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One of my many PC using friends told me recently that he was reading my latest Absurd Notion column, but started to drift off when I went on another Microsoft diatribe. This is okay by me, as this guy spent five years of college and a whole mess of money learning to program for the PC, so it's difficult for him to consider that maybe that money and time could've been put to better use on a better system. I mean, imagine if I'd sunk all my college years and cash into my English major, only to find out the national language of the United States was being switched to German.

Actually, that'd be pretty cool. German rocks!

Regardless, my friend's comments set me to thinking once more about how odd it is that so many of my friends are computer programmers, and yet none of them have been able to directly benefit me. What a waste! Of them all, most are on PCs, and the couple of Mac OS programmers I know are lost in financial firms, creating education software, or working on some other project that has no way of making my life more entertaining.

Not that I hold any of this against my friends, of course. Why blame them for my inability to create games for the Macintosh? Internal locus of control, you know. I was right there when computers were working their way into households. I learned how to program a basic BASIC skiing game on my Timex Sinclair 1000, and I used to program the Commodore 64 to automatically respond a certain way to my keyboard inputs so I could act out the scene from Tron in which Kevin Flynn angers the MCP into zapping him to the Game Grid. Certainly, being that much of a dork, I was primed to become a computer game programmer.

But no, I took a different path, leaving the hard stuff to the true warriors. The people with both the vision to know what we—as consumers—want or need, and the skills to actually build it. The type of people signing up now for Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference.

Even the descriptions for this event leave me all flustered. Get a load of this from the Enterprise IT track:

Apple's products have captured the attention of IT organizations wanting to develop and deploy open source and standards-based solutions into their heterogeneous environments.

Uh...okay. I know what those words mean, but not in that particular order. And, what's more, that's probably the easy stuff. Some of the other tracks sound like I could participate, but then I read on. Graphics and media, that's my thing, but not when...well...

Mac OS X features a comprehensive 2D, 3D, and video-based graphics system integrated with an advanced audio architecture giving you the ultimate platform for creating applications that stand out from the pack.

Oh. Applications. There's that word again. I don't use graphics and media to create applications, I use applications to create graphics and media. I suppose I could sit in on the QuickTime Digital Media track and not worry about my head exploding:

Join Apple engineers and industry experts to explore the latest in topics such as 3GPP for content creation and delivery for mobile devices, the impact of MPEG-4, and QuickTime Streaming Server best practices. Also, discover the hottest tools and techniques for creating exceptional digital media content. Sessions in this track also cover DVD production with DVD Studio Pro, creation of audio loops for use within Apple applications such as Soundtrack and GarageBand, and much more.

Hey, yeah, that's what I do...at least according to my resume. Still, it's not helping me develop games, is it?

Why don't I just learn all of this myself? Sadly, I'm afraid those days are over for me. Unless I can read my baby to sleep with the Xcode Tools beginners guide, I...actually, that would probably work. Have you seen the videos from last year's session? They're online, and it's exactly the kind of stuff that used to put me to sleep in college. Seriously, you should check this stuff out. If I were to read transcripts of these classes to Sophie, I'd fall asleep before she would.

That's not to say this boring, just that I can't get it. Most Macintosh developers I know live for this kind of talk; this kind of technology. It's important to them that as many words as possible have an "x" in them: Xcode, UNIX, Mac OS X, Xserve, PCI-X, X11. Me? I get no further than Planet X or XIII. It all makes me feel pretty useless until...

Until I realize my role in all of this. I'm the consumer. My WWDCs are the Macworld Expos where the developers get to show off to me what they've created. Have you ever spoken to a developer at an expo? Not the salespeople in the white polo shirts or the booth babes with the orange hair and short skirts, I mean the people who actually created the product. That's when it all gets fun, when they've taken what they've learned or perfected at WWDC, used it to build something cool, and then get to show it off. That's like me when I've finished writing a novel or cooked a really, really good chicken marsala. What fun to show it off.

Yes, the pioneering spirit is still alive in the computer world. There's still gold in them thar hills, and how appropriate that the prospectors are meeting in San Francisco to mine it. The more they dig up, the better our computing experiences will be. So, I won't be at WWDC, but I'll be watching. I'll be talking with those I know who are going. Soon thereafter, they'll be able to show me what they've learned, and I'll be able to use that on my Mac.

Then, maybe, I can reciprocate by going Open Source with my BASIC skiing game code. Or, at the very least, by teaching them German. Sprechen sie Objective-C?