But my long day at the Social Media conference at Stanford the day before, wiped me out. It was a 12-hour day from door to door. I left before dawn, with the moon still up, and I arrived home well after sunset. First full moon of the year.
Too much input. Too much time on the road, though Stanford's only 40 miles away. Commute home was classic. I hid out at Costco in Foster City for an hour.
The next day, I felt like I was run over by a tank—or maybe a Mack truck—so I stayed home thinking that at least I had two more days to attend MacExpo.
I won a coveted iFan pass from MacWorld, for tweeting—which meant I could attend all the MacExpo seminars and panels. I was pretty excited about attending MacExpo. I even took time off work to Make it So. Sore throat didn't help matters either. But hot tea did wonders.
Alas, Friday also had other plans for me. I awoke at 4:30 AM with the beginnings of an earache. Squeeze, twinge. Boom boom. Crackle crackle. It was nearly dawn before I fell back to sleep. So I didn't rush out the door until the crack of noon.
What I learned the hard way, was that when one has a budding earache, going down the 3.6 mile-long transbay BART tube at 135 feet below sea level, is a painful experience.
The lowest place in North America, Badwater, in Death Valley, is 282 feet below sea level. But you don't have the weight of the San Francisco Bay above your head and you're not whizzing along at 70 MPH down the rabbit hole.
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| Badwater |
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| His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, aka Joshua A Norton The first transbay proposal was submitted by the builder of the Panama Canal in 1920—essentially the same plan BART used to build the world's longest and deepest sunken tunnel (in 1965-69, it opened in 1973). The tunnel withstood the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake which destroyed the Bay Bridge. |
But I digress. Definitely canals were invoked. Perhaps not the palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal—Panama! I had to do careful snorkel snorts both descending to the bottom of the bay floor and ascending to the SF Embarcadero stop. The trick is to know when to pinch your nostrils and how hard to blow—too much pressure and you'll damage your eardrum.
My eustachian tubes were truly plugged so it was touch and go. I was constantly yawning and rotating my lower jaw like a donkey to keep them open.
When you equalize the pressure between the middle ear eustachian tubes and the atmosphere, whether by yawning or blowing your nose, there is an audible pop, or click, which can be heard by others. But then, everything sounds loud—including your own voice—until the canal closes again.
Nothing was as bad as the time I had a head cold in Cuzco and when the bus descended from the Andean pass above Cuzco into the Urubamba Valley, I was screaming in pain, and John had to coax the busdriver to stop at the overlook.
I took so many Sudafeds to relieve the pressure, my heart was beating fast as a hummingbird's. I took so many Sudafeds I would've tested positive for drugs. Hell, I wanted drugs, to obliterate the pain.
Of course I was already technically on Andean drugs on account of the high altitude. Coca leaves and rock lime weren't cutting it. But my teeth didn't hurt. I couldn't even feel them or my gums.
My left eardrum blew—there was blood on the pillow the next morning. Things sounded weird for a long time. Sometimes when I get into a noisy space, my eardrum beats its tympanum with every noise.
My right eardrum is scarred from when I was a child and had double earaches on Christmas Eve. It must've been pretty bad because the doctor came all the way from Point Reyes Station on Christmas Day replete with his little black doctor bag. That's the only time my grannie ever called the doctor to make a house call.
Now, the problem is, that I've cleared my passages—that I can hear everything far too well. And I do mean everything. Rustling paper is excruciating. Other people's iPod earbuds are too loud. People thoughtlessly rustling their swag bags during a seminar had me moving seats early and often just to escape the noise.
MacExpo staff gave me a Ricola to suck on—which helped a bit. But the ambient noise in the hall was wearing my reserves down. Then there were all the Mac fans meandering in thundering herds and droves to negotiate around.
I managed to make two passes around the exhibit floor to see if I had missed anything. I got some great technical advice on SSD hard drives from OWC, my go-to online store. But they didn't have anything for sale.
Aside from the maddening crowds, on the show floor there were a whole lot of guitarists, vague, blurred incarnations of Jimi Hendrix trapped in bowels of a bad Xerox machine, licking their so-called chops at every intersection—ostensibly showing off the latest music app or interface. ERG!
Certainly the music toys were amazing—the musicians, not so much.
Of course I was looking forward to going to MacExpo on the final day as well, but today I feel so rotten, I think I'll pass. The only things I really wanted were a tiny iPhone speaker, and a bluetooth keyboard—and the prices weren't great. And I'm in no mood to actually listen to mini speaker performance, let alone, make a rational decision. I'm afraid I'd have at it with a flyswatter.
The swag was almost nonexistent. I would've liked getting my New York Times word portrait done but the line was too long yesterday and I'm not one for standing in line. Besides, it's not the same as back in the good old days, when Apple was part of the MacExpo matrix.
What happened to the delicious madness of MacExpo? Those magical Alice in Wonderland moments?
Most of the vendors were selling iPhone or iPad apps. I don't own either one. I played with some iPad drawing styluses, and a painting app. I prefer the real thing—pen, pencil. or pastel on paper. I drew a galaxy of star lilies as onlookers champed at the bit for their turn. Still, there was some amazing iPad and digital art at the art show.
There was very little software or hardware at MacExpo for the traditional Mac user to play with—other than offers from scanner and printer vendors who were touting their iOS compatibility horns.
Yet the audience was jammed-packed with MacBook users. And no, they weren't just 50+ somethings. There were quite a few even older geezers present too. So much for the snide comment of one twenny-something to another about iOS apps, intended target audience—if you hafta ask—and rampant ageism.
One young vendor asked why I was even attending the show since I didn't have iPhone or iPad—as if I was a Luddite. Other than the urge to smack him one, I too wondered why I was there.
I'm not particularly interesting in owning an iPhone, or at least, not the hefty contract. I like my dumbphone's annual T-Mobile pay-as-you-go bill which costs me all of $200 a year. Can you say, hey big spender?
Besides, I can't even begin to read anything on the iPhone's tiny screen without going cross-eyed. Why would I want to surf on that? What I've noticed is that everyone's playing solitaire on their smartphones and tablets on BART. Wow. Think I'll stick to my Kindle for a while longer.
And I'm waiting for the iPad Retina to become available under Apple Refurbs before taking the plunge. Just because I keep elderly Macs up and running long past their expiration date, and I don't have an iOS gadget, doesn't mean I can't be savvy about the software. I was irritated, to say the least.
Swag levels are next to nil. The John Lennon Bus wasn't there either—they always had serious swag. Besides, they really put on a good show. Most of the vendors have tiny kiosks and stand around like it's a cocktail party. But no booze. No entertaining floor shows, not like in the good old days.
Roxio wasn't there with their contests and funny prizes. I didn't see one of my favorite software developers, Roger Wagner who created the first graphic paint programs for Apple, and developed HyperStudio, used to run a mean Mac "pretzel bar" booth. The amazing conversations we'd have, and the people we'd meet, while hanging out with Roger as co-pilot.
Roger Wagner didn’t just read the first book on programming the Apple computer - he wrote it. —Steve WozniakThe seminars I had access to were mostly focused around iOS apps. This year's MacExpo star was the iPhone. My other cellphone is a dumbphone. One seminar on iBook (iPad) authorship was geared toward the traditional Mac user—lots of great tips on both platforms.
The travel panel was good too. The Hollywood director/author who kitted up his iPad with a monopod, a wide-angle lens and a camera light to take videos of the show, was enthusiastically vouching the merits of the iPad and iPhone for big filming projects.
I attend MacExpo to see the innovation. MacExpo is a bit like a Maker Fair. There were a couple of cool projects in various stages of development. Many solar panels and even a water battery recharger. Myriad iPhone skins and kooky iPad cases—my favorite kickstarter project, from the guy whose booth was a green teardrop trailer‚ was a bungee cord with four clown noses attached to the corners of an iPad. Wavy Gravy on a trampoline came to mind.
I did manage to get to the iFixit seminar, which I liked so much I attended it twice. Few women in the repair panel audience. I got some technical advice on fixing my MacBookPro inverter light. They said, piecaecake! I'd already replaced the hard drive with an Other World Computing SSD Seagate hybrid drive and got fantastic boot times—17 seconds.
MacWorld senior editor Chris Breen was moderator of the second iFixit panel. There was a lot of discussion on keeping older technology alive as it's next to impossible to truly recycle them—whether dumbphone or iPod.
The trace rare elements used to make smartphones are lost, and the sheer amount of "upstream" elements needed to make our toys and gadgets was enormous. The latest MacBooks and the iPads, with throwaway technology, are not good for recycling—you can't separate the batteries from the frame—they blow up!
So, we were of a like mind, in keeping our components alive for a s long as possible. The iFixit guys were impressed that I kept my PPC iMac alive for so long, and said the power supply was suspect in those old iMacs. It was replaceable as long as the capacitors weren't bad.
However, with that said, they all agreed that trying to resurrect my 2005 PPC iMac probably wasn't worth it as I can't upgrade the software past Tiger. Chris Breen said it had a good run. Catch and release.
It was good to catch up with Chris after the panel. I reminded him of how he once beaned me with a little MacWorld office kit—back in the day when MacExpo swag was good. He laughed and said, I was lucky—he broke some other guy's tooth. Maybe Chris wanted to be a baseball pitcher in another lifetime.
I'm not much of a starstruck fan, though I was wearing an iFan pass. I admire Chris's wit and his intellect as a writer. He always writes back when I have a technical question. We had a sweet good old days moment. Dite. Angels dancing on a pinhead.
A spontaneous Steve Jobs shrine appeared last night. Flowers, Weird Mac thingies, candles. Something I would've like to have seen. So at least Steve was invoked.
Today, the MacExpo event is closing with a drumming circle.
Think I'll pass on that one too.
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