What am I working on?
What am I covering for the Times? TVs, cellphones, cameras, and Web 2.0. Plus whatever strikes my fancy.
In my spare time, I sleep.
Adam from Simian Fever snapped this photo of Christina, me and himself at the Bigfoot Lodge in San Francisco on Saturday night. The wife and I are both working this weekend but decided to go walk around the ‘hood for an hour or two. We’d never met Adam before but as you can see — fun guy. Adam, click it for the scary-big original size, and thanks again!
Sigh. It’s impossible for me to praise Natali Del Conte’s incredible watchability on video without someone making it into some creepy middle-age-guy-stalks-young-lady thing. One of my editors is still in the doghouse with me for adding an overtly sexual comment to something I wrote about her — nice edit, frigtard. Nonetheless, Natali’s just great onscreen. She’s from planet Venus, but she’s got an accessible diamond-in-the-rough vibe. Pronounces Latinos flawlessly but dings cellphone makers for pandering to La Rasa in press releases. She’s like that in person, too. The NDC Effect, which science can probably measure, makes people act all stupid around her. I wonder if she wants to be a gossip blogger?
I haven’t had any problems with OS X Leopard other than needing to buy Photoshop Elements again. But Robert Scoble has had serious problems and is blogging his usual over-the-top reaction. Which is great, because it’s fun to watch the Apple zealots pile on him instead of me for a change. Go Robert, go!
(Click the image to see it at giant size)
A dry read of the feature list in Apple’s latest operating system doesn’t do justice to it. You need to fire it up and play with it. They’ve broken the graphics out from the application silos, so you can:
The graphics are well optimized. I have last year’s slowest Mac mini and only sometimes does it hesitate. Yes, of course, this makes me want to go buy a new Mac.
My 2004 version of Photoshop Elements won’t run on Leopard. And the took away the floating analog transparent clock I relied on. None of the aftermarket apps are as pretty as Apple’s was. On the upside, the new version of Photoshop I had to buy ($70) has greatly improved the automatic tools for improving candid shots.
I’m working on two articles for The New York Times, another for Slate, and I need to rewrite some Wired stuff. Oh, and a feature for PC World that’s about as much fun as I can have reporting from my desk. Everything’s due at the same time. I’m clicking Yes on friend requests, but that’s about it. Go watch Marc or Natali instead.
Bono cuts in on my green Armani 9285’s, if I’m not mistaken. They’re part of the Red global AIDS fund drive, like the red iPods. The photo is from this video where Steve Jobs’s iPal sings a 20-year-old song that was cut from The Joshua Tree album, while sitting on the couch.
Fark founder Drew Curtis, me, and my long-lost former Z-Code coworker Ruth Colby, aka Calyxa. She gave me a techie’s tarot reading with her deck of Elemetnal Hexagons. Calyxa said I have good male-female energy pairing in my life. True! The woman on the card looks a lot like Christina.
One for Marc Canter. Whose name I can spell!
Good news: I just went to Starbucks with New York Times tech editor Damon Darlin — I’m pretty sure I read him in the Wall Street Journal 25 years ago — and we came up with some ideas for articles I can do. Which is kind of a relief, because the weird thing about my fellow bloggers is that while they go on and on about how no one reads newspapers anymore and all news comes from blogs now, most have a weird fetish about the New York Times. I’m suddenly a real journalist again to them. The other nice thing about writing for the Times is you can call any company or organization anywhere in the world and not get sent to voicemail. I love it.
