Apple AnnouncementsThis morning I went to my first in-person Steve Jobs announcement of new Apple products. Basically, the employees travel to the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus near Apple where we all crowd into an auditorium for the presentation. As has been clear from watching the remote broadcasts of Steve speeches from WWDC and MacWorld, these presentations are perhaps the high-energy events of Apple. Everyone's pumped up to learn what's happening, and although the generalities and a few specifics have been going around the rumor sites, it's the details that make some of the new products really exciting.The first announcement was of Mac OS 9, highlighted by Sherlock 2, Apple's search engine front-end for MacOS. I started using Sherlock (on 8.6) recently, and it's pretty slick, allowing you to bundle searches of many search engines - and non-search engines such as new sites like CNN - into one search, and its ordering is not bad. It appears that Sherlock 2 adds integrated searching of e-commerce sites and auction sites, the latter of which will probably be pretty useful to me in my comic book collection auction searches. The big news is the redesigned iMac, which sports a 350 or 400 MHz PowerPC G3 chip, more RAM, high-quality speakers, 10/100BASE-T ethernet, and supports the Airport wireless networking. But the clincher is that they added that stuff and dropped the price to $999. This got the biggest applause from the audience; it's pretty impressive. There's also a "DV" version which had a DVD-ROM drive, FireWire networking, and a RAGE 3D graphics chip. Steve then said something like, "And we wanted to make this as affordable as we could." I turned to Tom and said, "$899!" which got a chuckle. But no, unsurprisingly, it's $1299, which was I believe the price of the original iMac, 14 months ago. There's also the "desktop video" product iMovie so people can do their own home video editing with an iMac and a FireWire-capable digital camcorder (I guess FireWire is pretty common on digital camcorders already). Will this be the next big thing? We'll see. I'm more looking forward to 3D animation rendering programs on desktop computers that don't take all day, but I won't hold my breath! So yes, it was pretty exciting. If Apple can meet demand, I think a sub-$1000 Mac will be a huge seller, and the DV version should also do well for people who want those sorts of enhancements in a low-priced computer. Apple rules.
 Last night I finished Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, and my review can be summed up as: Don't bother. Whereas his earlier novel, The Name of the Rose, had a relatively straightforward story despite its many digressions (it's much better than the movie), Foucault's Pendulum digresses all over the place and doesn't really go anywhere. It's more-or-less about cabalism and conspiracy theories, with several Italian intellectuals discovering (it seems) a centuries-long plot by the Templars and Rosicrucians to take over the world. But it doesn't really go anywhere. Are there lessons to be learned here? Interesting and potentially useful facts to glean (such as the details of monastery life in Rose)? Not really. Just 500+ pages of dense and slow-moving text. Subrata said, "Well, if you'd asked my opinion I could have let you know that." Next time, I'll know to ask, I guess!
Tonight I watched two TV episodes I had on tape: First, last night's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which was a fairly routine story about a couple of teenaged models getting murdered. I am a little annoyed that Munch is largely kept on the sidelines, and I can see I'm going to get pretty bored with the two principals in the series fairly quickly. Neither one of them really grabs me. Then, last Wednesday's Law & Order, which was a very well-done story about young kids killing other young kids, and exactly what should be done with the perpetrators. The two sides were presented equally well enough that I had a hard time making up my own mind what should be done, but the judge's decision was not the one, I think, that I would have made. This episode reminded me of the difference between L&O and Homicide: In the latter, the story stops (usually) when the killer confesses, or when the police otherwise stop investigating. In the former, the story continues on to the court system. I definitely don't like the current assistant DA as much as I liked Michael Moriarty, though.
Hey, I finished third in my fantasy league this year, which means I win some money. So in eight seasons of fantasy baseball, I've finished in the money in seven of them. Not bad! I didn't give the first and second place teams a run for their money as I'd hoped given my big mid-season trade, but that's life.
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