Since WWDC is today, I thought I'd post my official speculation that the iPhone 2 will be announced today, and will be available June 27th.
Why June 27th? Because there's a Pixar movie coming out, and the first iPhone was released the same day as a Pixar flick.
Abby and I were walking down the street in Nyack yesterday after a quick lunch in a new middle-eastern restaurant. (In a bit of a parallel to the actual universe, it's a Islamic-owned establishment across the street from a Jewish-owned middle-eastern restaurant. At some point we expect the double yellow lines on Broadway to be replaced with barbed wire and tanks...)
In any case, as we were strolling, two black teens (yes, this racial reference IS important to the story) wearing a level of cool looking clothes that I'm unable to get away with (low slung jeans, cool looking hoodies, new sneakers, etc.) stopped dead in their tracks looking at me.
"Oh man!" said the younger of the two "where did you get that?" At first I had utterly no idea what he was talking about. Get what? I looked down and realized I was wearing an Apple logo'd zip up track-style sweatshirt.
"I got it at the Apple store at the company's headquarters in California." I said.
"I'm totally crushing on that!" (yes, that's what he said) "I've got Apple everything." His friend chimed in at this point to confirm that he did in fact have a ton of Apple-branded clothes. (Although he did it in a bit of a Forrest Gump sort of way—"Apple hats, Apple shirts, Apple drawers...")
I thanked him for his comments, and got into my car, which is when the oddness of the situation hit me.
Flash back to my formative years, sitting alone in my room at my mom's house with my Apple ][+, then Apple //e, then Apple IIGS, poring over manuals, learning how to do graphics on a system with two-bit color, and admiring my "Beagle Brothers" peek-and-poke chart.
Years later I found myself working at the Apple retail store, having been hired the day that the iPod was announced, and spent my days surrounded by overweight white folks—the early days of the Mac retail experience were only occasionally punctuated by the visits of teens, usually males, always white. In fact it was usually a challenge to figure if the customers or the iBooks were whiter.
Wearing an Apple-branded anything was never really a sign of a hip cultural reference so much as a clear indication that my life has been spent among the ranks of the geeks.
Now I'm picked out by clearly trendy non-white teens who identify with the brand icon, and must, to some degree associate with the products the brand represents. (After all, the Nike swish isn't popular just because it's a clever icon.) This is truly odd.
The only thing I can come up with here is that I've been a trend setter all along, I'm just vastly ahead of the curve, and that the world is just catching up to me as a teenager.
And that can only mean that any day now watching scrambled-because-you-haven't-paid-for-it Cinemax on a weekend evening trying to see a bit of nudity will become a cultural phenomena and I'll be further vindicated.
I am really, really swamped right now. It''s a good sort of swamped—not in an "Army Corps of Engineers built me a shitty levee system" way—with work projects.
I've been generating some content for upcoming seminar tours and so far I've written about 10,000 words this week. We're trying hard to launch some new programs around the PMA trade show, which I am thankfully not attending as I can't stand where it's being held.
"What happens in Vegas can go fuck itself," as the ads say. No, wait. Maybe that's "Vegas: What's that burning smell?" 
Back to life. I like being busy, though I'm up against a bit of a deadline and that's why I'm so swamped. Naturally the way that I'm wired I'm unlikely to do any work until a deadline looms anyhow, so this is just business as usual.
I've also had someone else interested in helping us look for a bit of capital contact me, which is nice. It's a good feeling building something that people think has a lot of potential. Never can tell where these lead, but it's nice to go down these roads.
This week I'm in Washington, on the Microsoft campus for the second annual Professional Photography Summit. (Marking air mile 56,000 for the year, for those of you playing the home version of Frequent Flyer Hell.) Microsoft brought a bunch of actors in to talk, part of a group that are lobbying for different rights for celebrities who are photographed. Don't ask. Really.
Anyhow, mind you I'm at the Microsoft Campus at a Microsoft event, and while I'm standing in the hallway putting away my iPhone, actor Joe Montagne's daughter comes up and takes a look at the phone. (She's, I think 16? Perfect market for a device like this, right?) "OH MY GOD" she says, "is that the iPhone?" which precedes the request for a demo, as always. So I'm showing off the iPhone to her mostly, but also to Ernie Hudson, Joe Montagne and Joey Pants. I show off a movie, scrubbing through it, changing the volume. I switch to photos and show her flicking through photos and then pinching to zoom in. Which is the point at which she squeals with surprise. (That demo on the Apple video was actually the same thing that convinced several people I know to get the iPhone.)
One of the Microsoft guys running the show comes over and says, jokingly, "what's with this Apple product at a Microsoft event? "Yeah," says Joe Montagne, "it's like looking at bar mitzvah pictures at Hitler's house."
That's one hell of a good line.
Yesterday I was riding my bike in San Fran, when I rode by YAFGOAS (Yet Another Fucking Guy On A Segway) and as I did a double take I thought that dork looks like Steve Wozniak.
I sort of shrugged it off—while I'm here for Macworld, Steve Jobs and Woz aren't exactly the best of buddies.
Today I read a Gizmodo post with a shot of the same hefty dork on the same Segway at Macworld, and lo-and-behold, it's Woz.
You sort of need to be a geek to appreciate this.
I'm not often obsessive, thankfully the gene that turned the houses of my parents into dueling junkyards usually only appears in me as a desire to get things done right fucking now when they're bothering me.
On Thanksgiving though, that approach doesn't usually work, resulting instead in a big pile of food that's ready at the wrong time. So for the last few thanksgivings I've turned to computer assistance to help plan my meals. It's been excel the last few years, but this year it was iCal.
Behold! A day's worth of cooking in order, timeline based! Now you too can play along with our home cooking game, Schlanderson Thanksgiving®
I've sort of lost my drive to photograph recently. Partially it's because I've been spending so much free time on my bike (4762 miles for the year as of today) but part is because I'm just sort of non-motivated. I've got two main camera selections, my super-honking Canon 1Ds Mark II, which is something like eight pounds with a lens is one one end of the spectrum. On the other is my smaller point-and-shoot but I've become so disillusioned with the image quality that it's not even worth shooting.
The perfect camera has yet to arrive, and every pro photographer I know wants it. It's small, high megapixel, with manual settings (including Aperture and Shutter Priority modes, and preferably full-manual) and in an ideal world it would come with a raw mode.
The Canon G7 seems tantalizingly close, and I'm still awaiting PDN's review unit, but it lacks a raw mode and that's a bummer. Panasonic/Leica have a new body out but it got terrible terrible reviews for high-ISO noise, and by that I mean "anything over 100 ISO" which makes it less attractive by a factor of around a billion.
Anyhow, fall just fell and I didn't get out to shoot at all. I think that's a felony in the photographic market. I need some motivation. A good project or something to get me going.
In related news, I've been on flickr for two years now. Time flies .
So, Apple today announced a bunch of new features to their iTunes Store (dropping the word "music" as they've added movies to the available media) and I've been playing with it. While the interface elements are tres chic, I'm a bit more impressed with something that His Steve forgot to talk about, which is the new downloading architecture.
While the presentation did mention that one can now change the order of items to download, it did not mention that things now download in parallel instead of in serial. In other words, instead of downloading an album, one track at a time, at about 300k/sec a track, it now downloads as many tracks as it can, at a good clip faster, at the same time until your broadband pipe is filled.
In my case, that's a 30mb/second FIOS pipeline that gives me the equiv cap download speed of 3.2Mb/second.
I just purchased Grosse Point Blank and O Brother, and they both downloaded at 1.2Mb/sec, for a total of about 11 minutes to download two full-length movies.
Incidentally, if you try to play back any movies from the store, you'll need Quicktime 7.1.3, which the program says is available from Software Update. It's not, as of this writing, but it is available from apple.com/quicktime.
I've spent the week playing with a new toy piece of equipment from Verizon, their EVDO (or EV-DO or EvDO depending on who is writing it) Express Card modem. Express Card is a format found in new laptops including my beloved Macbook Pro.
The card doesn't cost a fortune, though the data plan costs both one arm and one leg (something like $80 a month) and it comes in a box with both a Mac and PC installer.
While Verizon's PPPoE software I've used in the past is spawned from the mouth of hell, the controller for this card isn't bad. On the Mac it integrates with InternetConnect and allows for switching between EVDO and WiFi depending on what's available. Of course, it can't all be love-ely and when my Mac froze up and I rebooted I ended up reinstalling the software.
I get about 800k/sec connections when I've got 2-3 bar signal strength, which is pretty typical in the burbs out here in Rockland. (We were one of the first suburbs in NY to get it, since Verizon has a huge HQ here.)
It works, which is the best thing I can say about any product. I can sit around a park or a car or a coffee shop that sells unbearably burnt and expensive drinks and get work done without paying to use their unbearably slow and expensive WiFi.
Lappy battery life is lower when using the card, though not that bad, and if you shut off WiFi when using the card it seems to come out about the same.
Next week I'll give it a shot on the train from Tarrytown to Grand Central, and I expect that to go well, since I already know from my phone that there's EVDO service on the whole route.
If you NEED anywhere access to data and can afford the $800+ a year it'll set you back, good bargain.
Just a little reminder: terrorist bombings have killed fewer than 2000 air travelers in a decade (source: CNN) while each year more than 40,000 people die in car accidents (source NHTSA).
That's around 450,000 deaths by car accident vs. 2000 by plane attack.
Clearly we should immediately ban all carry on items.
Change is good
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