Tsaiberspace

You’re booking a flight online, and you’re at the final step of seat selection: unless you commute on a plane, you don’t know which seats are the good ones, beyond your normal aisle-vs.-window preference.

SeatGuru provides schematics and advice on seat selection for airlines and their fleets of planes (your airplane model is usually known when you book your flight). For example: “rows B, C, and H have restricted seat leg and storage room due to an underseat equipment box”.

Sweet.

Hyde St. Pier is actually part of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The highlights for me:

• Enough for locals to see, if you like looking at beaches and boats and national historical park kinds of stuff.
• Enough for tourists to see (it’s very close to Ghirardelli Square).
• Not as crowded as Fisherman’s Wharf.

In unrelated news, I’m migrating my photos over to use Gallery. I’m not very happy about it, but I think it’s inevitable. The main reason for going to Gallery is that I want to get some kind of commenting system in place for the photos. But everything else that made me like QuickyPix still makes me sad:

• Gallery: 1810 files, 307599 lines of PHP and “smarty” template code. QuickyPix: 10 files, 2500 lines of Python.
• Database backend is required for Gallery, but that’s not a big deal since I’m running WordPress anyway.
• Gallery themeing looks like it will be a huge pain. I’m already thinking I’m giving up on getting the photos to look integrated with the rest of the website.

On the other hand, I gain:

• Comments.
• Lots of other nice little features that I don’t necessarily care about that much, but are neat: random rotating photo, and a few WordPress-related plugins that I might check out someday (I’m pessimistic about my prospects here).
• Addressability of single photos: individual photos can be linked to; my QuickyPix setup only allowed addressability of whole albums.

My first Macworld Expo. I didn’t go to the Keynote speech; I just got a free exhibits-only pass, and went on Wednesday after all the Mac fanatics got their fix.

This is also my first trade-show that was not one geared towards enterprise infrastructure. It was immediately apparent on the exhibit floor:

• At an enterprise-vendor trade show, everyone pays (albeit employers usually pay), so both the exhibitors and the attendees seem to be more “serious” about the exhibit floor, and everyone is more engaged. It is relatively easy to get into the Macworld exhibit halls for free, so you have lots of “non-serious” browsers. In return, the exhibitors aren’t necessarily as aggressive about tracking down people who are just idly standing around; they figure you’re just a gawker.
• At an enterprise-vendor trade show, the product is generally available for display, but people aren’t actually selling the product right then and there, since the purchase cycle usually goes through some million-dollar purchasing process, and requires racking some pizza-box machine into a cabinet. At Macworld, there were *so* many vendors of laptop cases, sleeves, iPod skins, headphone accessories, it almost looked like a flea market or some street bazaar. Presumably they are there to sell to retailers (Best Buy, Target, etc.) who would be presumably paying some employees to go check out what is new this year. Although, of the consumer products available for sale, most had an “expo” rate that was up to 50% off their list price.

The one cool thing was some actual space where the new products were being demonstrated - iPhones, iPods, and of course, the new MacBook Air:

I was kind of underwhelmed:

• Heavier than expected. It’s still pretty light as far as laptops and portables go, and it is certainly thin and stylish, but I think calling it “Air” is a bit premature.
• I’m not a fan of the chiclet-style MacBook-like keyboard. I prefer the MacBook Pro keyboard.

But it is kind of neat to be able to provide a first-person description of it without having to wait two months to see one in an Apple store :).

Am I glad I went? Sure. Will I go again? Sure, there is enough to see to keep any computer geek happy (even a non-Machead like myself). Would I line up at 5am in the morning? No way.