It's Been a Good Day.

Wow, I've really, really had a very pleasing day. It's not that I don't have good days, I have them all the time ... and compared to many others in this world, I don't have many bad days at all either. I'm sure most of you would find my life a lot like I find working on films ... long stretches of incredible tedium punctuated by brief moments of excitement, chaos, glamour and pain. Today was just a lot of fun.

First of all, an exceptional number of old friends got in touch for one reason or another, and to me that's a huge bonus. I love my friends more than they could ever know, they really are the center of my life. I also landed a couple of new writing assignments (more on that in the near future), and to top it all off Apple unleashed another sterling round of industry-leading goodies for us all. The main one for most of you is Quicktime 6 Preview, which of course runs on both major platforms. I'll talk more about it in a future installment of Great Nerd Reading, but in a nutshell: this is big stuff. Really big. Moving some marketshare around big. Changing the playing field big.

They also released the eMac to the general public. This is less big, but still important: it's a very cool CRT-based, G4 iMac sibling for around a grand, and feature-for-feature it blows any name-brand PC out of the water at that price point. Sure, you can still build yourself a smokin' monster of a nice PC box for well under that, but start paying yourself $10/hour for every minute you spend not doing work on the machine (or the OS you're likely to run) and I think you'll see that the eMac pays for itself in under two months compared to your "homebrew box." Some of us would rather just drive the car than have to build it first ... and we'd rather drive a Volkswagen than a Yugo, if you get my drift.

Oh, they also released another update to Mac OS X, the most advanced OS on the planet. This particular update happens to more fully enable the video card in my iMac (named "Shiroyuki") to handle routine system video chores, which means I saw an immediate and noticeable improvement both in the speed of the graphics and the overall performance of the machine (since the main processor has less graphics work to do). Hey, thanks Apple!

Last, but certainly not least: my favourite "infotainment" site, As The Apple Turns, has finally returned to "the air" after a "broadcast interruption." I'll let sitemeister and satirist extraordinaire Jack "Can You Believe They Let Me Reproduce?" Miller explain it to ya:

Hey, folks, we're back... kindasorta. Didja miss us? Well, Slim, don't go expecting much Apple-flavored melodrama just yet; consider this episode our fledgling attempt to start easing back into the swing of things, following the arrival of a significant (but exceedingly cute) broadcast interruption named Anya. Believe it or not, people, it's actually been a little tough to establish an AtAT production schedule around the needs of a newborn child. Believe us, we were just as shocked by that fact as you are!
See, the thing about Anya is, sure, she's an official AtAT intern and a Goddess-in-Training, but at five weeks old, she still lacks the necessary motor skills to make the coffee or answer the mail, let alone craft masterful and gut-wrenching descriptions of Steve Ballmer's multiple icky glandular problems. Worse yet, instead of helping, she's actually hindering AtAT's production, because she needs to eat every two hours, and likes to remind us of that fact loudly and often, which means the rest of the staff is getting even less sleep than before-- a development that has the world's top scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders scrambling to explain how the impossible has transpired.

As The Apple Turns is a deeply funny skewering of tech news headlines that I think would appeal to anybody, but it certainly helps if you're a Mac news junkie, since that's what they tend to skewer the most. I read it both for that and the fact that Jack is a top-flight humourist, and the site just reeks of both an MST3K-like sense of pop-culture hipness and the love Jack puts into it.

If you're really in a mood to go "awwww" and feel all warm and fuzzy, head over to Anya Central. You can be amazed at the new improved streaming power of QT6.

Like I said ... a good day.