Enhance Your Performance!

Tue 22 Mar 200508:20 PM

Naming Names

Tue 15 Mar 200506:28 PM

That’s It

Mon 14 Mar 200508:01 PM

My brain was a little bit friend all morning in this, my last day at South by Southwest. I’m not sure I was optimally receiving all the information in today’s panels, but I count it a successfully day in that I got to have lunch with a small coterie of whip-smart people I’ve long admired, and I got to meet even more great people face-to-face for the first time. (I’m so fucking positive!)

Right now, sitting at the airport, I’m tired and I need some rest before taking on all the work waiting for me at the office tomorrow. So in spite of the fact that I’m missing out on some good panels this afternoon and tomorrow, I’m happy to be on my way home. Everyone I met at the conference was great, but I can’t wait to see my girlfriend and my dog. They’re hard to beat.

Day Three at SXSW

Mon 14 Mar 200512:54 PM

It’s day three at South by Southwest, and by yesterday at midday, I was already a little weary from all the panels and seminars. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t see some good stuff, because I did. It’s just that there’s only so much sitting still in an overly air-conditioned room for hour after hour that I can do. At lunchtime yesterday, we took off for Threadgills for some down home country cooking, and that helped. The more I see of Austin, the more I like. If it were as walkable a city as New York, I’d almost consider it a place I could feasibly move to one day, maybe.

So Far at South by Southwest

Sun 13 Mar 200501:14 PM

Too much going on here at South by Southwest for me to compose a fully coherent report of what’s going on. But I’d be guilty of dereliction of geek duties if I didn’t at least post some random notes, so here we go.

Fine-Tuning iTunes

Fri 11 Mar 200512:42 AM

Bad Company

Tue 8 Mar 200509:11 PM

Amid all of my relentless Apple boosterism, I still feel it important to periodically speak out about where the company is wrong and where it behaves maliciously, a self-appointed duty of which I have not been particularly conscientious, admittedly. But, if you’ve got any streak of blue-blooded American fight in you, not to mention a hint of that brand of indignant pride for the primacy of the First Amendment in Our Way of Life, then it’s difficult to ignore this putrid lawsuit that Apple Computer has filed against several online journalists publishing their work on, well, Apple-boosting Web sites.

What transpired was this: before this past January’s Macworld Expo, several highly accurate rumors about then unannounced Apple products appeared at the rumor-based Web site Think Secret. Wasting little time, Apple quickly filed a lawsuit against the publisher of Think Secret and other “unnamed individuals,” ostensibly to smoke out the rumor sources but, in effect, attempting to put a chill on rumor activity in Apple fandom at large. (This particular lawsuit also happens to be just the latest in several similar actions the company has taken to protect its proprietary rights.)

Walk This Way

Tue 15 Feb 200507:58 PM

If you live in a town where most traveling to and from places is done by auto, you might not experience this phenomenon, but I see it every day: when I walk down the street I pass person after person plugged into a pair of white iPod headphones. In New York, this is almost a given feature of pedestrian life, a subtle way in which Apple has left a mark on the character of the city. The other day I started wondering how many iPods I actually see during, say, my walk from home to work in the morning, was it just a few that seemed like many, or was there really an iPod consumer on just about every block?