Macworld San Francisco - Day Two

I've been here two days now, and I have to say, I'm really jazzed.

For one thing, just being there for one of Steve Jobs' keynotes is exciting enough for any card-carrying Apple fanboi. But the fact that today, Jobs announced the first of Apple's Intel-powered Macs makes it history. I mean, I've never really looked forward to this day, since Apple announced last year that they'd be switching to Intel in their hardware. But I guess I can live with it. After all I've lived with an IBM processor for this long. And the performance benefits, if Steve is telling the truth, are staggering, jaw-dropping. It's definitely worth the ego hit if they can keep producing Macs 4-5x faster than the 2005 model year's.

It's not just the hardware announcement that got my juices going. It was the demoing of iMovie, Garageband and iWeb that reminded me of why I love playing with Macs, why I got into the Web business in the first place, why I do what I do. I love playing with media. I love creating stuff, and sharing it with other people I care about .. even people I don't even know. I love the ability to produce creative stuff, whether it's photos or videos from my new digital camera, or blatherings here, or Web pages for clients (or myself), or multimedia movies for the magazine .. and after this morning, I was so jazzed, I couldn't wait to get my hands on some of these products (patience, grasshopper .. they are much cheaper from the University) and begin playing with them, creating with them, exploring new ways to have fun with my Mac.

In addition, I've been learning all kinds of new cool stuff to do with Dreamweaver, both for work and for fun. I don't think I'm going to tear down the Research site just yet .. IE6 is still very prevalent on Windows and I'd just as soon not have to learn kludgy ways to make things work for one browser's pathetic CSS implementation, but in another year or so I might reconsider that. But it certainly contributes to design of future sites, and I may be able to make use of many of these efficiencies hither and thither throughout as I go along. Dreamweaver is through .. now it's on to Flash for two days.

Those close to me know I've been in a lousy funk for the past five months. After this morning, I think I'm seeing myself breaking out of it, finding joy in my work again, and enjoyment in trying new things again. I didn't come here to find that .. but I shouldn't be surprised by it.

I'll add more before I leave. Tomorrow night I have a very nice evening planned to see more of the city .. I'll add more pictures I'm sure. In the meantime, I've added a good number of pics to my photo gallery .. feel free to peruse.