-case scenario, I'll sign for the package, go straight from my front porch to the car, and arrive at the train station just five minutes before my train to Boston departs — but what the hell. It'll only make the story even better. My only regret is that I'll have to FedEx it straight back to the maker later that same day. To ship it on time, they've filled it with prototype electronics and this is the only copy they've got. I'll get it back in a couple of weeks, once they've got more of these boards finished.

Which leaves me with the problem of trying to demo this thing. It is completely accurate to say that it wouldn't exist if I hadn't designed it, and yet the fact remains that when I take the stage at 10 AM, the sum total of my practical hands-on knowledge with it will consist of whatever I was able to figure out during the half-hour train ride into Boston, during which I probably won't even be able to power it up. I'll use that time wisely, no question. "Notice that when I drum my fingers on it like so," I shall demonstrate, "it sounds just like the intro to the theme from 'Hawaii Five-O'." And the crowd goes wild...

email me | link to this | related websearch

Behold! The Tactical Heads-Up Display Workflow!

Tuesday, July 12 4:49 AM

To those of you who attended my Macworld keynote this morning:

Here's the Automator workflow that I demonstrated. Open it in Automator, Export it as a Print Workflow, and viola! You can make tactical heads-up navigational displays for your vehicles with the push of a button.

If you didn't attend my Macworld keynote this morning:

Well, if you download that file and open it in Automator and export it as a Print workflow, you can use it to make tactical heads-up navigational displays with the push of a button.

email me | link to this | related websearch

Macworld Expo, Day Mrbrmzzzzzzzzzz...

Thursday, July 14 9:15 AM

(Note: the following post was started on Wednesday evening but yup...I fell asleep in the middle of writing it.)

I'm birched and knackered. I'm so tired that the best I can come up with right now by way of snappy descriptions is "I'm as tired as a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper." It's in my immediate field of vision just beyond the top of the screen here and I simply lack the energy to think of a better line.

All I can say is that there's some sort of conspiracy afoot to deny me the blissful nighly staple known as Sleep. It must be the same group of people who've been slipping mind-control drugs into the inks used to print all US currency because they're very, very good at it: one hour twenty minutes of sleep on Monday night, and about three or four hours last night.

No, I had planned my week better than this. Honest. But I was up late on Monday working (this is bad), and the last thing I did before going to bed was take a final spin through my presentation to check for problems (trouble coming) and then I hit upon a slide that made me think "is there any chance that anybody will have any what I'm talking about?" (Oh, you stupid, stupid teens! You know that this secluded miniature golf course has been padlocked and abandoned ever since those eleven nuns were found there slashed to death with a nine-iron! And yet you insist on breaking in there to participate in midnight drinking and fornication! When you gassed up your convertible, didn't you hear that news report playing on the attendant's radio, about how tonight was the tenth anniversary of the slayings and that the killer was never found despite the most intense manhunt in Five Pines history?)

So I concluded that I needed to Show, not Tell, which kept me at the keyboard until twenty minutes past I'm An Idiot. Which I can get away with, ordinarily, so long as I don't need to deliver my "A" game after one o'clock, say, and can count on getting a decent night's sleep at the end of the day.

Still, I was sleep-deprived on Tuesday afternoon, which is the only satisfactory explanation for why I agreed to appear on a morning newscast at 7:20 AM on Wednesday. Managed to get home by late afternoon and put a three-hour nap in the gas tank, which gave me more than enough oomph to get me to and through the second annual Close Personal Friends of Andy Ihnatko Dinner, which didn't break up until 10:30 or so.

The keynote went great...every bit as well as I'd hoped. The ballroom was standing-room only, which was a big relief because I'd prepared a "big crowd" talk and it wouldn't have worked very well if only a hundred people had showed up. Moreover, they were clearly on my side, and they arrived at the venue firmly convinced that my heart was in the right place and that trying to get a group-chant of "Jack-a**! Jack-a**!" going would be completely inappropriate behavior.

Naturally, I was on the wrong side of the microphones to know how good the keynote actually was. But from a selfish perspective I had a great time and I left the stage confident that I could score that one in the Win column. Plus, nobody got killed...not even the stagehand whose ineptitude and ambitious incompetence left me with absolutely no rational alternative but to throw a balky onstage 17" monitor at him.

To my huge relief, I only went about five minutes over, despite adding a bunch of stuff on the fly. To my double-huge relief, That Special Secret Item arrived safe, sound, and in time for my talk. I only had about five minutes to familiarize myself with it backstage before I had to send it out to a table next to the podium (under cover, naturally), but I confirmed enough of my assumptions and expectations to handily get through my Big Finish at the end of the keynote. No worries there.

The rest of Tuesday was a bit of a blur, owing to the aforementioned Colossal Lack of Sleep and the fact that this is one of those times of the year when I exchange my usual self-deprecating mock-fame for actual...well, if not Fame, then Reknown. Lots of folks were kind enough to stop me and say extremely nice things over the course of the day, and during the hour or so I spent at my author appearance on the show floor, my publishers sold out of all the Mac OS X Tiger books they'd brought and I managed to get a pretty good high off of the Sharpie fumes.

From the keynote I went straight to the author appearance and then straight to the MacBrainiac trivia challenge. The challenge started at 12:45 and I was starting to feel a little punchy at that point. But just as I would have told you after each of my team's previous three victories, my most valuable contribution as captain was in assembling three true Iron Chefs (Adam Engst, Rich Siegel, and Dan Frakes) with a wide variety of highly-complementary skills and knowledge and inspiring them to feats of greatness. I'm proud to say that my boys observed Ihnatko's Three Laws (One: Have a good time; Two: Don't embarrass yourself, unless doing so would violate Rule One; Three: Win, unless doing so would violate Rules One or Two). And thus, even though we did indeed lose in a post-buzzer tiebreaker, we have nothing to ashamed about. On the other hand, the eleven people in the audience who happily accepted the dollar bills I passed out before the applause-meter decided the victor ought to be ashamed of themselves.

But I couldn't be happier with the performance of Team Intel Aside. It just goes to show you that if you start with a core foundation of Good Friends, it's really hard to go wrong.

email me | link to this | related websearch