Here’s the webcast of David Isenberg’s talk at Oxford yesterday. I’m on the road and haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet. (I talk there tomorrow. No, it’s not intimidating. Nope. Nope. Nuh-uh. (Must keep telling self that.))

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I leave tonight for four days in Europe. Five talks, three cities (London, Oxford, Helsinki), two countries, four days. I’m looking forward to it because it will be interesting, but I expect to be a gibbering idiot by the end of it, if not at the start of it.

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I’m enjoying my new Powerbook G4. Really. I’m not finding it magical or worthy of religious veneration, but it’s been running continuously since I got it, it feels good, and I’m not done discovering all its nice touches. Nevertheless, when I go to Europe next week, I’m taking my Thinkpad X40 with me instead of the PB (assuming my ThinkPad is back from the shop — ulp). I’m sorry to do it, which is an indication of the bond I’m forming with my Mac, but when you put it all in the balance, the TP wins — given my idiosyncratic needs.

Here’s why:

Most important, I just installed Powerpoint 2004 and the Mac version doesn’t have features that I count on in Windows. In particular, it doesn’t have motion path animation and it doesn’t have an animation timeline. It plays path animations created under Windows, but you can’t create them or edit them on the Mac. Since I’m going to Europe to give presentations (5 in 4 days, 3 cities, and 2 countries), and my presentations rely on those features, that’s a killer for me. (Keynote seems to be a totally lovely piece of software, but it also doesn’t do path animation or have a timeline.)

Then there’s the fact that the PB is heavier than my TP and seems to get less than the TP’s 5+ hours of battery. I have an extra PB battery on order, but I have a bad back and adding weight makes a difference to me. If I were shopping for a new Windows laptop, I would not consider one as heavy as the PB or with its battery life. So, that’s a trade-off. Not a killer, though: If Mac Powerpoint were up to Windows’ Powerpoint’s snuff, I’d be taking the Mac with me.

Here’s the part that makes me really sad. Because I have a big, powerful PC desktop machine for work when I’m at home, I use my laptop almost entirely for travel. Much of the travel that I get paid for involves giving presentations. I know how I work and know that I will tinker with the presentation up to the last minute. So I’m afraid I’m regretfully going to have to go back to a Windows laptop.

Microsoft wins because it defeatured Office on the Mac. Sigh.

I am nevertheless going to hold onto the PB for a while because it’s fun, I’d like to learn more, and maybe there’s a way out of this that I don’t know about. [Tags: mac macintosh]

But wait! The Mac has a late surge! IBM received my broken ThinkPad on Nov. 17 but has to wait until Nov 30 to get in a newhard drive. So I’m taking my Mac with me to Europe after all.

That is totally sucky service from IBM. It used to be actually good. Is this an isolated incident or are they headed the way of Dell?

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One of the big drawbacks of the Mac for me is that I miss some utilities I’d written, chiefly my blog editor. It has a whole bunch of features (some day I’ll publish the documentation for it), but only a couple that I really miss: Automatic linking to sites I’ve linked to before and auto-html-ing of tags.

The small favor is to ask if anyone knows of Mac software that has those features.

But even if you do, I still want to be able to write small, amateur programs on the Mac. I’ve poked at XCode but have made no headway with it and have ordered an Objective-C book. What would really really help me, though, is being able to talk with someone who can get me up through a “hello world” program and to something that lets me do some basic text editing. We’d have to start at the IDE basics. Once I can create a form that I can type into, I can probably make headway on my own.

So, anyone have the time and patience to hold my hand through this? It might take an initial phone call and then some IM’ing or emailing of dumb questions. Send me email (self A_T evident.com) if you’re up for it. Thanks!

(Or, maybe I should invest in RealBasic. I’m downloading the trial version now.) [Tags: mac macintosh]

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Cameron Reilly has just posted a 70 minute (!) podcast interview we recorded last night. It was fun and wide-ranging. Best of all, every twenty minutes, we mention Doc.

(You will hear me sputter when Cameron comments about “getting chicks.” I’ve lost my sense of humor on this topic.)

To continue my court-ordered mentioning of Doc every 20 minutes, this morning something else occurred to me about Doc’s seminal piece on the threat to our Internet: Maybe Doc thinks of re-framing as the solution because he’s a writer, a word guy – and, btw, a great re-framer.. It’s like philosophers thinking that humans are primarily rational because philosophers (generally) proceed via reason. [Tags: podcast CameronReilly DocSearls]

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It’ll be easier for you to view this than for me to explain it. All I’ll say is that it’ll put your (where “your”=”my”)drawing abilities in perspective. (Caution: Transient line art nudity)

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FWIW, expect light blogging today and tomorrow. I spent the morning with a client in NYC – they’re trying to figure out how tagging can help people find more of what’s on their huge site – and am giving a talk in Irving Texas to an educational group. Fun for me and less for you to read. Win win!

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Dan has announced the alpha of his new product:

The product is the wikiCalc program — a web authoring tool that creates web pages. It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables.

Sounds cool. And Dan’s been known to put together a noteworthy product or two. [Tags: DanBricklin wikis SocialSoftware]

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I tried Plaxo early on. It rubbed me the wrong way . Then, as I occasionally have updated my contacts with info sent by Plaxo, I’ve come to tolerate it.

Today I hate it again. I got an update notice from someone and noticed that my own info was out of date. So I took the seemingly innocuous step of updating my phone number.

Lo and behold, Plaxo apparently took that as a command to send mail to everyone in my address book (actually, I don’t know whose address book) that I have new info that they simply must attend to. I am, I seem, an inadvertent Plaxo spammer and unintentional narcissist.

If Plaxo alerted you, I apologize. [Tags: plaxo]

[LATER that day:] Stacy Martin, Plaxo’s Privacy Officer, responds in the comments below, explaining what happened. It’s not as bad as I thought, but it’s somewhat worse than I’d like. (Thanks for the explanation, Stacy.)

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Peggy Noonan, former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, has a really good, really depressing Zeitgeist piece in the WSJ that generalizes from her personal slice of the Zeit’s Geist, which is interesting in itself.

She says that the “elite” assumes the wheels are coming off the trolley and there’s nothing we can do about it. Oh, she spends a short paragraph at the end saying that there “are a lot of people … trying to do work that helps,” but that comes across as a mere hand wave.

The piece seems to me to be broken in the middle. After several excellent paragraphs sketching the magnitude of the problems facing us (“You say we don’t understand Africa? We don’t even understand Canada!”), leading up to the conclusion that it’s not just the president who’s overwhelmed but the presidency itself, she then continues as if this is just how it seems. But if the wheels are really coming off, what do we do? Noonan blames the elites because they’re supposed to “dig us out and lead us,” but if the wheels are coming off, there’s not much the trolley driver can do. Is this something leaders can get us out of? Or is the system itself really in as bad a shape as it seems? I wish Noonan had been clearer about her view here, if only because if Peggy “Morning in America”¹ Noonan thinks America’s finished, well, that’s news. (A smaller-minded person than I might suggest that our current feeling of hopelessness is in part due to five years of untrammeled Republicanism.)

I think there’s truth to Noonan’s description. I do feel that my children will not be as privileged as I am, that America will not be the world’s only superpower in a way that actually lets us exert that power, that we’re living on borrowed gas and yuans, that even if we get back on track, I don’t like my ticket’s destination.

But I think that’s also why so many of us are so invested in the Internet. That’s the fresh start we’ve been looking for. It’s a world that’s more connected, more creative and more fair than the real world. (Completely connected? Completely fair? Of course not.)

Unfortunately, if we get the Internet right and the real world wrong, kids continue to starve.

1Note: Noonan did not write the “Morning in America” phrase that became associated with Reagan. That came from a 1984 campaign ad. [Tags: PeggyNoonan despair america internet DigitalCulture]

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