From MacWorld San Francisco

Down the Esca­la­tor into the Mac­World Show Floor

It’s been a long day, and I’m typ­ing on ye olde Tibook for what I fear will be one of the last times (the poor metal hulk is in its final days, with a per­ma­nent green line on the screen that extends from top to bot­tom about 3 cen­time­ters from the right edge).I man­aged once more to make it into the Keynote, albeit barely (no seats left, so I stood with hun­dreds of oth­ers at the back). There must have been the equiv­a­lent of the pop­u­la­tion of a small city in the West Hall of the Moscone Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. It was a lit­tle unnerv­ing just get­ting up and down the series of esca­la­tors to the third level where the Keynote was. If we didn’t keep mov­ing, there could have been an ugly pile-up.

The newly announced iPhone looks very impres­sive, and I’m pleased to see Apple once again pulling the rest of the indus­try for­ward. Many peo­ple (myself included) would have very dif­fer­ent lives if not for the cre­ative ener­gies of this leg­endary com­pany, now 30 years old. Jobs also announced that Apple Com­puter was chang­ing the name of the com­pany to sim­ply ‘Apple, Inc.’ That said, I’ve been dis­ap­pointed to hear that Apple has no new lap­top com­puter for me to replace this one with (I was hop­ing for some­thing small and light, but it looks like the 15-inch will have to do). They may be los­ing the Com­puter from the name, but they’ll keep mak­ing their for­mer name­sake.
Haven’t seen as many peo­ple that I know as usual. That may be because I’ve been spend­ing most of the first 2 days in a class on admin­is­ter­ing an OS X Server.

So You Want to Vote to Change the Massachusetts Constitution?

Back in Boston, Governor-elect Deval Patrick this morn­ing called on leg­is­la­tors to skip tak­ing a vote on an amend­ment that could ban gay mar­riages in Massachusetts.

“I believe that adults should be free to choose whom they wish to love and to marry,” Mr. Patrick said. “… Never in the long his­tory of our model Con­sti­tu­tion have we used the ini­tia­tive peti­tion to restrict free­dom. We ought not start now.”

Nev­er­the­less, a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment to ban gay mar­riage sur­vived a sec­ond vote in the after­noon after­noon after 62 law­mak­ers moved to advance the ini­tia­tive to the next leg­isla­tive ses­sion, ensur­ing that the bat­tle over same-sex wed­dings will con­tinue for at least another year.

A friend of mine back in Boston, Michael Femia, has a great blog called Bunko Squad. Today he mas­ter­fully skew­ered the polit­i­cal dis­course in a Poll of his own that suggests:

If there is a pub­lic vote on same-sex mar­riage, what should we vote on next?

__ Ban­ning Divorce

__ 3-Child-Per-Couple Minimum

__ Black Peo­ple Eat­ing At Lunch Counters

__ Women Need Husband’s Per­mis­sion to Drive

__ Abol­ish Child Labor Laws Down to Age 4

__ End Tax Exemp­tion for Politically-Active Religion

Good one, Michael.