A few months before the party, Andrew Stone told me about this idea he had to use his Videator software to create a light show for the band…. From what I understand, this is an easy thing to as a one-man or even unmanned light show, perhaps perfect for local bands to enhance their visual appeal.

or rather next to the quotes…… Here; CBS News (and in the video on the sidebar)Washington Postand, of course, there were plenty of mentions of our staffers at TMO, too:John Martellaro mentioned at InfoWorldBryan Chaffin mentioned at the SacBeeJeff Gamet mentioned on the AP wire in many, many, many places.All in all, a fantastic week!

It’s such a habit it almost rolls off the tongue without me thinking about it now, and it goes something like this: “Hey, happy new year, but I can’t talk now because I’m in a mad rush to get the last minute prep together for Macworld Expo.”… Braun and Chuck LaTournous to judge this fabulous event.Thursday, 1/11, 6pm: Mac Podcaster Meeting at the Apple Store with the likes of Adam Christianson, Andy Ihnatko, Leo Laporte, and more.

Over at TMO today is an article from me about our coverage of Steve Jobs keynote speeches over the years. So many people had asked us about exactly how we do what we do that we felt it was worth finally publishing.

Over at The Mac Observer (and, indeed, at iPodObserver, as well), we’ve begun experimenting with Google’s Custom Search Engine, largely because it’s near impossible for a site the size of ours to implement a search engine that’s any better than what Google can do…. I noticed today that Colin Crawford mentioned that Macworld has done the same thing, for exactly the same reasons.It also seems like they’re having exactly the same problem we are (at least on TMO): Google’s not making the results IFRAME long enough to display all the results and the navigation controls in every instance.

All of my Macs in my home/office here in Durham, New Hampshire are having trouble connecting to Google, in that they can’t connect at all using Firefox or Safari, though my wife’s PowerBook has had success connecting using IE.My linux and Windows machines have no trouble whatsoever, regardless of browser (including lynx).If I connect to a proxy server elsewhere, then Google loads fine on my Mac, indicating to me that, well, it’s not my Macs.This is the wierd one: If I run CrossOver on my MacBook Pro, and then run IE *or* Firefox, Google comes up fine…. the Windows version of Firefox running in CrossOver has no problem, while the Mac version (running on the SAME MACHINE SIMULTANEOUSLY) can’t connect.

Though I discussed it on the most recent Mac Geek Gab podcast, enough of you have e-mailed me about this that I thought I’d type about it here, too.For the last 3+ years I’ve kept all my mail (and I mean all 180,000 messages and 1,400 folders) in Mailsmith…. My e-mail client on my Macs and work and home can certainly do it, my phone already does it and, with SquirrelMail installed on our server, I can access it on the web, too.

If you’ve been following the conversation here (or over on HawkWings), you’ll note that one of my biggest concerns with having all my mail *in* Mailsmith was that I couldn’t easily get it all *out*, especially not while preserving the hierarchy of messages. That’s no longer a concern, thanks to a little bit of AppleScript mojo, a few hours of “free” time, and the seeds planted by BareBones flat-export script.

My big problem is that, as far as I can tell, there is no way to automatically migrate all of my mail out of Mailsmith while preserving the hierarchy of 1400 mailboxes that exists…. The import is taking a while, as one would expect, and hopefully I’ll have an answer to that particular question soon.But I ask you: knowing what you know, is Mail.app the right choice for me?

Well, I guess being in Chicago for three days made me miss the fact that Skype sneak-peeked the beta of their next round for the Mac, and even made public (though not promoted) access to the video-capable version of the beta.This thing’s pretty stable, and is *well* worth your time to check out.