• The main selling point of a cast-iron skillet: you can fry 1/2 lb of bacon and tell yourself "I'm just seasoning my cookware." #
• The only way you can consider an NFL game to be "action-packed" is if you act like the players get points for milling about. #
• I don't think any Super Bowl ad this year will top this one for the Letterman show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSKkmypTZM #
• Hate to sound like such a Guy, but my biggest reax to the Google ad was "Hey! 'Who is The Stig?' was one of the auto-completes!" #
• How the Letterman-Oprah-Leno Super Bowl Ad Came Together » NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/bduMRq (thanks, @joelhousman!) #

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• I feel like such a grownup. I want to scold this college kid: "You can't be out in jeans & a Bruins jersey! It's 20 degrees!!!" #

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Okay, I can’t get the first Twitter plugin working. So I’ve moved on to a different one: Twitter Tools. Let’s see how well this one works.

Oh, and based on a quick reaction to that previous post: as much as I’d love to spread the rumor that I already have an iPad…no, the thing I Probably Can’t Talk About wot I used with which to make that last post wasn’t an iPad.

To make it up to you, here are a couple more distracting photos:

Don’t mind me, folks: I’m just testing two things. First, this Wordpress plugin I’ve just installed, which automatically Tweets links to new posts (I thought I’d set it up properly, but apparently I needed to configure it with a special API for the linky-linky), and secondly…

…

…Mmm, no, I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about what I’m writing and posting this with.

Hey, look! A distracting photo!

I was at my usual comix retail establishment, engaged in one of our usual high-level cultural debates, when the talk inevitably turned to the subject of Burt Reynolds’ late oeuvre. We were exploring the fascinating dichotomy between his Hairpiece movies (which are usually very bad) and his No Hairpiece movies or  (which are usually good or even very good).

We had already dispensed with “Boogie Nights,” agreeing that for the purposes of our discussion, a hairpiece which was age-appropriate in both color and hairline would be regarded as a “No Hairpiece” production.

“He was pretty good in that movie he was in about ten years ago,” someone said. “He’s a retired burglar, and he starts teaching this young crook…damn, I can’t think of the title…”

Instinctively I reached for my iPhone and prepared to launch IMDB. But before I’d thumbed the button to wake the screen, Steve (the store’s proprietor) had fished a copy of the Leonard Maltin Film Guide from behind the counter and began flipping through it:

This book is not unfamiliar to me. I used to keep current with all of the master movie reference books: your Roger Ebert guide and your Halliwell guide and your Psychotronic guide, et al. I bought a fresh copy every time any of these were updated and kept them on the reference shelf near my desk, to handle just this sort of question, or to serve me with anywhere from ten minutes to three hours of nonproductive distraction from whatever it is I was meant to be doing.

(Yes, kids, times were hard before the Internet.)

But bloody hell! It’s been years since I’ve even touched a book like that. I grew up with them, and even I regarded this old Maltin guide with a certain mixture of fascination and disbelief.

I realized that one day, I will need to explain the following things to my (as-yet hypothetical) children about what books were like, back when the things were made from mashed-up tree pulp instead of mashed-up electrons:

1) If a reference book attempted to be comprehensive in any way, and it was essential that the information be presented in any kind of a logical, linear order, then you couldn’t update the book without republishing its entire contents. If it was an annual book — like an almanac — all existing unsold copies had to be scrapped when the new edition was released. They almost immediately became unsalable.

2) Why not simply release a slim addendum? Because the information needed to be presented in a logical, linear order: searching had to be done by hand. Many people would cling to the same dictionary editions they’d had since college, simply because they were so familiar with it that if they needed to look up a word like “preternatural” they could instinctively open it to almost the right page. Even so, lots of page-flipping and scrutinizing was necessary.

3) The cost of producing the book was directly related to how many pages needed to be printed. So if a book with lots and lots of content was being prepared for mass-market sale, steps needed to be taken to control the page count. Simetimes, drastic measures were necessary, like tiny, tiny printing and tissue-thin paper.

4) If a book needed to contain more content, the publisher couldn’t simply make the book’s “footprint” bigger. They had to pack neatly into shipping boxes of a certain size, and when they arrived at the bookstores, they needed to be stocked on shelves of a certain size. So usually, the only solution was to simply add more pages.

All of these factors sometimes led to the sort of item you see in that photo: a practically a solid cube of paper. If that book were any thicker, it’d roll away from you when you dropped it.

I remember a multi-page magazine ad that Microsoft took out some ten years ago when they launched their Microsoft Reader format. A timeline ran across the bottom of the ad, dictating how the future of publishing was definitely going to go, now that they’d crashed this Connecticut-sized meteor into the middle of the dinosaur habitat. Oh, Microsoft wasn’t too terribly confident. According to the timeline, it wasn’t going to be until 2005 (if I recall correctly) that “Most books are purchased and read electronically; physical books are only printed in special ‘gift’ editions for special occasions.”

We all had a good laugh about that. Even today, electronic distribution of books is mostly like an awkward office party that everybody shows up for but which nobody really participates in. “Your $12 book is a bundle of electrons that you can’t read until you spend $200 more for a whole new gadget” goes down about as well with the general population as “You know that group of toner-huffing morons you work with? Well, once or twice a year you’re expected to socialize with them on your own time. Oh, and your boss and all of your boss’ bosses will be there too, so there’ll be plenty of opportunities to commit career-limiting blunders, both real ones and ones that only exist in other people’s imaginations.”

But although the transition to digital publishing is happening slowly, it’s definitely happening. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. And the technology is the dull part. What’s interesting is the shift in perception.

You know how sometimes you turn off a certain cognitive section of your brain and force yourself to see a word not as a piece of language with meaning, but as a sequence of black shapes and white spaces? It’s like you’re seeing that image for the very first time and suddenly “bird” seems like a very odd collection of squiggles.

I’ve been buying all of my in-print books electronically for a couple of years now. Physical books aren’t weird to me yet. But damn, that old copy of the Maltin guide was a freaky and bizarre object. It’s the first time I looked at a book and didn’t see a container for information. I saw dead wood.

(Oh, incidentally: the movie was 1989’s “Breaking In,” co-starring…hmm. No, the writer and director are the only other names you’d recognize.)

Screen resolution is 1024×768 at 132 dpi.

Reading books on it: text sure isn’t as crisp as a Kindle. But it’s illuminated and anti-aliased so on the whole, the lower resolution is in many ways more readable than e-ink.

Feels very light in the hand. I’m not as worried about Arm Fatigue as I was.

This thing is FAST. I stretch-zoom a webpage and it keeps up with me now matter how fast I zoom and scroll. When you turn a page in iBook, it’s not “an animation of a page turning”…you are TURNING a freaking PAGE.

iBook will let you read free previews in some fashion. But nobody could give ne specifics. Read a special preview, online only? Download the first couple of chapters to the device, like Kindle?

Keyboard easel accessory is $69. It doesn’t fold for travel. Has special iPad buttons to go Home, etc.

Keyboard can keep up with my 100 WPM easy.

Virtual keyboard is more “tappable” thN “typeable.” you can easily type with all fingers, but you need to be slightly more deliberate than normal.

Same mechanical buttons on the iPad itself as on the iPhone.

Hold the lid of a small MacBook and you’ll get the general effect.

Steve is on the demo floor, being interviewed by Mossberg. I am trying to get a photo without compromising my “Steve doesn’t know my name” status.

OS and UI experience: it IS an iPhone. The OS will probably have to be renamed. Every time the UI confused me, it was because I expected it to work unlike an iPhone in some way.

My firdt chance to breathe since the shows started. Very underwhelnmed by the lack of unexpected fresh new I. But then again, maybe a reinvention of the touch UI would have been gauche. This appears to be a statement that “We developed the iPhone to be a great touch OS that could scale to anything.”

So its all one universe. Yu learned to use the iPhone…goog so you now know how to use an iPad. You shop at the iTunes Store? Good, thats how you buy things for the iPad.

“We were right all along,” I think is their dstatement swith the iPad.

Pricing is KILLER. This thing will moip the floor with just about anything. Its so easy to talk yourself into spending anoter $100 to get an iPad inhstead of a netbooki or even $240 more for this instead of an ebook reader.

And the “pay as you go” is another key to this thing’s success’ I think Apple has worked hard to erase obstacles to purchasing this.

A nice little easel.

A dock easel…WITH A KEYBOARD?! Okay, Im an iudiot. I was certain that it wouldnt have any sort of keyboard option.

Also a little leather book cover.

Inspirational little video with Mr. Ive.

AKA “OK, journalists, we’ll let you rest your fingers for a little while.” Thank you, Apple,. yes I need a rest.

Very neat: caqn create onscreen forms (like a clipboard) for data entry.

Each app will be $9.99. Compatible with iWork on Mac. Can connect to projectors. Purchase on the App Store.

Steve is back.

Syncs to your mac or PC via iTunes, like an iPhone, via USB. Syncs all data.

Data is synced back to your desktop.

Can have it with or without data plan.

Two plans: 250 megs a month for $14.99. UNlimited plan is $29.99 a month.

VERY good pricing.

Says its a breakthrough pan with AT&T which includes hotspot access.

NO CONTRACT. Pay as you go. Pay and activate right on your iPad.

THIS IS INCREDIBLE. Okay, that solves so many of Apples problems.

Breakthrough deals in US, hope to have international deals by June.

All iPad 3G models are unlocked. Uses new GSM Micro cards.

(I might be imagining things, but I think there are people in front row seeded to start applause. I sense a little bit of fatigue among the prtess.)

Price?

When we set out to develop the iPad, we had ambutious tech goals and UI goals…but also a very aggressive price goal: we want to put this in the hands of lots of people. Just as we could jmeet or esxceed other goals…

IU am thrilled to announce that the orice starts at $499.

WHOOOO! Cheers and gebnuine applause.

$699 for 64 gigs, base orice is 16 also 32 valk.

3G adds $129 to the porice of each.

Yes, fuck you, Crunchoad.

Wuill ship WiFi models in 60 days.

Will probably ship 3G models in 90 days.

Accessories

Steve says that he gave team the task to see what they could do with iWork on the tablet a year ago. Habnds iut off to Schiller.

Keynote. New version of Pages. New version of Numbers. All of them look like documents, very sinple UI

Keynote.

Runs in landscape mode.

Uses multitouch gestures. How to drag multiple slides?> Tap first one to pick it up, then tap others to Pick Them Up so to speak. Uses multiutuoch very well.

Very tactile, obviously. You grab all of your art, and other content.

Much of this is modal…you go into Animation Mode to define how an item will animate or transition. (Tap the Done button when youre done, to return to the main part of the app)

Tap the Play button to presentl.

ASLso includes the Magic Move feature of desktop Keynote. Looks very very pretty, overall. Slick and smooth animation and transitions.

Pages

Uses the sajme gallery motif you see ebverywhere else…like the way you scroll through open webpages in iPhone safari.

Turn horizontal for a fullsize keyboard.

New Page nbavigator tool. Taqp and scroll, manifying glass will show you a preview of the page yu
re scrooling through.==

Demos autowrap around an image. Drag the giraffe and it just keeps dynhaicaly reflowing all of the text around it.

Numbers=

Most impressive. You see folder tabs across the top.

This could be the first Fun spreadsheet app. Its all tactile.

Brings up a custom soft keyboard for each task (numbers, dates, formulas)

You can watch live game videok, as with other app. But this makes me excited about TV on this device…MLB has done a great job with Enhanced Presentation, embroidering video with more stats and content.

Apple comes out to remind us that it also runs all iPhone apps as is.

Steve sounhds a little raspy,.

Apple has done a great job of pioneering dysfunctionality wuith the Kindle or thats what I thought he said.

Shows off a new app called iBooks.

New iBooki Store. Looks like it has the same parity with music and apps.

Five huge publishers aqre already on boardf and it goes live today!

(Okay, I was wrong. I thought Apple would be content to have multiple bookstore apps)

Library flips around like a bookcase in a murder mansion to reveal hidden passage to the store. Looks like a WAY richer experience than Kindle Store. Book downloads directly to the device.

UI is like aq book. Tap anywhere on left or rtight tur pages, or flip graphically.

UI controls fade away when youre reading. Caqn avbe any kinds of photos.

Yay, it uses the epub format.

What kind of DRM, I wonder?

EA came onsite, he says. Need For Speed demo looks GREAT. You steer by steerng this steering wheel sized item.

Tap the rearview mirror to look behind you.

Performance looks awesome.

Reminds me that we still dont know what the resoloution of this screen is. How many pixels in each dimension? But this racing game looks fantastic.

Last up is MLB.com. I love their app for the iPhone.

Live Game gameday dispolay is fantastic. Tap anything for details, tap players to gflip out their baseball card. Bideo highlights play while the game is playting live behind the video.

We gave some developers this SDK just TWO WEEKS ago to see what they could come up with.

Gameloft first up. Has added new controls and hestures…iPad game has thumbpaqds on either side of the screen. Also integrating controls that use twisting and turning the pad.

Killing enemies by dragging a selection rectangle hardly seems sporting, does it?

(game is Nova)

Next up: New York Times.

Martin Nisenholtz gives demo, aided by two people.

Looks a little like Tim Gunn’s brother, which I mean as a compliment.

Finite snapshot of time, superi0or reading experience.

Flip through sections, tap into sections, bruing down a menu to have a list of menus. Can tap to select articles to sunc to your iPhone.

Reading experience looks great…resize things with a pinch, open slideshows.

I dont know if theyve really licked this yet. It looks like theyve just regformatted their articvles for multiple columns to fit the orientation of the screen.

But certainbly not a simple Make It Into ASn Ebook approach. Looks very browsable and discoverable, as a newspaper should be. You know, where you just leaf through pages and encuonter articles.

Brushes

Popular iPhone app, by a one person shop done by Steve Sprang.

Slide through a pretty ghallery. Your paintings can be edited…tap to edit. Layers and brushes. Store your favorite brushes in a waterciolorlike palatte.

Oh, kinow maqny artists who will go NUTS for this.

Can zoom in for finer control. All done via fingers.

Can record the process and play it back. Says its a true portable paint studio.

Very neat demo.

Next: electronic arts. Steady on, pull up your astronaut diapers, this could be great.

Awesome: runs all iPhone apps. Either in a small TV like window, or tap a 2x button and itll d0ouble the size. And the resolution, I wonder?

Runs these games and things without any modigfication. On the bigscreen here it looks great in fullscreen. Smooth, highly detailed.

Hey, he also has that great Piano Pro qapp

Demo

If the developer spends time modifying it, though…?

Says We modei9fied all of our existing iPhone apps to look great on tyhe iPad. To that end, theyve modded the iPhone SDK and are releasing it TODAY.

9.7 inch ips display

1.5 pounds, .5 inches thick–
-

1 ghz Apple A4 processor

16-64 gigs of storage

WiFi 802.11n BT2.1 + efdr

30pin connectore, speaker, microphone.

Battery – 10 hours of battery.

Month of stabndby time.

How do they solve onewindow UI? By populating dropdown menus as if theyre windows, almost (dropdown list of ihnbox messages, or can open it as a pane in the message w9indow.

Looks like a very unclottered interface.

Onscreen keyboard. He
s typing at what appears to be less than blazing speed but fast enough. It autocorrects like an iPhone.

Photos

(Everything works in portrait or landscape, incidentally)

FLick through photos. Looks like a lightable sort of interface. With albums and stcks.

If your photos are on Mac, itll recognize faces and everything. Locations?

Mostly flicks thro0ugh ijmages.

Yes, places. Big map with phots pinned to it.

Once again we see that tapping a buttobn in the “menubar” drops down a little media-rich window full of content UI.

Music.

Builtin iPod. Looks like iTunes.

BIG album qart is possible. Lots of us are going to have to upgrade our imagery! Mine are all 320p

iTunes Store

Looks hgreat…much better than the desktop edition. I hope this is what well see when we can do this via qany web browser. Very touchable.

Calendar.

Drag your finger over dates to look at content.

Contacts. Looks like an address book.

MAPS

Page curl in cornerk, peel it up to switch views. Looks to be Google Maps (Bing usuqally waterjarks its content)

Works like the iPhone app. Doesnt lok like theyve added much. Aplause for google street view (which oes look good).

Video

YouTube. “Wet And Woofy” is the name of the video hs selects. Its in hi def. I bet some google searches will turn up smutty videos with that name. If not right now, then definitely tonight. :)

Very uncluttered. I might even call it TOO uncluttered, almost stark. Video player also looks exactly like the iPhone video player.

It’s looking as if “A big iPod Touch” is looking like its distressingly spot on as a description.

Unblock scrteen like an iPhone.

Demos NYT website. Tqaps for stories. Very pretty screen. Lots of nice scrolling.

Aha: missing pplugin slug for flash content, I think.

Menu titles are little icons; tap to drop down the menu.

TIME website.

Fandango website.

Looks exactly like Safari, with aqdaptati0ons for touch (maqke big targets for touch).

National geographic.

Steve appears to be just ignoring the audience and enjoying browing the web with the iPad. Lots of silence and tappinh.

Looiks very, very fast.

SO much typing…sounds like qa house being consumed by termites in here.

We see an onscreen keybvoard 9in qa screenshot of the mil app.

Calendar looks pretty. All of these apps tke full advantage of the screen.

The Engaqdget shot of the mqap app was spot on.

iTunes looks like desktop itunes.

I
m a little disappointed; this does look like a big iPhone, UI and everything.

“Awesome to watch TV and movies on.”

Now he shows the demo.

Steve starts with a tease. Apple inbvented the laptop, he says, at least in the form we know it.

Then Apple reinvented the phone.

We all use laptops and smartphones now. The question: Is there room fort a third category of device in the middle?

Device must be far better at key things. Like:

Browsing

Email

Enjoying and sharing phots
Watching videos
Music
Games
eBooks.

Must be better at these sorts of tasks than a laptop of smartphone.

Netbook? No, thy arebnt better at anyth9ing (laughter applause). Smaller and slower, poorer displays; theyre just cheap laptops.

We thu

Yes, its calloed the iPad.

Looks a lot like a big iphone with a macstyle dock.

Steve takes stage without intro. Embarrassing when press and analysts iissue a standing ovation. I think it’s just the front section of Special Guests.

Kicks off. He has something special to show, but first, some updates: sold a stupid number of ipods.

3 billionth app doqanloaded. Gee, theyre not telling us what it was. A little embarrassing? :)

15.6 billion dollqrs in q1 revenue this year. An army of gold robots to execute the unwilling can only be a year off.

Most Macs sold are MacBooks.
By revenue, Apple is the largest mobile tech company in the world.

Settled into my seat. The room is about the size of a medium movie theater. I’ve chosen a seat on the aisle about halfway up, selecting a good view of the stage. Sharing a row with the Macworld folks, Gruber, and Jaqui of Ars.

It’s a sea of screens. Everybody is liveblogging or taking notes. It’s almost as if we’re watching a live livestream or something.

I am struggling not to hum a quiet Dylan impression as “Like A Rolling Stone” pumps through speakers.

Lights are dimming slightly.

Wait, I’ve just figured out who we’re going to blame for all this: people in the room playing Warcraft on the cell network and killing all of the bandwidth.

Good. Picking a scapegoat is the most important part of event preparation, you know.

Greetings!

Okay. So here’s how I hope this is going to work: I’ll have my MiFi, my Hackintosh, and my Nikon pocket camera with an EyeFi card in its SD slot. In a perfect world, this would mean that instead of flooding Twitter with an endless series of observations, thoughts, and bitchy comments, I can do a real liveblog — complete with photos as-we-go — just like I’m some sort of modern tech journalist or something.

Keep refreshing this page for updates. And if it doesn’t work…

…

Damn.

No, we mustn’t think that way. It will work. It will work.

(Shut up!!!!)

Pardon me a moment, folks. Just doing a little bit of tech rehearsal for tomorrow.

I bet you can tell from all of this that I did indeed finally get into San Francisco safely. Late, but safely. My hotel is in the financial district and I’m sorry to say that the only viable option for dinner was this:

Yes, I know. But I didn’t have dinner and I was pretty famished. Chiefly, I just wanted to two-liter Coke for tonight and tomorrow morning:

You know. Just Daddy’s Morning Medicine.

Ah.

Great! The system seems to be working fine. The system in question is the combination of hardware, software, and meatware that I’ll be relying on to liveblog from the Apple Event.

I’ll have my Dell Mini 9 hackintosh in my lap, running MarsEdit:

…And my MiFi in my pocket:

…And my Nikon Coolpix with an EyeFi card in its SD slot:

…Which means that I can be adding stuff to a blog post and every time I think I have another good chunk of information and thoughts, I can click the “Update” button and it’ll be added to what I’ve already got.

And every time I take a photo that seems useful for the narrative, I can just press two buttons on the Nikon and it’ll be sent to my Flickr account. MarsEdit has seamless Flickr integration so it’ll be a snap to have live-ish photos in this bloggy thingy as well.

Yes, this whole post has been a “live fire” test, to see how quickly I can write, take a photo, embed it from Flickr, and keep going. Also, to start training my fingers to press the Play, then Menu buttons on the camera…then Up, then OK to set the “protect” flag on the shot I want. This is what cues the Eye-Fi to upload that specific image to Flickr.

Looks good, so far.

One last test upload, and then I’ll click “Send to Weblog” and see if this all worked:

Push the button, Frank…

Yup, the photo pretty much says it all. At 5:10 this morning, I was stopped on the shoulder somewhere on I-95 between my house and the airport shuttle parking, on the phone with a nice lady at AAA and explaining to her that no, I haven’t left my car but yes, I’m quite certain that I blew a tire and I’m also 90% certain that it was the rear tire on the driver’s side.

(“Gosh, that one’s just a little flatter than the rest,” I recall thinking a few weeks ago. “And it’s not the first time, either. I wonder why that’s happening?”)

The car now has two new tires (the passenger-side one was just as old) and I’ve been rebooked on my third flight to San Francisco. I will get there in plennnnnty of time for the Apple event.

I assure you that my elan — unlike my original rear-left tire — is intact and undamaged. This is because the human spirit — unlike the spare that got me back here to my usual garage — is supposed to be able to run for far more than 50 miles at 50 miles per hour.

The only real change is that the focus of my trip seems to be not on Jobs…but on Job.

THIS, me hearties, is Heritage Dr. Pepper:

Remember Pepsi’s brilliant idea last year? To do a special limited-time run of beverages made with real sugar? Well, they’ve expanded this wonderful program this year and added Dr. Pepper to the “Throwback” lineup.

Real sugar Dr. Pepper.

Yes, there’s a bottler in Texas who still does cane sugar Dr. Pepper. But this stuff here can be purchased by the case, by frenzied, joyful case, when you enter your local supermarket with the idea of just buying some lunchmeat and vegetables and wind up running back outside to get a cart.

I find that the Heritage Dr. Pepper is more of a sippin’ liquor than something you might just slug down. I can easily make one can last a full half an hour; each mouthful should be allowed to linger on the tongue and savored. It’s a dynamite flavor.

Good God. Why doesn’t the Coca-Cola Company ever come up with ideas as good as this one? We get Passover Coke, sure, but I think it’s best to maintain a separation of church and carbonation.

Bastards. There I was, thinking I was getting away with something by avoiding carryon baggage fees. But the airline got me back by making my plane go broken before anybody boarded and then canceling my flight. Whoof. That mulched the money I spent on shuttle fare to the airport, one day’s parking, and one night’s hotel in San Francisco.

There was a very quick “Damn and blast,” then I launched a litany of punchier comments at the airline’s automated reservations line which, in my estimation, was severely underperforming, and then a Very Nice Lady re-booked me on an early flight tomorrow.

Well.

I truly think that anger and frustration are voluntary choices as often as not. How do we choose not to react that way?

First, we acknowledge that there are things that can’t be changed. Then we move on from there and make a frank assessment of the potential for credible self-pity:

1) If the original rumors had been true, then I would have missed the Apple Event. I’ll still get there the day before.

2) I’ve been rebooked on an early flight. I can still meet my friends for dinner on Tuesday, as planned.

3) I’m even in a window seat. I could have wound up crammed into a middle.

4) If this had happened on my return flight, I’d be scrambling for a hotel room, imposing myself on friends, or sleeping in the airport. As-is, I get to sleep in my own bed. And the last thing I did before I left the house for the airport was load up the fridge with Heritage Dr. Pepper.

5) It was the very first time that I’d packed for San Francisco using nothing but carry-on luggage. So when they canceled the flight, I was able to just grab my things and catch the next shuttle back to my car.

6) I get a “do over” on my packing. I realized on the bus that I’d left my camera at home. Plus, I’ve checked the weather in San Francisco and feel very good about leaving my leather winter coat behind and traveling in my sportcoat. It’ll be a bit nippy when I return home, but sitting through the 45 minute flight delay reminded me that a reproduction vintage leather bomber jacket was not designed for breathability in heated spaces.

7) I suppose it’ll be easy for me to file a column tonight before I go to bed.

Etc.

Final tally: oh, stop whining and grow a pair, for God’s sake. You lost a hundred bucks but things could have turned out far, far worse. Look here: you’re watching tonight’s “House” and “Big Bang Theory,” too! We’re admittedly far from a blessing in disguise but there’s no need to deploy the left-paren emoticon.

Plus, I’m sure that my luggage enjoyed the little day trip to the airport.

So far, incidentally, I’m a complete convert to the carry-on style of travel. At least 20% of the hassles of airports were eliminated by virtue of the fact that I had a very light laptop bag on my shoulder and a single wheely case. No paperwork or procedures for checking my bags, no delays…and the Pelican 1510 LOC case makes one hell of a comfortable footstool when you’re stuck in Terminal B for an unknown, but profoundly nonzero, length of time.

Okay. That’s a wrap, folks. Let’s pick it up from here tomorrow. See Gene or Stu for your callsheet.

I’m off to San Francisco. On Wednesday, I will enter an auditorium at Yerba Buena Gardens and sit down. Apple will then say things to me and a few hundred of my closest friends.

This ends the factual portion of my pre-event coverage. Everything else (I must remind myself) is mere Speculation. Though if Apple doesn’t plan to announce their rumored Tablet at the event, our first tipoff will be the protective floor-to-ceiling wall of chicken wire that’s been erected between the stage and the audience.

But I’m sure that Apple is well aware that we’re hauling our butts alllll the way out there for just one reason: to hear Steve Jobs sing the theme from “Rawhide.” If it turns out that the biggest news to come from the whole Event is a new blackish-purplish color for the iPod Nano…?

No, that’s not going to happen. I felt pretty safe when booking my flight well a few weeks ago because of the nature of the January 27 Event rumors. They certainly had all of the ineffable earmarks of a managed leak rather than random speculation.

And I should (gratefully) point out that this will be the cheapest trip to San Francisco in Team Ihnatko’s league franchise history. I had two different offers of guest rooms to sleep in, so I decided to play “chicken” with the various travel sites to see how desperate hotels get as the clock ticks down. I was hoping to get a four-star hotel next to the convention center for $8 a night. Instead, on the day before my flight I got a 3.5-star hotel a 15-minute walk away for $75. I learned that the “butter zone” — at least for this trip — seemed to be about a week before check-in reservation. That’s when the best hotels released their rooms to the deep-discounters.

(I’m exceptionally skeptical when I read people’s Tweets about fantastic room rates for Macworld Expo and the like. $149 is no bargain in San Francisco. I’ll pay $100 a night if I’m desperate; otherwise, I know I can find something very good for under $90 by performing a little due diligence.)

I’ll soitenly have much more to say about the event and my time in San Francisco as the week progresses. For now, I’m wrestling with a self-imposed challenge:

I am determined to make this my very first Carryon Luggage-Only trip to San Francisco.

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to calculate the exact dollar amount that will suddenly cause consumers to revolt and decide that their product, service, or pill-popping lead singer just isn’t worth it. Apple’s certainly wrestling with that question as they choose the right price for their (rumored!) Tablet.

It’s unpredictable. We’re a fickle marketplace. I can only say that when airlines instituted new fees for checked bags, I sighed and accepted that airlines define success as “we lost way less money than our closest competitor last year.” I didn’t think they were totally out of line to ask for a small fee for each checked bag. When the fees started to creep up, I didn’t really flinch.

Okay. But with the latest round of increases, those fees are now $25 a bag. Each way. One suitcase adds fifty dollars to the price of a ticket!

No. No, no…NO. I’ve reached my limit. I’ve finally had that moment when I feel like a sucker for disassociating those fees from the cost of my airfare. And I feel like a lazy spendthrift for not getting myself in the habit of being thrifty about the things I take with me on trips.

American Airline’s luggage increase doesn’t take effect until February. But there’s no time like the present. This relatively short trip — which includes only one real “business” day — will be a good initial test of discipline.

I’ve instituted a new mission rule:

The two key words being “cheapest” and “indispensable.” If I’m flying somewhere for a formal event, checking a full-size garment bag for my tuxedo is a permissible option. But only if “rent a tux when I get there,” “ship the tux ahead of me via UPS” or “stuff the tux in a carryon and have it cleaned and pressed before the event” are all more expensive than checking the bag.

I have just the thing to help me in this campaign: Pelican’s 1510 Laptop Overnight Case. It meets the maximum FAA definition of overhead-stowable luggage, which is very good. What makes it very great is the fact that it’s made with the same materials and engineering that Pelican uses when designing a case that can protect a 24″ CRT from baggage handlers.

That was a big concern for me. I’m usually assigned to the boarding group that’s technically numbered “4 or higher” but which a more forthright industry would simply announce with “Okay, all the riff-raff we barely give two ****s about can grab now grab their live chickens or whatever and board the plane. Whoops! Sorry, I think you people refer to it as the ’sky trailer’, don’t you?” By the time I board, the overheads might be full. That’s a bad time to realize that you packed that thin nylon rollerbag with the expectation that you’d be carrying it personally to its destination.

Mind you, I’ll still be packing anything valuable or fragile in my laptop bag. But that hardsider will give me a little piece of mind. It utter intolerance of your desire to overstuff it will also enforce the aforementioned new self-discipline.

(Another bonus of its built-like-a-tank-ness: during my trip this weekend, I used the Pelican as an laptop table while I waited for the train to New York and then as a seat when I waited for my train back home. This thing is bloody sturdy.)

It’s nicely fitted-out inside, with a big zippered compartment for clothes and accessories and custom-fitted bags for your laptop and cables that Velcro in place, right inside the lid.

Choosing a bag was easy. Deciding what to pack will be a challenge. The “one pair of undies per day” rule is a sensible one and will remain. Everything else is open for discussion. Tonight I found myself going through my socks and wondering if I shouldn’t favor the thin ones over the thick, comfortable hiking kind I normally wear.

I want to pack my black blazer. Can I afford it? Or should I take the unstructured “hybrid” shirt/jacket that fills many of the same duties but takes up less space?

It’s the selection of tech gear that’s causing me the most angst. I travel with an SLR. That’s usually not a question. But can I absolutely count on being able to wear it on board like a big black medallion? Or should I take the pocket Nikon instead, just for safety?

At least I have an “free” carryon option for the SLR. What about my netbook? I have the nagging feeling that I’ll have to leave it behind.

Which would be a damned, damned shame. A netbook is a godsend during a conference or an event I need to cover. All I need is something with a keyboard and system resources that’ll let me take some notes, do a little research, and post a few things. The MacBook Pro is Captain Overkill; it’s a hell of a lot to be carrying around a convention hall. I can’t count on the battery lasting through a 90-minute keynote with furious typing and WiFi action, and a 15″ laptop is a pretty big thing to take into a keynote hall where you’re all going to be packed in, kneecap to kneecap.

So. Hmm. Under this new self-imposed restriction, can I afford the luxury of bringing two computers?

Or can I do something as daft as leave the MacBook at home? It’s not the processing power I’d miss…it’s the fact that it’s my entire creative universe, with every tool, project, and scrap of research I work with every single day back at the office.

Damn. A side-goal is to avoid relying on my laptop bag as an Equalizer, packing it to the gills. Otherwise, there’d be plenty of room for both.

Well, I’m sure it’ll work out. It’s an experiment. Initial failures can be expected.

New York was a very minor test-run, to re-familiarize myself with the bag. It was just an overnight, so the packing was simple and even my laptop bag was very light on my shoulder. It was a bit of a thrill, I must confess. I felt like…well, like a normal traveler. You know, those people who seem to have taken just the essentials and who can glide onto a train or an airplane effortlessly, instead of looking like a stevedore trying to manhandle four casks of molasses onto a clipper ship in one go.

So overall, I think this new Mission Rule will be good for the soul. Limitations and restrictions build muscles: after all, the only way to succeed with greater restrictions is through greater thinking.

All I know is that I’ll probably have fewer incidents where I’m unpacking my bag in a hotel and discover that I’ve just taken the 13.5 volt charger for a portable hard drive I haven’t used in a year on a little 3,000-mile vacation away from the office. I’m looking forward to that.

You’ll have to excuse me now. I’ve just remembered that I need to find an 8″ plastic baggie for my toiletries, none of which may contain more than 3 ounces of liquid.

Oh, good heavens. It looks as though Garry Trudeau is doing a whole week’s worth of strips about the Apple Tablet event this week in San Francisco.

To clarify: one of the most popular strips in the world is doing an entire week’s worth of comic strips about an event in which a rumored (rumored) consumer product might (might) be shown off for the first time.

I think we now need to create a new word for “hype” that only refers to the sort of buzz that an Apple product can generate. At this stage, the only way for the Apple tablet to get more press would be if it got into a car crash after its wife beat it with a golf club.

Incidentally, that thump…thump…thump you’re hearing is the sound of Microsoft’s CEO pounding his head against his desk over and over again. You did a heckofajob with that CES keynote, Ballmie…

My pal Scott Bourne has an interesting post on his Photofocus blog: “Seven Things To Ask Before You Take Your Next Photograph.” It’s all good stuff. The man knows photography.

I’ve been blessed with a kind and generous spirit so I thought I’d help him out a bit by adding ten more to the list. No need to thank me, Scott: it’s just what I do.

8) “You’re not a cop, are you?”

9) “What did the model mean when she said ‘Sure I’m a woman…I mean, technically’?”

10) “Would a micro four-thirds camera have been a more appropriate choice for this assignment? How much will it hurt when Kate Gosselin’s goons shove this Nikon D3 SLR up my ass?”

11) “What’s the highest non-lethal dose of Nyquil I can give this kid to make him settle the hell down?”

12) “Should I attempt to minimize its visibility with makeup, or just erase the model’s vestigial tail in Photoshop later on?”

13) “Quick, is this the kind of bear I’m supposed to run away from, or is it the kind I’m supposed to play dead for?”

14) “What’s the legal difference between animal abuse and mere animal endangerment?”

15) “Is there even a market for photos of Susan Boyle sunbathing topless?”

16) “Um…this isn’t the camera with the Eye-Fi card in it, right? Because if this shot gets downloaded by my Mom and Dad’s digital picture frame in twenty minutes, they’ll never be able to look at their daughter-in-law the same way again. Or anyone in a sports mascot costume.”

17) “Usted no es un policía, ¿Verdad?”

Comments from NBC executive Dick Ebersol yesterday have been making the rounds:

Referring to the pointed jokes made this week by Mr. O’Brien and David Letterman of CBS, Mr. Ebersol said it was “chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn’t beat in the ratings.”

He added that “what this is really all about is an astounding failure by Conan.”

Ah.

Well.

He might have a point. Conan’s ratings were pretty poor. For the first time since Leno’s early tenure in that time slot, other shows were highly competitive against The Tonight Show. Dave regularly beat Conan in the ratings.

Noted. But Dick should tell it like it is. If “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien” was a failure, then “The Jay Leno Show” was a disaster. Conan wasn’t the host of the show that was costing affiliates hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

“The Jay Leno” was worse than a mere disaster. “The Jay Leno Show” was a goddamned Chernobyl. It was such a monumental, toxic collapse that after the evacuation of Leno and his staff, the 10 PM timeslot was declared permanently uninhabitable by network talk shows. I can’t imagine anything that Conan could have done during the remaining two and a half years of his “Tonight Show” contract that could have possibly topped that.

I’ve often hypothesized that there’s just something in the Y chromosome that urges men towards Super Bowl football-fan behavior. Something that compels us to invest body and soul into a conflict that we have absolutely no part of, to obsess over stats and trivia, pick a winning team, and wear the team colors.

And when a man defies the statistics and has no interest in football, then that genetic predisposition finds different ways to express itself. The time and passion that men invest in their Super Bowl picks I invest in my Academy Awards picks. The fact that I sat down to blog a little about Jay and Conan and wound up with…

(Cutting and pasting it into my word processor for a word count…)

Holy jumping Zarquon.

Well, it doesn’t matter how long that post was. The point is that I’m here in my Conan O’Brien replica blazer, shirt and tie, with a giant foam-rubber blue card on my hand, shrieking at the screen and enjoying it.

Reading back yesterday’s post, I’ve spotted a problem: I assumed that Leno had a free choice to take the 11:35 slot or decline it. Much of the coverage of Le Scandale reports on NBC’s contractual position with Conan. He has a longterm contract for Late Night, there’s a huge buyout penalty if they cancel him, he’s contractually entitled to be the host of The Tonight Show…but his contract (apparently) has no language mandating that The Tonight Show has to run at 11:35.

The network’s negotiating position (it’s certainly nothing more than a strategy) is that they can simply move his show without breaking their contract and suffering any penalties.

Today I started wondering if there isn’t a similar failure in Jay’s “Leno Show” contract. I imagined that NBC offered Jay his old slot back and he accepted. Is it possible that the sheet of paper they slid across the table to him merely showed the amount of money the network would sue him for if he declined? Does Jay’s contract demand that he continue to do The Jay Leno Show at any time of day that NBC puts it on the schedule?

Maybe Jay thought “I’m not going to go through a year of legal action just to defend my decision to turn down a job I really, really want.”

I dunno. That scenario doesn’t make much sense. As anyone who’s ever hired a home contractor can sadly attest, a contract is only as strong as the participants’ desire to actually stand by their promises.

Hell, I’m sure Conan can tell you all about that. You know a network is in trouble when its behavior can be compared to that of a guy with a pickup truck who spends half a day tearing your kitchen apart and then runs away with your $8,000 deposit.