First let me say that I'm writing this column sometime after midnight on Wednesday, while sitting here at a sports bar called Bru's Room in Pompano Beach, Florida. And with that, billpalmer.net has taken mobile publishing to a whole new level. Not to mention a whole new level of strangeness. I really didn't intend to write this column while sitting here at Bru's Room, but something told me not to leave my PowerBook sitting on the front seat of the car while I was in here, and if I'm going to do something as bizarre as bringing a laptop into a bar at midnight, I might as well take things one more little step down the weirdness path by pulling the laptop out and doing some writing.
So here I am. What on earth am I doing here? Well, I was on my way home from the Mac User Group meeting in Miami (in this case, "home" is defined by my dad's place in Deerfield Beach), and I ended up stopping at any number of locations, the most recent of which just happens to be this place. But it's the user group meeting I want to talk about. Tonight's meeting was different than last night, during which I was presenting. Tonight, I was just another attendee, which was kinda nice because presenting can actually take a lot out of you, so it was nice to just sit and listen this time.
The Gold Coast Mac User Group (CGMAC) meeting took place Wednesday at the "Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium," which gets the award for the longest name of a building that I can ever remember encountering, and which I haven't visited since we took a field trip there when I was in the sixth grade. The two main presentation topics for the evening were on Google and Photostop, and I was highly impressed by both. I thought I knew a lot about Googling until I saw this presentation, after which I realized that I hadn't been taking advantage of the ubiquitous search engine nearly as much as I could be. And the Photoshop tutorial held my interest a whole lot more than I thought it would, considering that I don't even use (or know how to use) Photoshop.
But then, that's the whole point of attending user group meetings: to get a taste of the stuff you haven't explored, or explored enough, yourself. That's a lesson to those of you out there who are concerned because you don't know nearly as much about Macs or computing as you wish you did, or as much as you think you should: don't sweat it. Learn what you can, when you can, and don't worry about the rest. There's no way on earth that any one person could ever learn it all, and even if they did, by the time they finished learning everything, it would all have changed by then and they'd have to start over. I'd estimate that overall, I know maybe thirty percent of what I wish I did when it comes to Macs and computing. It's not the end of the world.
The manager of Bru's Room just came by to say hello, which I took to mean that he was a little concerned that there was a guy sitting in his bar after midnight, typing on a giant laptop. Must have thought I was a restaurant critic or something. Well, I'll play one for a moment: the burgers are excellent. The NY strip steak, which I've had here in the past, is good as well. The place is named after Bob Brudzinski, who used to play for the Miami Dolphins (see, I knew I'd manage to bring Dolphins football into this one way or another). End of review. Alright, so much for my career in food critiquing. The question remains, though: how exactly did I end up here?
Actually, my first stop on my way home from the meeting was Bayside, which is one of those festive outdoor malls squarely aimed at pleasing the visiting tourists. I never could stand these kinds of places while I lived down here, but now that I actually am a visiting tourist, I can see the attraction of such places. The sea breeze alone was worth stopping to take in for awhile. The live band performing at the waterside was a plus. Dinner at the adjoining waterfront Hard Rock Cafe would have been a bonus, but even on a Wednesday night, there was just too much of a waiting line to make it worthwhile.
So I walked around, took in my dosage of ocean breeze, and then headed north to Fort Lauderdale beach, in the hopes of grabbing a slice of pizza at the truly unique all-night pizza joint right there on the beach. But this was simply not meant to be, as the entire stretch of beachfront road was blocked off for this weekend's Air and Sea Show. I would have needed to park way north of the place and then walk about two miles to get to the pizza place, and so that wasn't going to be the dinner solution either. Heading home, convinced that I would be going to bed without my supper, I passed Bru's Room and realized that it was open even later than I thought, and so it stepped in to save the day. Or the night, as it were.
After two user group meetings in two days, you'd think I'd have had about enough by now. But instead, I'm actually a bit disappointed by the fact that there's no meeting to attend tomorrow night. The cool thing about local user group meetings is that they're as unique as the people running them and the people attending. No two user groups are going to be the same; no two meetings within the same user group are going to be the same. I can take solace, though, in the fact that FLMUG, the local user group in Orlando that's close enough to home so as to not require a road trip in order to attend, will be meeting in about two weeks. And something tells me that come this time next month, I'll be planning another user group tour for this area.
But in the mean time, turning my attention back to our little online user group (in case you were beginning to think that in the middle of my user group tour, I'd forgotten all about it), I'm getting more and more excited about this Monday's online MUG meeting by the minute. A special guest, free books, plenty of reason to think that attendance will be strong and the end result will be in the best interest of everyone who attends. We're pushing five hundred members now, which if you'd told me would be possible when I first started this group, I'd have laughed you out of the building. And yet here we are. That's Monday, May 3rd, from 8:00-10:00 pm Eastern Time, for those of you keeping score at home.
One last thought I'll share is a line I heard at Tuesday's NATMAC meeting that represents perhaps the perfect retort to anyone who asks just why they should buy a $799 eMac when they could get an el cheapo Windows PC for $499: "You wouldn't buy a Ford Focus, would you?". If that line doesn't say it all, I don't know what does. Almost no one buys the absolute low-end automobile (unless their budget forces them to); most people end up buying a car that's somewhere in the middle or toward the bottom of the middle, or at worst, the top of the bottom. And yet, people apparently think so little of computers that they don't want to spend one penny more than they absolutely have to.
I've long held that most Windows users see computing as nothing more than a necessary evil, and well, there's a whole other column in there about how the crappiness of Windows has all but ruined the idea of enjoying personal computing for such a large portion of the population. It's why it takes so much work for a Windows user to be convinced to switch to Mac. When they're told that the Mac experience is vastly better, they dismiss such talk, because they were told that by a salesman or a geek that Windows was going to be a good experience, and that didn't turn out so well for them. Most Windows users are convinced that if they switched to the Mac, it would merely be the same crap but different, forcing them to memorize a bunch of things over from scratch just so that they could adjust to a new computing experience that would be no better than their old one. Hey, you can't blame them; it's what they've gone through every time they've ever moved to a new version of Windows, or bought a new PC to replace their old one. Microsoft's true sin isn't that they stole the GUI from Apple. It's that they've stolen a worthwhile computing experience from the vast majority of the population, and the most of the population doesn't even know it, and some never will.
Ah well. I don't want to end on such a preachy note, and as I said, that's a whole other column. So as I head home to take iTunes 4.5 for a spin, it occurs to me that while this sports bar has great burgers, it most certainly doesn't offer wireless internet. I guess I won't be publishing this column until the morning after all. But then again, it's almost morning already.
Tomorrow (or, technically, later today), I'll be making a "special appearance" on the couch outside the Boca Raton Apple Store from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, and if you want to join me, there are a few chairs next to the couch with your names on them. Between now and then, I think I'll hit the beach. I spent the first 26 years of my life living within a mile of the beach, but remarkably, didn't go all that often. Now that I'm a tourist, I suppose I should go and play the role of spending a disproportionately large portion of my trip at the beach, and having the locals laugh at me. But if I really am going to the beach, I think I'll leave the PowerBook at home. Well, maybe. I wonder if they've got wireless access out on the pier?
See you tomorrow, from wherever this journey takes me.
