David Pogue, Dictate by MacSpeech,

I am so tired. I got to M West at 8:30 and am in line for the David Pogue presentation.

Update: In the room. Rotating disco lights and loud music. Just the thing at 9 am.

Later: David had the head of the Microsoft Mac BU, talked about Office 2008. Much more exciting was Andrew from MacSpeech, showing the new Dictate program, which is replacing iListen (thank goodness). It uses the Dragon Naturally Speaking engine. I am a major fan of DNS and even bought a Windows laptop once to run it, which I dumped as soon as the Intel MacBook Pro came out.

He dictated text on stage, which is a noisy, echoey environment. Did very well. Then he handed the microphone to David, with no training of the software, let him use his speech profile, and yet David was also able to dictate almost perfectly. Just amazing.

MacSpeech

He also had people from Computer History Museum who showed interesting artifacts, such as a hand wired prototype of the Mac. They also read from some early Apple documents. A 1977 financial project drawn as a straight line on a log scale (for all you geeks) projected they would make something like $83M in 1983. That year they actually made a billion. (I hope I got the dates right.)

Computer History Museum

Then the 5 most fanatical Mac Geeks in the audience told there stories, and David sang a couple of his new parody songs. I hope my recordings came out ok.

Highlights from yesterday:
After a false start, when I forgot my badge. Realized a block away, so I was able to reboot. I cruised the Moscone South exhibit hall for a while, and met my old friend Cindy for lunch were we swapped stories. Back to the show and watched a presentation on blogging for beginners by Dan Pourhadi of macuser.com. As a blogger for about a week, it fit the bill. A bit of cruising, and I realized I was exhausted and walked back to the room.

Dan Pourhadi's Blog
We went to dinner with Cindy and Julie, and engaged more conspiring.

I am getting tired of typing. I can't wait to be able to get back to dictating.

Keynote Day

I was up before 4 am, and was in line before 5:30. By that time the line was all the way down the very long block and around the building. Much longer than last year at this time. By about 6:30 or so they let us in to continue standing in line in the building. We finally got into the room at 9:30, and even coming that early I was in the video overflow room.

Standing in line there was a lot of geek talk, much of this around who had owned the earliest version of the Mac, etc. A guy standing by me was carrying a copy of "The Fountainhead" so we got into a discussion of libertarian thought, pluses and minuses. He was a recent Stanford graduate who had spent some time working for the Guiliani Campaign. Then he went to LA to start to work as a screen writer, but admitted that this was unfortunately timed, so he is staying with his family these days.

Luckily, I brought my folding chair, so I had a little relief. I offered it to others, but strangely, had no takers. It was new, clean and everything. After standing in line for 4 hours, we were all getting pretty tired.

All of you who care already know the basics of the Keynote. I love the look of the MacBook Air, but I think I am most likely to get the Time Capsule. We don't sit at home watching TV.

After the Keynote, trying to exit was frightening. On the escalator down, I realized that the lobby was completely filled with masses of humanity, with no one moving. At the bottom I saw no choice but to take escalator back up and use another exit. (Check out the picture link below.)

I tried to get on the wifi at the expo, but it was completely overloaded. I walked to the closest Starbucks, but it also was full and the wifi was similarly overloaded. I went to a couple of blocks away and finally was able to get online.

I wandered back to the hotel room, and snoozed for a while. Then I walked back to Moscone West and looked around the exhibits. They had a Podcast Studio, and watched Leo Laporte talk about podcasting. By that time I hit the wall. Walked back to the room, and took my second nap.

Back to Macworld tomorrow.

pictures

Countdown to Keynote

The countdown to the keynote is on. I am planning to get up at 4:30, down a Starbucks double shot lite, eat an apple and a Cliff bar, grab my folding chair and backpack, and head down to Moscone West. Last year, we might not have gotten in the main room, had it not for Chris determination and sheer size. We ended up kneeling on the floor behind a row of chairs. Not bad location to see. Eventually the person in the seat in front of Chris got up and moved. Possibly because he got tired of having Chris breath in his ear.

In order to properly prepare for tomorrow, Kathy and I completely exhausted ourselves. We walked to Moscone, to get our badges. Later we took the cable car to the top of Lombard street (the famous twisting street), walked down to Columbus Ave, and walked through the North Beach area. We settled on the Stinking Rose restaurant, famous for garlic dishes for lunch. Then we walked back to Caffe Puccini for some espresso and a bit of rest. On to City Lights bookstore. The down Grant street and cruised Chinatown doing a little shopping. Finally straggled back to the room. Kathy was too tired to go out, so I am sitting at the Caffe Espresso after a veggie panini and salad. Just wonderful!

pictures

Golden Gate Park

I was too tired to post yesterday. We took the bus to Golden Gate Park. It had been a while since I had ridden a bus and in San Francisco, the first seats are along the wall facing inward, instead of facing ahead. Signs say to yield seats to seniors and disabled. It was relatively empty at first and I figured that I was sort of a senior. The bus started filling up and soon there were many people much more senior. An tall, elderly black gentleman with a long white chin beard like Fu Manchu was guarding a young girl. I took her to be his granddaughter. A large woman in her thirties with a large wheeled cart, pushed her way through the crowd, and yelled into a cell phone. Most of the trip I was standing, holding on to the bar, trying not to fall down.

We went to the DeYoung Museum. They had sculpture in cages and a tower from which I took pictures. We went to a sculpture exhibition which did not do much for me, but then saw the teapot exhibit. Who would have thought what they could do with teapots. Sensuous teapots, robot teapots, political teapots, Andy Warhol teapots. By then my Stendhal's syndrome was kicking in, so Kathy continued looking and I went to sit in the garden.

There is a slideshow of some of the pictures on the right.

Some pictures from Day one

In which our heroes have adventures in the airport

I woke up at 3:30 this morning. After a quick breakfast and coffee, went to making sure the computers were all backed up and shut down. Finished packing. We left the house at 7, and were in the airport by about 8. By this time, I was in need of some espresso. We staked out seats near the Starbucks, and Kathy went to check on the flight. It was delayed and will leave at 11:05 instead of 10:15. We settle in, me playing with the computer, and Kathy laying her head on the table. Kathy goes back and checks just to make sure. Same thing. So about 10:15 we start packing up to go through security. We walk by the departure screen, and it says “departed.” We get through security as quickly as we can. We go through the line dividers and push to the front. Kathy runs off, not even putting on her shoes. I have to stop because of my CPAP machine. They are very nice at the gate, but say they announced it throughout the airport. We would have heard it. ATC released the plane suddenly and they had to go. They got us on the next plane, a couple of hours later, and this was relatively uneventful. We had not problem finding the bags that had come on the original plane.

We took the shuttle to the hotel. The driver stopped in the middle of the street with the cable car coming. A cop came yelling at him, so we rushed into the hotel. We settled into the room, and went for a walk. We checked out the gym, and then walked around looking at the offerings of the local restaurants. We stopped at an old favorite, the Caffe Espresso, and had a light dinner. We then walked through Union Square.

Then on to the Apple store, explored around and bought a cable to hook up Chris’ video camera to the laptop. We continued to explore the area, and finally went back to the room.


I pulled out Chris’ camera and noticed there was a tape still in it. There was some video of our trip to MacWorld from last year. I have to download iMovie HD because iMovie 08 won’t run on my Powerbook G4 12 inch.

I will be interested to see what is there.

Radical Sabbatical

I also am using this as a mini Radical Sabbatical. For more information, click the link in the sidebar.