The Digital Dad

Hear ye! Hear ye! By order of her majesty, my wife, your presence is requested at our sister site, missy.drewperry.com!

There just may be some news worth hearing.

This should be on an All-American postcard. Title: Life is good.

It’s Christmas Day for Eastern Orthodox Christians, and thousands of them may die tonight.

I’m linking below to a story from USA Today that you may not be aware of. Because of a pricing dispute between Russia and Ukraine, Russia today ceased all heating fuel deliveries to Ukraine and, by proxy, all additional countries Ukraine supplies. Countries such as Bosnia and Serbia have no additional pipelines to other fuel providers and as a result 4 million people are without heat today. With temperatures already below freezing during the daytime, there is no way to know how many will survive the night. In a frenzy, many affected peoples drove upwards of 100 miles today in hopes of buying an electric heater, but store supplies were rapidly exhausted. A Bosnian woman perhaps put it best when she asked, “Is this the 21st century? How can someone leave me without heating in minus 10 degrees (Celsius) because of a dispute I have nothing to do with?”

So say an extra prayer for those poor souls with no heat, and for a swift end to this deadly dispute.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-01-07-russia-gas-europe_N.htm?csp=34

Today is the keynote address at the annual MacWorld Expo in California. For Apple users the world around (and with the proliferation of iPhones and iPods, that number is growing by leaps and bounds), this is traditionally a big day. The iPhone was launched at a MacWorld keynote. The iMac, Powerbooks G3 and G4, Mac Mini, MacBook Air, Intel-based Macs, Apple TV, Time Capsule; all (okay, most) revolutionary Apple products launched during the keynote address of MacWorld…
…by Steve Jobs.

Now say what you will about Apple and Steve Jobs and fanboyism, but the fact is that he’s given every single MacWorld keynote since 1997. That qualifies as an institution. This year, not only has Apple announced that Steve will not be giving the keynote (apparently for health reasons), but that after the 2009 show, Apple will no longer appear at MacWorld. Waitaminute. It’s a Mac show, right? Yes and no. The conference is not an official Apple event, it’s produced by IDG World Expo, a spinoff of IDG, a media corporation who owns, among other things, MacWorld magazine. It is a forum for Macintosh developers, not necessarily Apple itself. Apple runs their own show, WWDC, held at the same location (the fabled Moscone Center in San Francisco) in June. But as the WWDC is a conference for software developers, most of the new products announced there are software applications.

So what’s their plan? Will Apple start making major hardware announcements at WWDC? Will they morph WWDC into a more global conference? Or will they (my prediction) ditch MacWorld for the far more news-friendly Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Vegas a few weeks after MacWorld? With Apple vying for a more mainstream market share and global adoption of their products, this seems a likely choice. Time will tell. Meantime, I’m all giddy. 90 minutes til keynote!

I’m back at work this morning, which feels odd after a two week holiday break. But it was time. Cabin fever had begun to set in and it was either go back to work or keep cleaning the house. Work it is.

I’m also a week away from my first semester of Master’s courses. I’m enrolled in two classes, both with a coworker, which should really help the transition back to the classroom.

Christmas was absolutely wonderful. Liam, now three, was truly able to appreciate the holiday experience for the first time. We talked about the baby Jesus and took him to a live nativity. We read Christmas stories and sang carols. And Christmas Eve he went to bed easily, eager for the morning to see what all Santa had delivered.

It was also very nice having Christmas at our house for the first time. Until now we’ve gone off to my wife’s parents’ house for the holidays and we were grateful to them to allow Liam to experience Christmas morning at his own home.

2009 is starting off wonderfully and looks to be a banner year for the Perry household. We’ll have more news from the homefront in the coming weeks and months, but so far the new year is very, very bright.

So back to work it is. I’ll have more soon. TTFN.