Drummer's Corner of the World

More later, but I'm home from MacWorld, from an extra week in San Francisco, and from Conflikt. Critters are all fine. Vet and petsitter bills for Thunder's little excursion into overdose-land are horrendous. I may not be leaving town again for awhile, 'cause this trip cost me waaaaaaay more than it was supposed to.

I didn't go to bed last night and I've been in shuttles or planes or airports since 3:30 a.m. Seattle time. I go fall down now.

Got called by the vet this morning (at 6 a.m., 'cause I'm not sure anybody told the vet who was on duty first thing this morning that I'm three timezones away) and was told that Thunder was bouncing and happy and doing great. Got called about three hours later by Dr. Roach, reiterating the earlier info and telling me he'd chewed his IV catheter out during the night, which is "usually a sign that they're ready to get out of here" (silly boy). She was going to call the petsitter and let her know she could pick him up. So yay! No dog-related crises today.

Today was mostly a show-floor day... I went to one very useful conference session on Best Practices in Client Management at the end of the day (with the guys from afp548.com and spent the rest of the day wandering the show floor and talking to vendors. Spent some time with the folks at Insider Software, looking at the very newest version of Font Agent Pro (we're migrating from Font Reserve Server to Font Agent Pro Server, so it's good to see more nifty features and a continual and active development stream), and spent some time with the folks at Microsoft bemoaning the loss of VBA in their Mac apps. For some people, this is no big deal. And I'll admit, the improvements in AppleScriptability in Office are a huge step forward. But for those of us with Office in the enterprise, who need to rely on macros in documents working whether the recipient is on a Mac or a Windows machine, the loss of VBA is a big pain in our workflows. I knew it was coming... it's not like this was a surprise... so my time with the Mac BU guys was mostly spent reiterating why a cross-platform scripting environment is still necessary (and thankfully, trying to find a replacement for VBA is still on their development roadmap... so this is hopefully not a permanent problem, though still one that we'll have to live with, and work around, for at least the next few years).

Best acquisition of the day, from a business perspective... the Office 08 for Mac Administrator Guide. Yeah, I know it seems boring, but we've got a Notes-to-Exchange migration coming in a few months and there's good info on exactly what works (and what doesn't) with Entourage '08 and Exchange Server.

Best find of the day, from a personal perspective... the coolest tripod ever... the Gorillapod by Joby. If I'd actually brought my camera on this trip, I'd've bought one today. Instead, I'm going to take advantage of their show special to order from the website. Free shipping and an even better price than they could give on the show floor. Hard to argue with that!

I finished the day off with chocolate cream puffs from Beard Papa's and now I'm going to relax and catch up on email 'til time for the Cirque du Mac party later tonight.

At some point, every MacWorld, I have to eat at Chevy's, because I like their food, they make killer margaritas, and there's still not one any closer to me than Chicago. So tonight I went to Chevy's with a friend, and I came home with a penguin.

Across the room, we spotted a guy wearing the most amazing balloon hat, topped with a penguin. I assumed he was one of those random magician/entertainer types who haunt restaurants (and who I normally find annoying)... but it turned out to be a 14-year-old kid, building his college fund by making the most amazing balloon animals. He can't drive yet, so his mom drives him, and the two of them seemed to be really close. So this nice, bright, articulate young man made me a balloon penguin, who is now gracing the Really Ugly Chair in the hotel room.

A nice way to brighten the end of the day...