This Tuesday I will be leaving for San Francisco for 5 days for MacWorld 2010.  While I am there I will also be visiting the Apple Company Store, which is located at the Apple Campus in Cupertino, as well as Leo Laporte and the TWIT cottage in Petaluma.

 Being a professed "MacHead" fanboy, I cannot pass up the opportunity to visit Apple and buy a few items in their company store.  TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) has some great pics of what the company store offers such as t-shirts and hats and other gifts.  I will definitely be bringing some extra money for a few.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I will be attending MacWorld.  The yearly gathering for Apple fans, professionals, programmers, podcasters, vendors, and even celebrities such as Kevin Smith.  I plan to check out the expo floor for all the new gadgets and tech items as well as attending some conference events.  Besides conference events I am really looking forward to MacWorld's main events which include David Pogue, Kevin Smith, and most of all Leo Laporte.

Saturday I will be traveling north to Petaluma to visit Leo Laporte and the TWIT cottage where he does all of his numerous podcasts.  I am VERY excited to see both him and his studio.  It is amazing how a cottage can produce as much as well as better content than some networks.

I will be taking pictures of my trip as well as tweeting what I think is cool and newsworthy. If there is anything in particular that you would like to see, please post a comment and I will check it out.

Here is my video interview that appeared on the iPhone Reality Show.  The iPhone Reality Show was an experiment by CommandGuru.com in live streaming video of 10 international programmers working in Italy writing an iPhone app in just 7 days.  You got to watch and listen to the developers and the designers as they worked.  They developed an app called Wikimeety that is a social networking app for creating and sharing events and invitations.  Near the end of the week CommandGuru asked the viewers to come up with a motto for the application.  My submission, which ended up winning, was "Share Where", a play on words involving the features of the app.  They asked me to do a live interview which I was stoked about. 

Here is the interview that appeared live on the streaming event.   There is noticeable lag between where I was and in Venice, Italy which really messed with me during the interview.

The Ultimate Gaming Machine 11.0 (UGM) was built by Leo Laporte and Coleen on TWIT (http://www.twit.tv).  It is a watercooled super gaming computer worth about $12,000. The specs can be found at http://tinyurl.com/bgeoad.  It also has a custom paint job that no other computer has had.  Photos are here http://tinyurl.com/nnt2zg.

Leo, Coleen, and the rest of TWIT is giving away UGM to one lucky winner.  Contestants were supposed to submit their top 10 reasons why they should win UGM and then the top 10 finalists would be chosen.  The finalists are then put up for voting and the person with the most votes WINS UGM!!!

Luckily I am finalist number 6 that was chosen to be in the top 10.  Now I need everyone to vote for me.  By rules you can only vote once or the votes do not count.  You do have to register on the site to vote, but you will not be spammed.  This is a very respectable podcast site.

You register to vote at http://army.twit.tv/main/register.  
Once registered just post a status update that says @UGM vote 6 . 
Thanks

When Apple had there press conference on the iPhone 3.0 OS I was like most other people and in the middle of their workday (1pm for me). However just like most of you, I was refreshing my browser following Engadget's live blog on the event. So maybe since I was working and following at the same time, I missed the part about minor tweaks to podcast playback.

Today as I was listening to TWiT's MacBreak Weekly podcast (tallking about the iPhone 3.0 OS announcement), wirelessly\adapterlessly on my bluetooth headphones, I decided to check to see how much was left for the podcast and that is when I noticed a few new additions! These seem only to be for podcasts, I do not see them in regular music playback.

Below the timeline, there were a few new icons. There was a 30 second rewind!! For me that is a big feature. I don't know how many times I am listening to a podcast and something else will grab my attention and then I end up having to rewind the podcast which can be an annoying task.

Something else that was new was a 1x 2x 1/2x playback speed toggle. I doubt that I will use it much but may be nice to speed through advertisements in podcasts.

There was also an email icon there, but I could not get it to function currently. I can only assume that it is to email a link to a podcast to someone.

Minor features, but its nice to find some unmentioned improvements!

-Screem

Another new feature that appears in the iPhone 3.0 software is MMS photo sending.  However this is not fully activated until ATT activates it on there end.  Here are screenshots of a picture being attached to a text message.  Just go into photos and select a picture, then click on the share icon.  This will bring up a list of different methods to share.  MMS is listed and when chosen it will take the picture and add it into a message.

Again, this is not fully activated until ATT enables it in their service.

-Screem