Monday, May 20, 2002

Since I defended Bush a few days ago (my friends will be amazed!) now I have to say something about his crazy Cuba "policy." If I heard the news correctly today, he basically said we wouldn't work with Cuba until that country adopts a capitalistic, democratic system. At least two major problems here: we don't get to decide what form of government another country adopts, and we are, ahem, less than consistent about demanding such standards from many of the other countries we do business with. What is it about Cuba that blinds some politicians? The Cuban missle crisis was decades ago. Today Castro is barely a bit player on the world stage. He is no threat to us or to much of anyone else. Probably the best way we could cause him to lose power would be to forge strong relationships with his country; it wouldn't be long until there was a sea change it Cuba's politics. 5:37:42 PM      comment []

Some lunch-time observations about the Apple presentation: The Final Cut Pro demo was very well received. I've used FCP 2 a bit but have not upgraded. The integration with other apps (like Photoshop and audio) is excellent; time to upgrade. DVD Studio Pro seems to be quite a cool program but I don't think users have quite gotten their minds around DVD production yet. I don't think this is a software problem - more of a user-readiness issue. As always, Apple lunch was great! ;-) Now, after lunch... A rather long marketing presentation from Adobe about Golive and InDesign. Golive is interesting but I'm pretty much a direct coding kind of guy. About InDesign, maybe I'm out of step but I'm not all that interested in print publishing at this point - almost everything I do goes on the web. Next up is a session on PhotoShop 7.0. This sounds somewhat interesting since I just ordered my upgrade... ... and a bit later. The new PhotoShop does look pretty great. The file browser is especially cool. There are a few odd gaps. Photoshop allows you to see and edit the EXIF data about your images... but you can't search for files based on this. Strange. Also, I can't make to many judgements on one demo, but the "spinning beach ball" seemed to be pretty active during some of the demo. 1:09:04 PM      comment []

By the way, it is still raining - even more than yesterday. 10:19:45 AM      comment []

I'm at Apple today. I almost forgot that I had signed up for a Bay Area higher education event - mostly concerning the issues around moving from OS 9 to OS X. If I hear anything really new and interesting I'll report it here. (So far most of what I've seen is fairly familiar stuff.) 10:18:55 AM      comment []