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Monday keynote!
Well, that's just weird. The exhibits won't even be open yet. And everyone's so dutifully terrified these days, you'll probably have to be strip-searched and pass through a cordon of hired goons just to get into the room. I wonder how they're planning to fill the empty seats, too. Mere mortals can't afford to change reservations or pay for an extra night's lodging in San Francisco, you know. We stayed in a rather the worse-for-wear establishment in January, 2000 that was a long ways from Moscone, but it still cost the most I've ever paid for a hotel room in the U.S. of A.

The funny thing is, a tiny room in a third-floor walkup "hotel" above a private sex club and brothel in Berlin cost even more than that back in '94, six years earlier. For that matter, so did the fancy-schmantzy capitalist pig palace [hotel] in Leipzig. We wouldn't have been there at all, either, except for having to evade lurking luggage-snatching bandits who literally outnumbered disembarking passengers in the Bahnhof that lonely holiday weekend afternoon. After successfully running the gauntlet in the pedestrian underpass, we burst forth into the twilight and went straight to the nearest place we could find.

Leipzig wasn't half bad, actually, once the holiday was over and the streets were full of people once again. For my wife, the city of Bach, Mendelssohn, and Robert & Clara Schumann was holy ground: we sat in one of the churches where J.S. Bach had played the organ and Kathy cried. (Oh, how I love that girl.) The sanctuary also served as an assembly point for the demonstrators who threw out the Communist city administrators just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Music to liberate the soul and courage to smash the state, wow. Better vibes than that are hard to come by, amigos. Heck, I choked up too.

Go west Mac fan
Something similar lay in wait for me that January day when the two of us flew from Albuquerque to San Francisco for Macworld Expo 2000. I had hardly ever been to the West Coast, save for a long-ago month spent on the rugged beaches of the Olympic Penisula in Washington state. But San Francisco! I hardly knew what to think. Yes, of course, the Expo was a Big Deal, but sweet Jesus, San Francisco...

Where do I start? With the Gold Rush of' 49, the earthquake of '06, Ferlinghetti and the Beats, Haight-Ashbury, underground comics, the music? The MUSIC, of course. The sounds that cracked open my head at a time when more brains than mine needed stirring in a major way. Something was happening out there in '63 and '64, and even in the rigid Baptist Taliban environs of central Texas, we knew it. An art major friend of mine had been out to the coast and returned with the Grateful Dead's first album -- this being a time when you simply could not buy such things in Austin -- and when the careening, loosey-goosey, organ-riffing, blues-rock jumped out of the speakers, I was hooked. This was an orgiastic celebration of life, as antithetical to what passed for joy in my own upbringing as it could get, and I dug it.

Decades later, after years of buying records, listening to music, and reading about the bands, I had developed unique mental maps of San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Chicago, Memphis, London, and a hundred other places I had never been. The names, at least, of the clubs, parks, neighborhoods, streets, and suburbs were burned into my mind, albeit without any grounding in geographical reality. But they were part of the culture and history of the music, my culture you see, so when The chance came in January, 2000 to cover Macworld Expo San Francisco for Applelinks, I was ready! Um, well, ready to try to cover Macworld for Applelinks... that is, er, you see... "Hey man, I'm going to SAN FRANCISCO!" Apple? Seminars? Geek-talk? Dum, da dum-dum.

No wonder it's expensive
My first impressions of San Francisco were surprising. The city was old, by American standards, and occupied some of the most remarkable topography I had ever seen: BIG hills, mountains to most people, covered with buildings and trees, plunged steeply down to the water on all sides. They call it "the city by the bay," but as far as I was concerned, it was in the bay. There was no room to expand, every piece of ground was taken, every bit of curbside occupied by cars, but what incredible diversity of ethnicity, architecture, and vegetation, for that matter. Whether the sun shone or the fog rolled depended on wind currents and the terrain. Flowers and trees that grew on one street might not on another, and so on. And the ocean! I mean, well... as former FARR SITE readers know, I had an awful time keeping my body inside Moscone. The day after the Expo opened, I was gone.

The keynote was fabulous, of course. Steve Jobs and the Apple crew put on a great show and even played Grateful Dead recordings before the speech began. Now that I think of it, that was my favorite part, except for the wimpy volume level. Don't get me wrong now, nobody does Jobs like Jobs. Off the top of my head I can't remember what products he introduced, but I left the hall pumped up and ready to party. Two hours later, after cramming all the free toys and glossy literature I could carry into two enormous bags and paying $12 for a really bad sandwich, I had had enough. I spent a fine hour in the sunshine grousing about Mac cliques with Del and Lysa, then trudged back to the hotel. That night my wife and I had pizza with Beth Lock, famous Internet columnist, and the Expo kind of fizzled out for me after that.

We ended up bagging the hotel and took up a friend's offer to put us up in a funky but chic Victorian apartment next to Golden Gate Park. Everyone in the funny little grocery around the corner spoke heavily accented English. I made contact with an email acquaintance who drove us all around one afternoon. We had espresso on the sidewalk in North Beach (which isn't a beach) and washed down a wild Italian fish stew with big glasses of wine. He showed us everything, all right, and gave me a taste of--oops, save that one for the book. But on the way back to our apartment after lunch, as we drove quickly past a largish, well-worn, nondescript sort of building, he gestured and said: "And there's the Fillmore!"

"THE Fillmore?" I think I said.

"Oh yeah."

And damn if I didn't get tears in my eyes. It ain't Bach, but it meant an awful lot to me.

Postlude
The point is, you're going to Macworld and maybe you'll miss the Monday keynote (Monday?!), but don't take it too hard. You can still have a high old time checking out the show and meeting other Mac freaks. If you're there as a journalist, after you write about whatever whoopy-doo hoo-raw happens on Monday, you can do most of your research websurfing for press releases on your bed in the hotel. Heck, you've got a badge that shows you were there, don't sweat it.

Those of you who followed my meanderings two years ago know that at the time, the conflict between my Mac writing commitments and just being in beautiful San Francisco turned me into one very difficult boy. It needn't have been so, but there you have it. Don't let this happen to you! Even without the cultural icons I had to spin your head around, you might find yourself getting a headache from all the commercialism of the Expo and feel a need to get out and just walk down the street.If so, do it. By all means, just do it.

It's San Francisco, man... Go SEE somethin'!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr apologizes to everyone who wrote in with suggestions for his Windows-using friend who wants to transfer files to her iBook.The discussion of text formatting, etc. didn't have a chance against memories of Germany, Texas, and California. (But look for an Applelinks article on the subject this week!)

WE DON' NEED NO STEENKING SMART TAGS!

Those of you who know what "smart tags" are may want to include the following code in the <head> section of your Web pages. (This page is so protected, BTW.) But since the solution comes from Redmond's own skunk labs, I can't guarantee that using it won't land you in a gulag just in time to keep you from voting in Florida.

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AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

DESIGN CREDIT: GRACK! byline graphic by Bob Farr.

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