Toluu

Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA)

The blog of Andy Ihnatko, internationally-beloved technology pundit.

Apple Event – My Live (to tape) BlogSeptember 1

A frame grab from Apple's livestream. I was watching it on my iPad, via AT&T's 3G connection.

The session starts with a reminder that Skype is a piece of crap. I was supposed to be joining Leo and Alex in a special MacBreak talking about the presentation as it happens. I even had a special MacBook and iPad setup with a camera and a mic. But Skype said no ****ing way.

And Skype’s screwup cost me about $30. I paid for a day’s worth of hotel broadband solely for the Skypecast. And then when I realized that I’d need two sets of headphones (one to listen to the event on my iPad, one so I could listen to the TWiT studio on my Macbook) I ran to the corner Walgreens and bought a cheap pair of Sonys.

I repeat: Skype is just a total misery. It frustrates the hell out of me that I need to use it but can’t count on it in any way.

Anyway. So here I am in my hotel room with the MacBook on one side, with this blog post open. And the iPad is next to it, streaming the show live via AT&T.

Steve takes the stage and starts by showing off the glam new Paris Apple Store, and the new Shanghai Apple Store. New York gets a big glass cube;

Reminder: I’ll be speaking in Chicago Wednesday nightAugust 31

…And of course, the main topic will be all of the news Apple saw fit to cram into their big media event earlier that day. This meeting of the Chicago Apple User Group is open to everybody so do come on by. 7 PM at 25 West Hubbard.

Details are on the group’s website.

Weekend TV Double-Alert: Peter O’Toole and Bad PilotingAugust 28

I’m going to suggest that you watch two things on TV this weekend. One of these recommendations is in your best interests and the other one is in mine. Does that sound fair?

Good.

Turner Classic Movies is showing Peter O’Toole movies all day today. I’m confident that no further explanation is necessary and that you’ve already broken the news to your 18-year-old daughter that she’ll have to find somebody else to drive her to college this weekend. There isn’t a bad movie in the whole day’s schedule, which is to say: no, they aren’t showing “Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage.”

Which is a real movie:

But I’m singling out “The Stunt Man,” which airs at midnight. It’s far and away my favorite Peter O’Toole performance and the movie itself is always a contender for my personal top ten favorite films.

It also presents me with a problem, each and every time I try to get someone to see it: I won’t tell you anything about this movie.

“The Stunt Man” is best seen cold. If I describe the plot, if I describe Peter O’Toole’s character, if I even give you the genre of this movie ahead of time, I think I’ll diminish the your experience. It’s a brilliantly manipulative screenplay. Richard Rush has a keen awareness of how an audience watches a movie.

Read nothing about it. Tune in to TCM just a minute or two before midnight and leave the sound off, just in case Robert Osborne is wandering through his little fake library saying something unhelpful, such as the whole plot of the film.

Onward to the selfish recommendation.

My buddy Phil Plait shot a three-episode pilot for The Discovery Channel and the first show airs Sunday night at 10 PM. “Phil Plait’s Bad Universe” is an astronomy-oriented science show with the usual Discovery Channel spin: “if at all possible, shoot some video of the host in a blast shelter cautiously pushing a very serious-looking button.”

It’s all part of the very laudable goal of making science programming watchable. Real science is a lousy spectator sport. Even the most earth-shattering discoveries usually involve a graph with a spike right in the place where the math predicted it would be. If your mission is to communicate the significance of that spike to a lay audience, you might have to do some literal shattering of the earth. You need to blow some stuff up.

Heigh-ho the derry-o, the TARDIS on the DomeAugust 27

It’s easy for Boston-area geeks to get a little bit blasé about the sudden appearances of improbable objects atop the Great and Not-So-Great domes atop Building 10 and Building 7 in the center of the MIT campus. If it’s your first time at the ballpark, a spinning no-look over-the-shoulder catch that robs the visiting team of two guaranteed RBIs is a heartstopping thrill. Meanwhile, the experienced season ticketholders are nattering to each other that  if the centerfielder had been paying attention to the shortstop, he wouldn’t have been playing so wildly out of position in the first place. Same deal here.

Tonight I attended a dinner salon of local geeks. Of course, conversation turned to the subject of today’s TARDIS appearance. Inevitably, we compared it to previous dome hacks.

“The phone booth was better,” someone said. “It was a working phone booth.”

“How do you know that isn’t a working TARDIS?” someone else asked, rather pointedly.

And all around the table, there was agreement that any final judgement would

Apple Event on September 1 – The theme is “Oh, God-dammit!”August 25

The artwork from next week's Apple event invitation.

Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to check your email!

Not 24 hours after I was on MacBreak saying “If Apple were to hold a special event to show off the holiday-season iPods and stuff, we wouldn’t get more than a week’s notice”…I got an invite to an Apple event being held in San Francisco a week from today. Behold the artwork, which surely will be scrutinized as carefully as Obama’s birth certificate, and with the same sort of wild-arsed conclusions.

Well.

My week just got more interesting.

I’m scheduled to talk at the Chicago Apple User Group that night. San Francisco to Chicago in one afternoon is a bit of a bumpy commute and it’s probably a bit much to ask all of its members to just sort of fly out to California and hold the meeting at a food court near the event site.

And I don’t even have the freedom to think up a Cunning Plan…the Kindle 3 arrived this morning and I’m crunching to finish a review that can run in the Sun-Times tomorrow.

You know, what’s the harm in just asking the