Okay, So You DO Read This Blog. I Get It, Now.

Monday, October 10 8:04 PM

When one is as beloved as I...

(Awkward. "When you are as beloved as I am," perhaps? "When there comes a time in the events of all men, beloved such as I...")

(All right. All of these sound as though I'm first-drafting a Declaration of Independence. I'll start again.)

And now I've forgotten where I was going with that. Why o why must I be cursed with this compulsion to accept nothing less than perfection in all that I do? "Surely, if mediocrity were to creep into my word structments and paragraphical flowmakes just once, none would be the wiser." I dismiss this thought as soon as it comes, cursing myself angrily for even considering it. "Mediocrity and 'just good enough' is never tolerable; each word must a pure gem of flawless Truth, Beauty and Wisdom," I re-affirm, setting fire to a "Family Guy" DVD to underscore this commitment.

You deserve no less, Dear Readers. Even when you're all being so terribly, terribly mean to me.

When I stop blogging, the overall arc of reader feedback proceeds in a linear fashion. First comes silence. This has never been a daily or "every Wednesday" sort of blog, after all, so lapses of a week or so are accepted with a strength and forebearance that can only be described as Doris Day-like.

Next, we move into the Friendly Cajoling period, in which folks email me to remind me just how beloved I and my writings are, and how the absence of my postings leaves a void in their lives that no number of visits to www.hotspankyelves.com can fill. These messages are built like a sandwich: slice of fresh-baked compliments, layer of peanut-butter-like nudging, and then a second slice of compliments. It's actually rather touching, and prods me to try to do something about these updates.

We are now firmly in the shank of the "Bitchy" phase.

Half of you are offering to buy me a dog or a cat and the other half of you are threatening to kidnap my dog or cat and hold it ransom until I come through with fresh content. That shows an admirable amount of unity and organization amongst my readership and I only wish you'd apply that sort of enterprise towards clothing the hungry or something instead of trying so hard to generate Bad Karma.

Well, anyway...Message Received. On Sunday -- the Lord's day -- I got eleven such emails, so clearly, it's long past time for me to get this thing going again. It'll be a bit problematic, though: needless to say, the new edition of my weblogging app isn't done yet. It's actually becoming a Very Cool Thing and I'm having a ball writing it. Plenty of longtime Good Ideas are slowly becoming Good Features. Just the other day, I started messing around with ways to integrate iPhoto and Flickr into the app. iCal is doing a swell job of automating the various "See Me" "Read Me" and other Tommy-like sidebars, and I've put in handlers that generate all kinds of content for me automatically.

CWOBber 2.0 is fairly ambitious. So much so that I decided to finally sit down and read through all of XCode and AppleScript Studio's documentation. I'm no stranger to those things, naturally, but up until now I'd just double-click on the .PDF and cherry-pick the info I was immediately interested in. But no, none of that this time around. I spent one morning printing out double-sided copies of all 800 pages of documentation, and after a trip to Kinkos that cost me $13 cash and a fifteen-minute wait, I now have a handsomely-bound three-volume set. How, after all, can you judge your level of progress towards mastering a certain language or programming environment unless you can count the number of food stains and bent pages in a set of reference books? Electronic documents are swell for a great many reasons, but clearly the analog approach will always have an ineffable tactile appeal.

Alas, if CWOBber 2.0 is becoming stronger and slicker as the days slide by, it's certainly not getting any Done-er. So I'll just make some manual updates for the timebeing. And to make up for the lapse in update-age, I shall make this pledge to you: Seven days of daily blogging.

(Can you believe it?!?)

Well, I think it's a friendly gesture, anyway. Keep in mind that this means that each and every day, I'll have to manually edit two HTML files and an RSS feed. And then FTP them to the server!!! In 1889 terms, this is like raising a barn, haying four acres of prarie, and losing two children to typhoid all in the same morning...so please, show a little consideration.

Oh, I'm also going to upgrade the RSS feed from 0.92 to 2.0. That shouldn't affect your newsfeed subscription in any way, unless of course it affects your newsfeed subscription in some way. If the latter, please do email me and let me know.

But be nice. Remember, after the Bitchy phase comes the "Rejoice and celebrate, for Andy's blog is back online" phase.

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The Apple HoverCar - Late, but worth the wait.

Tuesday, October 11 9:52 PM

When I brush my teeth in the morning, I see many things in the mirror. Examples: a two-year-old ticket stub from "The Incredible Hulk," which I saw in Michigan with about a hundred fellow mac geeks; bits of Crest and/or Listerine spittle dating from as recently as last night to as venerable as three weeks ago; the reverse-image of a tub enclosure that I'd like to upgrade. I've no clue as to why the ticket stub is still there, the spittle is there because I'm a dude and can't be arsed to Windex the thing more than once or twice a month, and the tub enclosure is there because of the damnable Domino Effect, by which removing the enclosure means removing the tile which means removing the shower door which means $3000 in Home Despot charges and three months of showering at the Y.

I do not see the reflected face of Walt Mossberg, Dean of American Technology Columnists. And for that one simple reason, I haven't been seeded with pre-release hardware and thus I haven't a clue as to what Apple will announce on Wednesday.

Video iPod? I'd love to see it. I doubt it'll happen tomorrow, though, chiefly because Apple's too smart to release that sort of thing into a vacuum of content. "Naturally, you'll want to fill it with hundreds of hours of movies and TV shows," Bizarro-Steve says. "We're thrilled to create such a wonderful opportunities for other companies to sell that to you."

Bizarro-Steve will then announce that he's personally greenlighting development of a Newton Messagepad 2006 Edition. One made entirely out of compressed tuna.

But it's just got to be something juicier than a batch of hopped-up desktops and PowerBooks. Freshened-up iPods make sense, as would an announcement akin to the one that Apple made at last year's San Jose media event: a deal to bring U2's entire catalogue to the iTunes Store. "Wouldn't it be cool if the iTunes Store finally won the race to acquire exclusive digital rights to the Beatles catalogue?" I mused to a friend last week, over dinner. Then I remembered that Paul McCartney is touring the US this month.

I hit VH1.com when I got back home. I downloaded McCartney's tour schedule, and discovererd that Sir Veg has Wednesday through Friday off.

Hmm.

Yeah, y'see, this is how the sickness works: you come up with a theory that sounds good, and thanks to the Imberwhet it's not hard to turn up something that seems like a smoking gun. Predicting what Apple's going to do is a mug's game. Leave it to the drunk and the desperate, I say.

Still, it is indeed a fairly big deal to ask the world press to come out and cover an event like this one. If all that Apple's prepared to announce is a series of Spongebob-themed iPod Shuffles, Apple PR can look forward to a lot of stories on the nightly newscast where the reporter just makes fun of Steve's shoes for ninety seconds before throwing it back to the anchor.

Meanwhile, while waiting for the Big (maybe) Announcement, head on over to MacNotables.com and subscribe to this nifty new podcast I'm contributing to. Chris Breen, Adam Engst, Ted Landau, Bryan Chaffin and I spent about 45 minutes tonight talking about Apple's financial announcements before we transitioned into a bramble of irresponsible speculation regarding what's going to be happening on Wednesday.

The site ought to go live on Wednesday. It's MacNotables' first podcast and I'm really happy with the way things turned out. I've always believed in the Mr. Ed algorithm for podcasting: "Never speak unless you've got something to say." Which explains why my own podcast is silent, apart from those times when I'm giving a talk and I think to record the thing. The idea behind MacNotables is to have about a half-dozen Well-Known Mac Folks in the group to offer up regular commentary and bloviage. With so many people in the mix, there's an excellent chance that something useful will come out over the course of the hour.

Though naturally you should keep in mind that this is the Internet, and expecting anything worthwhile from a website or a podcast is another one of those games for the drunk and the desperate.

While I've got you all here, I might as well tell you that I've got a Flickr album full of U2 photos from last year's event. Alas, I won't be in San Jose for tomorrow's unveilings. No big deal. I bet Paul plays nothing but his solo stuff, anyway.

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This Is The Age of Video Violence

Wednesday, October 12 10:36 PM

This will probably turn out to be a short post, sensation-seekers. Today was a rare four-column day and I'm a bit commented-out at the moment. But if you came here hoping to read my comments on the new video iPods, head on over to MacObserver.com, which ought to have one or two pieces online by now.

I'm amazed that today was as productive as it ultimately was. Column 1 had definitely left me in a bit of a sulky mood. I loved the first draft and yet the final draft ended with me striking out and stalking back to the dugout, bat in hand, to kick the hell out of the water cooler. It almost never happens when I write for online, and you can guess the reason why: I had waaaaay too much fun writing it, and then after twisting my arm back into my shoulder socket following an over-enthusiastic pat-on-the-back, I discovered that I was a cozy 80% above my absolute maximum word count.

But I was on deadline, and it had to be done, and so I had to do that thing where you decide which of our eight children gets to come with you on the lifeboat.

The culling-out process goes fairly smoothly at first. There are the ones who never even make the shortlist. Maybe you're sort of fond of them, kind of, but they really never pulled their own weight to begin with and to be honest, you're relieved to have an excuse to get rid of them. Which still leaves you with five or six. There are two pairs that sort of look alike, or who can do much the same work, and while each one is perfect in its own way, that gives you a reason to whittle the list down to three.

The point is that you row away from the bonfire-at-sea with a sense of pride in having done the responsible thing, but nonetheless you can't help but feel a little guilty about your accomplishment. By the end, I was deleting adjectives and adverbs, and at my ultimate moment of desperation I was mushingwords togetherintoone, hoping that my editor wouldn't notice.

Rrgh. I've developed some skill in writing newspaper columns after X hundred of the little darlings in print. I'll give myself that much. One of these skills is maintaining a subconscious sense of how many ideas I can put into one column, of how far I've gone so far, and how soon I'll need to start wrapping things up. And normally, my Spidey-Sense serves me well. But this time, again, I was just Having Too Much Fun With It.

No, I won't tell you which column this is. The ultimate disappointment is in reading these things days or weeks later, and not being able to tell which ones I loved and which ones sent me back to the dugout with a raging compulsion to fill the Gatorade logo full of cleat-holes. On a Good Day, it makes me think "You see? You're way too hard on yourself." On a bad one, the best I can manage in terms of bucking myself up is to note that at least my work is consistently sucky.

Well, that's why we storm back to the dugout and kick the water cooler. There are more at-bats to come, thank God, and a strikeout in the first inning is forgotten after a two-RBI double in the third. And I was pretty happy with the stuff I wrote later. In my head, I picture myself in the locker room right now, cheerfully telling the guy from FOX I'm just trying to help the ballclub, we're playing them one game at a time, with the Good Lord Willing, things will work out...

On that subject, I should shoulder some of the blame for my hometown team's post-season performance. "Go, Sox, Go!" I prayed. I now realize that I probably should have been more specific.

I can't be the least bit bitter about our loss. The Red Sox got beat, fair and square, by a team that steadfastly refused to make any mistakes and played inning after inning of flawless baseball. Man alive, did the White Sox deserve to move on to the American League championship series.

Reason Two why I'm not bitter: the Yankees lost. Which to any Red Sox fan is at least 40% as satisfying as a Red Sox win.

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Sparks Fly Upward

Thursday, October 13 21:47 PM

Ach, I'm a victim of technologus interruptus: I won't have a new iPod to play with for another week. And yes, you're right to want to mention this at your next church group meeting, and find out if you can't get some sort of canned food drive going to show your support for me in this, my time of hardship.

So I'm a little disappointed today. I want to start playing with this new thing as much as any other man or woman on this planet, with the certain exception of Walt Mossberg. I don't doubt that he was placed under NDA and received his two weeks ago. It probably came pre-loaded with all The Good Parts of Jennifer Connelly's film oeuvre and a $200 gift certificate to The Cheesecake Factory.

Is there an emoticon for childish sulking? After twenty years of public Internet messaging, you'd think that there'd be an efficient three-symbol emoticon for Childish Sulking. Consider it inserted right abouuut...here.

Actually, the only actual problem created by my lack of fresh pine-scented iPod-ness came in the form of a 9 AM phone call from a business reporter at NECN. NECN is a New England cable news channel and I've been doing regular technology segments for them for the past couple of months. They keep calling me in and I solely attribute this to the fact that I'm a savvy, insightful, and personable concierge to the world of technology. The fact that I'm also self-employed, live only about twenty minutes from the studio and am usually available on short notice doesn't even enter into it. I know this for a fact; after my third tech segment, the producer emailed me with those precise words. When I pointedly asked if he was just being sarcastic, he said "No," after a bit of a cautious pause.

Granted, it's a bit of a challenge to talk about a product that you've only read about. Fortunately, this wasn't one of those live things where I talk for five minutes; they just wanted to tape an interview with me for the evening business report, and with a fresh set of D-cells in the Personal Arrogance Generator device I usually wear in a concealed pouch on my lower back, I knew that I could get through it OK.

I'm looking forward to next week, when I'll get to just stand up there during the morning newscast and talk about the iPod. I get to control the message, y'see. When you're being interviewed -- whether it's TV, radio, or print -- you sort of have to use all of your Jedi mind tricks to make sure that they ask the right questions, and that the interview contains all of the points that you think are incredibly important, viz:

"So...is the small screen a big drawback?"

"It's a disappointment, certainly...particularly when you compare the new iPod to PDAs and devices that are designed solely to play video. But I don't think Apple set out to create a brand-new sort of device. This was about taking the most popular music player on the planet and giving it the ability to play video, too. After all, these new iPods don't cost any more than the old ones; you're getting the video features for 'free'."

Not that I'm there as Apple's mouthpiece, of course. But I am there to share my opinions, and if I'm the only one in the room who's concerned about the fact that Soylent Green appears to be made from people, then I'm really going to try to get that on videotape.

The interview went well. It was just another bit of Randomness in an already overly-Brownian sort of day. The electrical service to my building was being worked on today so I was forced to spend the morning and afternoon as an AC Refugee. The router was down, naturally, which meant that I had to spend the morning working in a local library. After the taping I headed to the bakery cafe to finally check my email and file a couple of pieces. Eventually, my answering machine picked up when I phoned home, signaling that my house was now safe for geekery, and I got back more or less in time to record another MacNotables podcast.

And now I'm finishing this blog item, gazing longingly at the crumbs next to the keyboard, my sole memory of the big sourdough cracker that tried its best, but failed to substitute for the dinner I haven't had yet.

So my plans for the rest of the evening are as follows: I save, I post, I get myself a bit of supper. La, la.

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Okay...My bad.

Saturday, October 15 21:05 PM

Hmm. Okay, admittedly, there was a bit of a hiccup in my self-imposed "Seven Days Of Blog" mandate, in so much as I didn't actually post anything on Day Five of the thing. If I do two postings today and ultimately claim that I did indeed achieve an average of One Post Per Day Throughout The Week, that'd be wimping out. Absolutely. And on a brighter, sunnier day I would stamp my feet and restart the clock at Day One.

But ladies and gentlemen, it's raining outside. It rained yesterday, too. The day before that really wasn't very devoid-of-rain at all, and before that, well, the weather was pretty bad, I don't mind telling you.

Each day of rain has melted another little layer off of the metaphorical Tootsie Pop of my soul. By now, all that remains is the hard black little thing that I've always managed to hide behind a thick wall of palatable sweetness. So I am posting two things today, and I will happily claim that I've maintained a one-a-day average...and you know what? Maybe I'll post two things tomorrow instead.

I am really really very super-double-plus ready for this rain to let up.

For what it's worth, Friday's lack of postage was entirely due to being Bookended with obligations. I had a UK column due, which meant staying up extry extry late on Thursday night (as in, until about 8 AM Friday morning). Normally, I'm the beneficiary of time zones, not the victim; living in Boston means that I've got as much as a three-hour headstart on my editors. But London offices close up at noon, Boston time. It's as if they think that's funny or something. Going to sleep with four hours of work left and waking up with only two hours on the shot clock would suck mightily, so I just have to plug on through the night until we're deep enough into the TODAY show that Katie and Matt can barely continue to mask their contempt for each other and the producer has to order one of them out to go talk to the sign-waving gomers on the Plaza as a form of Time-Out.

So: I filed a (very good) column and then fell straight into bed, not awakening until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, when a contempt-filled voice in my ear demanded that if my life was so freaking pathetic that I was still home in bed watching TV at this hour on a weekday, then Jesus! Why don't I go to school to learn how to fix heating, ventilation and cooling systems and goddamned finally make something of myself instead of staying a loser?!?

I forgot to turn the set off before I fell asleep. My bad. I wish there were some way to email these vo-tech schools and tell them that actually, I'm already doing very well in a fabulous career. Or I wish that they'd stop hiring spokespeople who remind me of a gym teacher I had in seventh grade, the one who knew that you could put an orange inside a tube sock and it wouldn't leave any visible bruises on the kid no matter how hard you hit him with it, or how frequently.

And Friday evening, I had a previous commitment that superceded bloggerly duties: a belated birthday dinner for my youngest sister. "Never stand up people who are organ- and tissue-compatible to you," kids. That's just good advice.

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Shuffle Up and Peel

Sunday, October 16 23:29 PM

Incidentally, if you've enjoyed my past work, then you can look forward to my upcoming regular poker column, which will be accompanied by a book of the same title in six months' time. No, I haven't signed any such deal; I have not been approached by any interested party from any of poker's many online, broadcast, or print communities; and my personal knowledge of poker begins and ends with the conviction that if one of the girls at the table asks "Do shoes count as an article of clothing?" the answer is "No," and if they make a successful semantic argument, you have the right to insist that they count as one item, and not two.

But a poker column is just a matter of time. At first, only dedicated poker fans and players wrote about the game. Then, famous people who'd been secretly studying the craft for years got into it, and now Big-Time Poker is starting to run out of people who have yet to communicate an opinion on what to do when you're under the staple and draw DoKtRr after the Green Lantern, leaving you looking for a 10, an Ace, or a nice, lean cut of pastrami to make it to Home Depot. If I'm patient, I'll ultimately become the most prized novelty of them all: the only writer left who's never played a single hand of poker in his life. I'll contribute a frisky series of articles entitled "Take The Damned Sunglasses Off And Act Like A Normal Person Instead Of A Collection Of Bizarre And Hopelessly Lame Affectations, You Morons! — An Outsider's Guide to TV Poker."

The above digression was brought to you by the discovery that yet another favorite blog of mine seems to have turned into a poker blog all of a sudden. Soylent Green is made of people, ladies and gentlemen; don't forget that I was the first one who told you that.

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If an iPod has no video, does it still rock?

Friday, October 21 12:30 PM

My new iPod arrived about a half an hour ago, and the very first thing I've learned about it is that apparently, you can't simply drag a 1.4-gigabyte near-DVD-quality Quicktime of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return Of The King" onto its icon and expect iTunes to say "Yes, sir! My feet are like wings, sir!" What you can do is bring your troubles to QuickTime Pro. Pro will sigh, roll its eyes, agree with you that iTunes is sort of a d!@% about these things, and then it'll diligently convert the movie file to some specs that your new iPod will be happy with.

So I appear to have anywhere from three minutes to 19 hours on my hands while I wait for QTP to finish. Why don't I update the ol' blogger-roo?

With your permission, I'm going to start off with an "I Rule!" thing before proceeding to the inevitable "I'm A Loser" section.

My cordless beard trimmer now looks like a million bucks. See, I needed to trim my sideburns (one finger-width short of the jawline is optimum, I find) but the thing looked like it'd spent the past ten years in the bottom of a bait drawer. To avoid contracting some sort of flesh-eating deal, I decided that it was time to Pimp My Trimmer. A work-order was duly written, and after it was posted in the local post-office for the required five business days and failed to attract a formal protest at a public meeting, I took the thing completely apart.

Non-electronic parts soaked in an alcohol bath overnight and were then scrubbed clean with an old toothbrush. All user-removable electronic parts had all of their contacts sanded to a mirror-bright finish, to increase conductivity. I removed the original NiCad battery and soldered in a new, higher-capacity one, and re-oiled the clippers. And after a routine re-assembly and recharge,

it's up and buzzing as furiously as it did when it was new.

Plus, I have also finally fixed my office chair. The pneumatic piston started to go a few months ago and it didn't have the simple courtesy to just plain break. No, one of the seals is just a little bit weak, you see, and so every ten minutes or so it goes b-DMP and drops me down about an inch.

I often joke about the daily suffering that I must endure as an Internationally-Beloved Pundit, but I assure you: nothing pulls you out of your Creative Genius Zone like suddenly being dropped. It doesn't matter that it's just an inch! Instinctively, your brain urges you to leap, tuck and roll: this is clearly the precursor to the rest of a trapdoor giving way, followed by a trip down a slimy ancient slide, an undignified landing, and then angrily picking up your hat and reminding Short Round that you told him not to take that obviously-way-too-handy torch out of its wall sconce.

And as you can imagine, it's not like I have GPS coordinates for the Creative Genius Zone to begin with. After three b-DMPs, I'm ready to throw things. This is Bad, because many of the most throwable things on my desk are Costly. And many of them are also Just On Loan.

I took the chair apart and made a successful repair. I did have to sacrifice the up-and-down action, but preserved both the swivel bit and the recline bit. I won't describe the procedure in detail. Not that it was terribly complicated, you understand, but I know that if I simply report that I had to buy a second steel nipple because the first steel nipple was too long, well, that'll send the customers home happy.

Let's just do a little bookkeeping, here: a new trimmer would have cost me about $40, and a new chair would have cost at least $300. So technically my handyman skills have left me with an extra $350 in the budget. This means that I can now pre-order an X-Box 360 and still wind up $50 ahead. Truly, I pity those folks who aren't so careful with their budgets.

Dash it. I also wanted to communicate the glory of Replacing The Doorknob (alas, this wasn't a revenue-positive transaction). But (a) it probably would come across as all boastfull and stuff, and (b) I think my movie's ready to come out of the oven. We'll have to return to the "I'm a Loser" bit in due time.

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How do you say 'Hey, how's it going?' in British?

Wednesday, October 26 6:20 PM

Well, now this is really starting to get me all steamed: I'm here in London, this is my third visit, and yet I stillhaven't seen any dancing chimneysweep. Not. A. One.

Either London keeps screwing with me ("Quick! Everybody wash that crap off your face, hide the brooms, put on some sensible clothes and a cellphone headset, and walk like bored commuters! Andy's coming this way!") or else the media has been lying to me all this time.

Still, I've only been here for 10 hours or so. I'm sure between now and next Thursday, I'm going to catch somebody in the act. Remember, folks: cultural stereotypes are always correct. If by the time I go home I haven't encountered a single local who's every bit as British as Dick Van Dyke -- I will accept a small-time "Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels"-style hood as a substitute -- it can only mean that everyone here is ashamed of who they are and desperately hide their true nature from outsiders.

Sad, isn't it?

I'm proud to say that in the past (now 13) hours I've succeeded in not paying for a single meal. That's a very important goal when you're spending a week in a place like this, where everybody insists on British pounds for all goods and services instead of dollars. After seeing what the exchange rate is like, I sure don't blame them. Arriving in London with US money in my pocket, I felt like I was driving to Best Buy with five plump geese and a cord of firewood, hoping to walk out with an X-Box.

But I was well ahead of the game before I even stepped off the plane. Twice in my lifetime, I have been the victim of British Customs' sick little joke: they know that you've just arrived on an international flight, possibly on the redeye; they know that you're exhausted and dehydrated; and they know that on top of all that, you've spent the last twenty minutes of your life wandering through a line that has an antsy bureaucrat at the end of it as opposed to, say, an Uma Thurman who can't remember whether her lip gloss is flavored or not, and desperately needs someone to give her a firsthand report.

And what to they place in clear sight of all of this?

A Coke machine. Right at the exit. It's the very first thing you see after Her Majesty's duly-appointed representatives have looked you over, decided that whatever threat you might represent to the nation, it's not worth having you detained and beaten for, and sent you off on your way.

Bastards!

In case the penny hasn't dropped yet: see, the machine only takes British money. Of which you have none, because you've stepped straight off the plane and into Customs.

This state of affairs is a blatant, insensitive, cackling swipe targeted specifically at people who are at their most physically and emotionally vulnerable. In fact, the only people being punished are the virtuous. After twenty minutes in line I identified at least nine total strangers that I could have beaten up for 1 pound 20 in change. But did I? No; I am well known for my commitment to that delightful combination of caramel color, phosphoric acid, and Merchandise X, but my commitment to the Golden Rule is a greater legend still.

The last time I returned from a week in London, I made sure that I preserved my last pocketful of coins in a small dish on my dresser. A year later (at 7:30 AM this morning, specifically) I dropped two coins into the machine, fished a bottle out of the hopper, and took a long, victorious pull of its contents.

"What do you think of that?!?" I yelled, triumphantly thrusting the half-empty bottle into the air. "Thought you could thwart me, could you!" And the smile on my face was so broad that the only way that it could be removed would be if three uniformed men tackled me to the ground and rubbed it back and forth against the carpet a few times, which I'm told is precisely what happened.

Anyway. My usual counter-jetlag algorithm worked flawlessly (redeye flight in, struggle to the hotel, get an early check-in, sleep the rest of the day) and an hour after I woke up, I was treated to a fine meal for which I did not have to pay. I can't tell you how happy I am about that. Honestly, all of my old college survival instincts kick back in when I'm in London. In my youth, I could flatten my ear against the ground, concentrate intently, and leap up five seconds later, having sensed the presence of an unguarded tray of leftover catered sandwiches in a conference room in Building EE-28.

And in a place where buying yourself lunch for less than $30 is justifiable cause for nude celebration, frugality and modesty are closely intertwined.

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At Liberty

Saturday, October 29 6:04 AM

Well, the Good Lord giveth and the Evil TV taketh away. I overcame the debilitating one-two impact of a six-hour redeye flight and jet-lag by sleeping from about 10 AM to 5 PM on Wednesday, but then I obliterated all of that fine progress by staying up until 5 AM watching the World Series. So suffice to say that by the time I set up my PowerBook at the podium and gave the first of my three Mac Expo UK talks, my CPU was somewhat underclocked.

"Honestly, you people have decided to build your city in the most inconvenient site possible for live viewing of American baseball," I complained to the near-capacity crowd of Londoners, and they all assured me that they'd do something about that. And lo and behold, I've just looked out my window and notice that the island does indeed seem to be a few inches farther West than it was before. At this rate, London ought to be comfortably in the Central Time Zone by roughly 16,288 AD, just in time to watch the Cubs win it all.

So by now, I've given all of my talks (one on Thursday, two yesterday). The show concludes today but I'm confident that I've wrapped up my business at Mac Expo. I wish I knew why this sort of show isn't generally successful back home. National Hall here in Kensington is about the size of an ice arena, I'm guessing. It a compact show, to be sure, but nonetheless it's a target-rich environment: Apple was there, as were Quark, Adobe, and a lot of recognizable players. This wasn't one of those deals where 60% of the exhibitors are selling either blinged-out iPod cases or electronic magnotherapy boxes. And upstairs in the conference rooms, there were two very fine education tracks, centering on Mac OS and professional creative tools.

So all in all this was a terrific excuse for folks within driving distance to weasel a day off from work. Even on a Thursday afternoon, the aisles were nicely packed. Better still, there was plenty of energy in the room. Along with plenty of cars. I counted four, including a rather spiffy Lamborghini which had had a company decal awkwardly slapped on its hood and was sort of hiding itself in the corner of the hall, like a dog that's been Velcroed into an Elvis costume.

I wish I knew why we can't do shows like this back home. Macworld Boston is no more, after a 20-year run and a temporary relocation to Fun City. I thought that the last show wasn't all that bad and the news came as a big disappointment. Maybe the Macworld name was hurting the show more than it was helping. "Macworld Expo 2005" (attendance: something like 10,000, I think) naturally provokes memories of "Macworld Expo 1992" (attendance: 60,000, which remains an impressive figure even after you assume that the numbers might be wildly inflated).

Plus, maintaining the name subconsciously causes the show to resist major change. I think the show really wasn't free to re-invent itself for the Apple (hell, for the whole technology industry) of the 21st-Century. Even the Windows trade shows are dropping off the calendar left and right; the only truly successful shows are the ones that focus on basic consumer technologies instead of operating system.

It's entirely possible that this is a sign that finally, computers are back in the hands of all those geeks who stayed at home on Prom Night to invent them. By now we've got a whole generation of people who grew up with the things and devoting a three-day show to the topic is like basing a show around the concept of plumbing or electricity. That is, you can do it, but you've got to target it towards folks who are actually in the trade...not the consumers.

On a lighter note, I spend part of my time yesterday following a pair of men who turned out not to be Peter Jackson and Jack Black. It was only for about ten seconds, I quickly add, and I stand by the rightness of my initial reaction. Neither man looked a whole lot like their counterparts but they were in the same physical categories, and it's only natural to take the thought "that guy looks sort of like Peter Jackson" and upgrade it to "that guy could indeed be the director of 'Lord Of The Rings'" when he's walking around with a guy who sort of looks like one of the actors in Jackson's next big movie.

Okey-doke. It's 6 AM and I've a big day of walking around ahead of me. It's about a mile a half to an open-air flea market, and I've got a vague loop planned that will take me through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and hopefully a stop at Harrod's to replace the pair of crashproof socks that I bought last year and promptly lost.

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Have you tried this "sitting down" thing yet? It's fabulous!

Sunday, October 30 1:48 AM

Home again. Though when I say "Home," I of course mean the Hilton, not my house, and although this statement implies that I've just gotten back in, in truth I've had a three-hour nap and watched "Halloween: H20" on ITV in its entirety.

I've no idea how far I walked today. In each of my three trips to London, my constant back-pocket companion has been Knopf's excellent MapGuide book, which separates London into eight fold-out maps. From 7:15 AM to 6 PM, I walked into the map book (the Hilton is about a quarter-mile off of the book's westernmost coverage) and travelled clear across one region map and most of the way into the next one. So suffice to say that if my shoes had an odometer, I'd now be breaking the seal and rolling that sucker back to preserve their resale value.

Last night I'd had made vague plans to rest up for a bit and then maybe go out again to pay a call at the Ministry of Nightlife, but as soon as I climbed into bed with my Coke and my slices of takeout pizza, my legs and feet said "I see you won't be needing us for a while, so we're just going to go ahead and switch off now."

They did this without tabling the issue for debate, but nonetheless, that was perfectly fine by me. In truth, the only reason why I wanted to go out tonight in the first place was that the British are, as a race, the most hysterical drunks I've ever encountered. And I don't mean "hysterical" in the New York way, ie "Thank God I drank those nine Captain Morgans; otherwise, I'd still be much, much too uptight to get buck-naked in Prospect Park and throw bleach in the faces of total strangers."

No, nothing quite so Daily News-able. I just mean that if you ride the Underground for an hour on a late Saturday night you'll catch a pretty good show. George Carlin says that he likes to watch auto racing because how else are you going to get to witness a ten-car pileup without being in the mother%#$@er? I ride the Underground on Saturday night because how else are you going to get to watch a grown man pass by a street musician playing classical violin and then spontaneously rip his shirt off and start dancing "Footloose" style? Without having to drive a weepy bastard home a couple of hours later?

Oh, well. I'm sure the next time I'm in town on a Saturday night, the drunks will still be there. I think they get some sort of grant money from the National Trust or something.

An early night will be good for me. I'll need to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow; I'm going to this special underground party where lonely men and women put on squirrel costumes and cuddle.

Buuuut seriously, folks. Tommorrow's going to be another day of Ambitious Walks. Plus, after tonight, I'm here on my own nickel (I'd translate that to English pounds, but do the Brits actually have a coin that's worth a third of a penny?) so tomorrow, I'm moving on to a bed & breakfast.

What a shame. I've been here at the Hilton for four days and I'm only just now starting to get the hang of it. Deke McClelland, a fellow Mac Expo speaker and an acknowledged Iron Chef of Photoshop, checked in a week ago and last night during dinner he gave me precise instructions on operating the room's temperature control. There's a pushbutton and bank of LEDs for the fan and a second set for the temperature. Press one button and...nothing. Press the second...nothing. The first and then the second? Both at once? Hold down the button, and maybe the LEDs will go up or down until you let go? Nope, nothing happens.

So as soon as I got back from the restaurant, I dubiously followed a carefully-transcribed list of steps that was so complicated, so non-intuitive, and so desperately improbable that frankly, at the end of it I was expecting to read

And with a loud squish!, the Babel Fish lands inside your ear.
Points: 45/120.
You are inside the holding cell of the Vogon Destructor Ship. Ford Prefect is still sleeping in the far corner with a towel wrapped around his eyes. There is a small door to the North.

...instead of hearing a fan come to life for the very first time and then feeling traces of cool air enter the room. Nonetheless, that's precisely what happened. I think the whole system was set up to make sure that the cooling system is only engaged by people who really, really want it. Cool air can only be obtained by the brave and the determined. We need those sort of people in public service and I think we should install these same boxes in all government offices. Whenever an elected official visits your town, you would then ask them "So, how do you like your office?" and if he or she says "Horrible; it's stuffy and hot all the time" you should then plan to vote for somebody else the next time.

Plus, for the first time since checkin, I'm actually enjoying a cold drink in my room. The Hilton has no ice machines -- I think the reason has something to do with the ongoing conflicts between Britain's form of socialism and its historical class system; yes, I'm just totally making that up, but in all matters British, it's a good default line to kick off the debate with -- and the one time I called Room Service to have some ice sent up they helpfully suggested that I go down to the bar and ask for some. Possibly from any patrons who look as though they won't mind you sticking your fingers into their glasses. I don't know because I really didn't feel like going out begging for frozen water at 11 PM.

It's therefore been a week of drinking warm soda and cool tap water. Today, I walked a few blocks east beyond the hotel and I discovered both a cheap pizza place and the first off-license in London that was able to sell me a sack of party ice. I hope I'm not going overboard here in describing my joy at finally having a cold glass of anything in here. The fact is, when the Berlin Wall came down, I hadn't spent my entire life under the iron thumb of Communism. Nor have I ever played a deadly game of worldwide cat-and-mouse with the chief of an international terror cell, a breakneck adventure that ended with a desperate flurry of hand-to-hand combat atop a spire of the Golden Gate Bridge that sent the aforementioned chief tumbling hundreds of feet into San Francisco Bay and certain death.

What I'm getting at is that four days of warm soda is easily the worst hardship I've had to endure in the past year or two, thank Heavens, and if you're not at all impressed by my patience and endurance, then there's really very little that I can do about it.

I'm just amazed that the staff of the Hilton has apparently never encountered this need for in-room ice before. There's an easy solution: whenever someone calls down for ice, you send someone to the bar, scoop some into a bucket, send it to the room, and charge a pound for it. It's like free money and it's not like the boys in the home office ever have to find out about it, right?

Compare and contrast this with the experience I had at Harrods today. The first time I shopped at Harrods it was my very first trip to London. I had to attend a formal event and I'd packed the tuxedo shirt with the French cuffs by mistake, so I desperately needed a pair of cufflinks.

I walked in, dressed like a caddy on a public golf course, and I spent all of four or five pounds on a set of knotted cloth cufflinks. But the staff couldn't possibly have been more helpful or more courteous, even after it became crystal-clear that my clothes did indeed reflect my income level and that no, I wasn't one of those quirky dot-com billionaires. They acted like I was the first customer they'd seen in weeks.

I needed some new cartidges for my fountain pen, and my walk was taking me in the general vicinity of Knightsbridge so I made the detour. Expenditure: two pounds fifty, and yet everybody treated me like the nephew of someone with the power to get them all fired.

And they have a terrific stationery department. They have case after case after case of pens, ranging from cheap, practical daily writers to overblown things that are the Hummer H3 of fountain pens. They're not designed to perform their most obvious purpose: they're designed to send the message "Not only am I incredibly wealthy and an titanic ass, but I am so wealthy and such a titanic ass that I actually like to flaunt what a titanic ass I am. You can't touch me...and I need for you to know that."

I'm three chapters into something new at the moment and I finally have enough of the pieces in place that I'm eager for every hour I can spend with my notebook, moving the story forward...hence the need to find a new cartridge for my $10 steel-nibbed Pellikano. But this also makes this a dangerous time for me to be in a pen store. A £50 gold-nibbed pen doesn't seem like a luxury. It seems like a sensible, practical, legitimate business expense.

There are indeed pens that are flat-out fun to write with, producing a dense, flowing, lively little line along with the sense that you're writing with power steering. And truth be told, a hundred bucks American is about the going rate for a nice daily-use pen. I haven't had a Nice Pen since I lent my Lamy 2000 to someone ("for just a second, I swear") and they sent it sailing over a balcony a heartbeat later.

I'm a good person. I deserve nice things.

If I find a hundred bucks in the street next week, I'll be kicking myself for not buying that pen, won't I?

Yeah, I'd probably better stay far, far away from Knightsbridge for the rest of the week.

Still, it was a worthwhile and entertaining half-hour. As I sampled pen after pen, the salesclerk and I wound up talking about the latest problems circling my President.

It's hard to really get a handle on how you feel about your national issues until you find yourself in another nation discussing them with someone who isn't a fellow citizen. It's like the old saying: if you want to learn a subject, you should study it; but if you want to understand a subject...you need to teach it.

For instance, over here, I don't use any of the shorthand that one typically falls back on at home. As a spokesperson for my country (because you never know how seriously your words will be taken) I feel obligated to carefully articulate my opinion that like all Presidents, the things he does really really well are of the "keep the lights and the heat working" variety. But unlike most Presidents, I feel that most of the things he's done terribly wrong flow from the sense that he's a manager and not a leader, a state of affairs complicated by the impression that President George W. Bush's first and second terms were tailored to be George Herbert Walker Bush's third and fourth terms...and by extension, Reagan's fourth and fifth.

Whereas back home, you tend to clumsily collapse all of that down to "The man can barely feed or dress himself." The same's true on the other side of the political fence, naturally. The vast majority of Bush's supporters tend to have very rational and respectable reasons for asserting that the President is doing a decent job under extremely trying circumstances but it's hard to properly articulate those ideas in today's environment. A war tends to have that effect.

"The Silence Of The Lambs" has turned into a made-for-the-USA-Network disaster movie about overstressed air-traffic controllers, starring Claudia "Babylon 5" Christian. Which means it's probably a good time for bed.

So today: the Portabello Road street market, Kensington Palace, Kensington Gardens, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Harrods, and Rocket Pizza just down the way. Tomorrow is earmarked for Roger Ebert's Great London Walk: The Rematch. This time...it's personal. Oh, and there'll be a GPS receiver involved.

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The Revolution will NOT go un-cameraphoned!

Monday, October 31 3:56 AM

It was a state of affairs that would be familiar to any alky or junkie. This morning, I started to wake up and I managed to regain enough of my wits early enough in the process to realize how important it was that I keep my eyes tightly shut as long as possible. I didn't what sort of situation I was going to be waking into, precisely. But I had a good enough sense of the broad details to predict that as soon as I fully took stock of the world that I was about to awaken into, I would have to probationally score this day in the Loss column.

Specifically, I remembered that I had stayed up just a little bit late watching horror movies on ITV, which was a mistake, but one from which I could easily recover. But then I irreversibly compounded the mess by going off on an all-night writing jag.

So I had every confidence that I was pretty well-screwed. I finally opened my eyes, aimed them at the clock, and waited a moment for the autofocus feature to lock in. Yes, indeed: it was past 10. I had planned to spend my morning as though I had four and a half precious days left in my beloved London, checking out of my hotel bright and early and heading off to Hampstead for breakfast, lunch, and a good, stirring walk between and after. Instead, I spent it as though I was home in Boston on any given Sunday: I slept until late in the morning and then sort of lolled in bed, reading and watching TV until noon.

There really wasn't any point to even attempting to follow through on my threatened assault on Hampstead Heath. Clearly, by the time I performed my morning ablutions, finished packing, checked out of the hotel, and performed all of the steps necessary to arrive at the Belsize Park stop on the Northern Line, I'd only have enough time to run to the margins of the Heath and step on the soil as though I were crossing second base on my way to third, and then run right back into the Underground. Because a friend was going to be picking me up from the Hilton in the late afternoon to ferry me to his mom's bed & breakfast.

"If only I'd woken up just an hour early," I sighed, picking up the TV remote and being simultaneously dismayed and intrigued by the presence of an "American Idol" semi-clone featuring both Simon Cowell and Sharon Osbourne as judges. "There would be just enough of a safety margin for me to consider an abbreviated version of my Hampstead Heath campaign."

And then two hours later I (a) remembered that today was the day we all turn our clocks back one hour in the States, and (b) learned that actually, they do that sort of thing here in the UK as well.

Oh.

So I stayed in bed for no apparent reason, other than to learn that this show ("The X-Factor") apparently begins with a dozen competitors who can actually sing, a bizarre twist that I dare American talent-reality shows to emulate.

Okay, well, it all worked out OK. I took a bus back to Knightsbridge -- manfully resisting the magnetic pull of the Lamy Studio pen, available in silver, black, or palladium finishes -- and toured a section of Hyde Park that I'd skipped over during my first visit last year.

It was actually a terrific little walk. I had no definite plans. When I reached the far edge of the park, the tentative drizzle that I'd been shielding my Nikon from broke just a little bit, enough to end the mist and open the skies just enough to let in some late-afternoon sun, pelting the Wellington Arch mercilessly with fusion radiation. But it sure purtied up the monument, so took off at a slow, determined run, shooting continuously as I went.

And here's where I really ought to paste in a picture. You're absolutely right. But could you be more specific? I shot 533 pictures today, of which about 120 or so are of the Arch and its immediate environs....which one would you like?

I'm not even sure which one I like. I thought I'd shot the hell out of the thing, but there's this tiny souvenir shop inside it and a split-second before the attendant was about to hand me my 20 pence change for the Coke I'd bought, he heard the briefest pulse of a police siren under the arch and trotted outside, the coins still jangling in his hand. He returned a minute later. "You might want to stick around for about ten minutes," he said, completing the transaction at last. "The Horse Guards will be riding through the Arch soon. That's what the police just stopped to tell me."

And this, friends, is why I like walking around with an SLR, hoping that a good shot is going to happen.

When I was in Washington, my friend Barbara asked me just why exactly I was stopping to take a picture of the Washington Monument...already one of the most-photographed objects in the country. Well, yeah, but I've never photographed it before.

And taking the picture isn't a substitute for actually experiencing the moment. If you work at it, you can tell a complete story with one image, and while some of the work involves fiddling with knobs and buttons, most of it is simply immersing yourself in the photo's subject, its environment, and the way that people and light interact with it.

If anything, the camera only enhances the intensity of my experiences. I would love to flatter myself and believe that I'm creating Great Art with my Nikon, but in truth, the photo itself is just a souvenir of the terrific time I had making that picture.

I spend the next eight or nine minutes scoping out the scene and ultimately chose three different vantage points before the cavalry arrived, preceded by a mounted constable. Regardless of my determination to get a decent shot, I couldn't help but be impressed by the spectacle. As much as I enjoyed watching it, I wondered what it was like for the men who were doing it. How many times can someone ride through the city in full traditional regimental dress before it stops being exciting? After the hundredth trip, does it still feel like a proud honor, or does it eventually just become a practical way to get the horses back to the stables at Buckingham Palace?

Once again, my tipster ratted out these fine military men: he told me that they'd be coming back in the opposite direction an hour later, so I strolled off through Green Park (another British park crossed off the list) towards the palace. I took my time. I'd been to Buckingham Palace on my first trip, during one of the best walks ever. I'd taken the tube to Parliament with no fixed plans apart from taking a DTS -- a Damned Tourist Shot -- of Big Ben and then walking in whatever direction seemed interesting. This took me around the Eye, the Tate Modern, on a tour through Westminster Abbey (a surprisingly profound experience), Regents Park, The Mall, the palace, and well beyond.

In many ways, that walk redoubled my conviction that if you consider yourself too hip to visit the tourist spots then maybe you're too hip to leave the house at all and should save everyone a lot of hassle. All the same, Buckingham Palace is probably the least-satisfying of all of London's attractions. You can go to Wellington Arch and have a real experience. You can sit peacefully and reflect on its significance, or you can walk straight up to the thing and enjoy the monument from every angle. At Buckingham Palace, any of the building's positive attributes are obscured by the simple distance between the fancy gates and the Queen's front potch, and the only thing you can really experience is being immersed in a sea of aimless tourists. The silent thrill of being That Guy in the background of thousands of holiday photographs spread all across the planet will only take you so far before you opt to continue onward. You've got fifteen minutes, or possibly longer if you're creative enough to imagine that the hundreds of Huddle Masses clinging to the gates represent the opening overtures to a workers' revolution.

"In such a situation, would Prince Charles choose to (a) send a representative outside to negotiate terms for his abdication and permanent exile, (b) stockpile weapons in his private chambers, swearing that he's going to take as many of those Roundhead sons-of-bitches to Hell with him as possible, (c) bite down on a suicide pill concealed inside the heel of his shoe, proudly denying the leaders of the People's Grand Sword Of Most Celestial Light of their dreams for a lengthy show trial followed by a flashy televised execution...or (d), would his last words on this Earth be "I don't know how you think you're going to buff my my riding boots properly with guns in both of your hands like that"?

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