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(Warning: even as I begin writing this post, I’m reading ahead and I can see the potential for a sermonette-style transition to a Life Lesson via the phrase “…and you know, it occurs to me that life is like that, sometimes…”)

I’ve learned a lot about how a dilettante like myself builds a modern Wordpress site. We’re a special breed, the dilettantes. We have too much ambition to just sign up for a Wordpress.com blog or use an off-the-rack blog theme. We don’t have enough ambition (or not enough money) to hire someone to custom-design something to our specs.

We live somewhere in between. We must learn, explore, make lots of mistakes, and ultimately reach an articulation of the declaration “I give up!”

It’s a productive version, though. It means “I have reached my saturation point of Exploring and Learning and Growing. My knowledge and my skills have expanded to completely fill the container of time and energy I can give it. Now, it’s time for me to just build the thing and move on.”

So to aid my fellow Dilettantes, here are the various steps I went through on my way towards that magical destination of Giving Up.

Just sign up for an account on some blogging service, click on one of the six available themes, and go. It’s simple and quick, and you’re off and blogging right away. Which was no good for me because I couldn’t find a simple theme that would suit my needs.

Plus, I like the fact that I spend $20 a month for shared hosting on Media Temple. If I want to add a second blog, or a third, I don’t need to pay another $20 a month. At most, I just need to think about upgrading my service at some point.

So I moved on to

It’s close to the lack of effort of Level One: it seems as though you can just keep browsing through galleries and eventually you’ll find a design that’s precisely the one you would have built yourself, or commissioned.

No good for me. I tried, but there are just wayyyyyy too many choices out there. I think I “chose” six different themes over the past two years. I even paid for a couple of them. But eventually, I waffled, reconsidered, and kept looking at more themes.

So I moved on to

I should mention that I already know a lot of CSS, and enough PHP to confidently hail taxis and order in restaurants when visiting PHPistan. Plus, I liked the puzzle of learning something new.

Tutorials like this one and this one really inspired me. Wordpress maintains a database of your blog’s data and the theme is a series of templates and scripts that manipulate that database. The tutorials urge you not to be a hero. They wave you away from the idea of filling an empty BBEdit window with PHP and HTML and show you how to just steal the functional nuggets of code from existing themes in Wordpress’ built-in library.

That’s right up my alley. It’s the cultural legacy of coding. When you’re building software, your most valuable resource isn’t the reference manuals and API guides: it’s other programmers’ working, tested code. Cut and paste the function you need, examine how it works, and ultimately you can figure out where you can safely tweak and prod it.

Furthermore, building a new theme from existing code elements is particularly attractive to someone with my rudimentary PHP skills. Writing scripts from scratch is still a slow process for me, but I know enough PHP to build something from existing elements and modify what’s already been built.

I eventually abandoned this approach. Building your own theme is very doable and I learned many things about Wordpress that would serve me well later on. The more I dug into the nuts and bolts of the process, though, the more I began to appreciate that a Wordpress theme is a living, breathing piece of software instead of as a set of HTML files in which little snippets of script act as content placeholders. I was certain that I’d wind up with something functional. I wasn’t so sure that I’d wind up with something that would live and breathe and grow, and could take advantage of future plugins and Wordpress features.

Remember, the whole reason why I abandoned my homemade CMS was because I’d been on the upgrade-it-yourself treadmill for almost 14 years. I’m not eager to return to that world.

So I moved on to

This is going to be the sweet spot for most bloggers. Choose a theme, any theme. Then just learn a little CSS (or pick up a spiffy utility like CSSEdit, or StyleMaster for Windows), create a child theme, and then go to town.

Child themes is brilliant, I tells ya. If a Wordpress theme is worth using, it’s awfully complicated piece of software. Even if all you really want to do is make the titles of your posts a little bigger, there’s a lot of slogging to do before you find the thing that you need to change. And then a year later, when the theme’s developer comes up with an updated version that adds loads of fab new features, you’ll click the button to upgrade and poof! All of your custom changes go away.

A child theme is a brand-new theme of your creation. Three lines of cut-and-paste markup code tell Wordpress “Start off with all of the scripts and styles you’ll find described by this theme here” and the rest of it describes your overrides. “Don’t style a post title like that. Style it like this.”

This tutorial got me off on the right foot. It explains everything. Even better, it gets you excited about what you can accomplish and makes you feel stupid (in a good way) for not finding out about child themes sooner.

…And then you install the Firebug plugin for Firefox, and you wonder why you made such a big fuss about customizing a theme in the first place.

You know that you want to change the font of your post titles. You know that it’s a simple case of modifying or overriding the theme’s CSS definition of that element.

Easy. Er, but first you need to find that definition.

Firebug will give you a simple dashboard to the CSS structure of any page in the browser. Roll your mouse over any CSS declaration, and the associated element will highlight on the webpage.

(It’s supposed to be just as easy to do this in CSSEdit. But I find it’s easier to do it in Firefox.)

Then you just slap in an overriding CSS definition in your child theme. CSSEdit is swell for this sort of thing because it’s interactive. You plug in a change via a (somewhat) word processor-style tool palette and immediately see it reflected on your site.

I treaded water here in Option 4 before I lost interest. It seemed as though the DNA of the original design was always obvious, which sort of put me back where I was when I was examining dozens and dozens of prefab Wordpress themes and not finding any to my liking.

But then I learned a little more about the theme community. And I moved on to

Brilliant!

The themes you get in Options 1 and 2 are like a hotel room or a model home. The furniture and drapes might not be to your taste, but you can move in right away. Option 3 is like starting off with a wooded lot. Option 4 is like buying an empty, existing house and then decorating it to your liking.

A “framework” theme offers some of the best features of all of these approaches. It’s as though the builder pours the foundations, frames in the whole house, gets all of the plumbing, heating, and electrical services going, plasters all of the walls, installs the roof, nails up the exterior siding, applies two coats of primer…and then hands you the blueprints.

All of the tricky technical bits that make a Wordpress theme work have already been taken care of. You could move right in and live a rather stark existence among those bare walls and uncovered floors. But the understanding is that you’ll be finishing it up on your own.

And remember, you have an exceptionally well-documented design. I’ve settled on Thematic, because it’s so well supported. It’s not the only well-documented framework out there, of course. This is one of the big deals of a framework. You solve the problem “How the hell to I put a banner image in the header?” after a quick search of the support forums, not after an hour of poking and prodding and testing and failing.

There are bunches of popular frameworks. As I browsed through a dozen or so, I quickly came to see these frameworks as…well, rapid-development application frameworks. Which is precisely what they are. You’re building a new piece of software, without going to the trouble of re-inventing code that’s virtually identical among 90% of all Wordpress blogs.

So that’s it, right? I’m at the end of my journey? The right answer is “Install a framework, and then build it up as needed”?

Close. I believe I’ve now hit upon a method that I’m referring to as “Really Quite Totally Finally The Right Way, Honestly, And I Mean It This Time”:

It’s a small tweak to Method 5. It seems to have given me everything I want, and removed every obstacle I’ve encountered.

I mentioned how easy it was to create a child theme: just paste in three lines of canned code at the top of a text file and presto, it’s a child theme. One of the lines tells Wordpress “This child theme’s CSS styles will include all of the CSS styles of the parent theme, with the following overrides:”

Well: if you omit that line, then you get all of the machinery of the parent theme (the plumbing, the electricity, the foundation) without any of its CSS styles. Every element in the page layout is tagged with CSS selectors, but none of those tags have been styled yet.

Brilliant! Only even more so than the previous time I said that!

No, really. I was banging my head against the wall today because I’m really feeling the (self-imposed) pressure to finish up a new blog I’ve been wanting to launch since the middle of last year. Over the past few months of development, I’ve learned that modifying an existing, complicated theme via CSS is the fastest way possible to measure the exact distance between how you think CSS works, and how it actually works.

CSS is really quite simple. Anybody can understand it. You only run into trouble when you can only see (or you only understand) one small part of the elephant representing the CSS styles for this theme.

Yes, I’m a clever boy: by adjusting the offset of a graphic, I can get it to overhang past the left margin of the blog post that contains it and overlap onto the background slightly. My CSS stands proud and strong. But it didn’t work. I was unaware that the CSS element that contains the image has been told to clip anything that extends beyond its border.

I sighed. I edited the CSS for the containing element and told it “Please don’t do that.” I applied the changes, refreshed the page…and suddenly the whole page was a total, ragged mess. Because another style was counting on that clipping effect to pretty things up.

I don’t blame CSS. I don’t blame the designer. I don’t even particularly blame yourself. If I had understood the whole scheme, I’d have known exactly how to accomplish what I wanted to do. But I didn’t. And on some level, that’s kind of impossible.

Theme frameworks are wonderful and modifying them can be a streamlined process. But you’ll run into trouble if you’re trying to make the framework do things that its designer didn’t anticipate…or if they assumed that the framework’s users would be experienced consultants, instead of first-time dilettantes.

The solution was to remove that one little line from my child theme’s style definition. The Thematic framework will still act as the glue between my site design and the Wordpress system. Now it’s up to me to actually create that site design, from the ground up.

It seems like the right call. Building every CSS style myself will take a lot of time, but autopsying Thematic’s CSS scheme would have taken just as much time and would have been far messier, I think. The Win is that I won’t have to give up on a good idea just because I can’t figure out how to make it live harmoniously among all of Thematic’s existing definitions. Bonus: I bet I’ll be less dumb about CSS by the time I’m finished.

I had never liked the broad width of Thematic’s content area. I opened the page in Firebug to refresh my memory on how Thematic’s different content areas are tagged. Then I created a style for “#wrapper” and set its width to 800 pixels.

Save, upload, refresh. The layout is 800 pixels wide. I want it centered in the window. Edit, save, upload, refresh: it’s centered. I want the background and the content areas to be contrasting colors. 1-2-3 and it’s done.

Best of all, it’s a linear process. I’ll never have to spend an hour “unwinding” the CSS to sleuth out why a piece of text refuses to be bold. The most frustrating tasks are the ones where you feel like you’re walking through a series of blackened hallways and you don’t know what you’re going to confront until you flip the next light switch. You thought you were going to have to just empty a wastepaper basket next to the sink. And then you got the bathroom door open and discovered that whoever designed the plumbing system in this apartment building didn’t incorporate a checkvalve system that prevents all of the sewage from all of the other units from backing up through a single fixture. You’re definitely going to be here a while.

Even without the presence of raw sewage, those projects are frustrating as all hell. I’ve been Bolding text since before many of you were born. I feel as though it’s well within my skill set to command a computer to make a certain word or line a skosh heavier.

This might be an arrogant statement, dear reader, but there you go. So I find it very, very disorienting when I add “font-weight: bold;” to a CSS definition and am only 60% certain of what effect that will have on anything.

Between the hours of 8:30 and 8:45 this morning, I bought two things:

1) Breakfast, consisting of a wheat bagel and a Diet Coke. Purchase price: $1.74.

2) An iPad. Which cost me more than the breakfast.

People have been asking me “So which iPad are you planning on buying?” and I still don’t know how to answer, even though I’ve actually bought one now. I’m not anywhere near the average consumer.

So instead, I’ll tell you what I think about the two major variables in this sort of decision. You’re in on the ground floor at $499. Where should the rest of your money go? Is it even worth buying a better model?

I think the first thing you should spend money on is additional storage. The iPad is going to be one hell of a great content device and my experience with my iPhone tells me that although you can make any amount of storage work, a mobile device pays the greatest dividends when there’s a good chance that answer to the question “Gee, I wonder if I have that file or content with me?” is “Yes.”

This is an especially big deal on a device like the iPad, which comes with a big, gorgeous screen. 16 gigabytes is useful. It means that I can cautiously put a movie or two on it, and maybe a vodcast subscription, and sure, I can have a couple of photo albums on there so long as I don’t go nuts. But 64 gigs means I can throw media on there with the reckless exuberance of a dancing hippie who doesn’t know that the Rolling Stones have hired Hell’s Angels as event security.

It also means that when apps like AirSharing and Evernote come to the iPad, the device can truly be that one electronic file folder that contains every document or scrap of research you’ve touched in the past month or will ever want to lay your hands on.

Put it this way. I’m in a coffeeshop and writing this on Lilith, whose 500 gigabyte hard drive contains just about everything I’ve created and everything that’s ever caught my eye online. If it suddenly occurs to me that what this blog post needs is right here, right now, is a statue of George Washington regarding a lesser public sculpture, I don’t need to hit the Internet for just the right image or head home to my desktop:

So get as much storage as you can afford, I say.

Onward to the 3G question. I’m starting to wonder if 3G is going to be terribly important. “Internet everywhere” is impulsively attractive, but do you really need mobile broadband? New England is practically lousy with free WiFi. There’s so much radio traffic here that it interferes with the migration patterns of many local bird species. As I entered the coffeeshop this morning I passed by a whole family of wrens, shivering in little Bermuda shorts and wondering what the hell happened.

And if you already have some sort of device that can share its mobile broadband connection — a phone with an app that turns it into a mobile WiFi base station, or a MiFi — the question’s of moot.

Still, Apple and AT&T are offering a sweet deal on the data connection: $29 for a month of unlimited traffic, with no contract or ongoing commitment required. If you want mobile broadband this month, you buy 30 days of mobile broadband. Done.

As a MiFi owner, I’m more interested in the 3G model’s GPS features. Live navigation on a pocket device is lovely. But what can we do with it when the screen is THIS big? What happens when this live, interactive map is flat on a table where three people can peer at it and make suggestions? What kind of car app is possible, when there’s enough screen real estate to deliver a lot of information in a concise and uncluttered way?

If you’re truly seeking my advice, and your funds are limited, I say give the 3G model a miss and put that extra $129 into additional storage, or an important accessory.

If I were an ordinary consumer, I bet I’d be opting for the 32 gig WiFi model, with the wireless keyboard and the desktop dock as no-brainer addons. I think those two accessories will have a bigger impact on my use of the iPad than 3G and GPS. I’d want to own the 64 gig one, but we’re trying to economize in this scenario.

Of course, if I truly were an ordinary consumer, I’d be patient and wait to see what the reviews have to say about the iPad. It’s a rare person who can afford to pre-order a $499 thing sight-unseen. I think most of the folks who are rushing to pre-order the iPad are folks like me who have pre-existing plans for theirs.

What did I actually get? Oh, the top-of-the-line model: The iPad 3G with 64 gigs of storage, due to ship a few weeks after the WiFi-only iPad.

My decision was influenced by factors that would never apply to a regular consumer. iPad 3G, or the WiFi-only model? By one way of thinking, I needed to buy both. I need to have one in my hands on April 3 (meaning: the WiFi edition) but I’ll also need the 3G model because I’m writing a book about the iPad, and the 3G model has unique features.

Damn. I remind you that I am a freelance journalist in a rapidly-collapsing print market. I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll have an Apple loaner on April 3. I don’t know for sure, mind you. But you need to place your bet before the betting window closes and no matter what I bought, I definitely wanted my pre-order to be near the head of the pack in case models were in short supply.

So I went with the 3G. I did hesitate a bit over the “accessories” question before completing my order. Ultimately, I didn’t buy any.

I already have the Wireless Keyboard and that’s the only accessory that I consider to be a slam-dunk. I don’t wanna drop an extra hunnert bucks, only to discover a month later that the folding easel I keep my iPad in makes Apple’s $29 desktop stand irrelevant, and that I almost never see the benefits of an extra $29 charger.

Why might that be? Because apparently the iPad can charge from its USB sync cable. This is just conjecture, but I imagine that the only thing the 10-watt brick can do is charge it faster. My office is already lousy with USB wall chargers. If it takes twice as long to charge it via USB — I’m just making up a number, here — how likely is it that I’ll actually take advantage of that extra time?

[Edit to clarify: you do get a 10W charger with your iPad.]

There was another factor at play: for the love of God, I was already spending $829, before tax, on this thing. I’m being paid more than $829 for the book so please, shed no tears. Nonetheless, to a freelancer, that kind of an expenditure is like a deacon hearing people whistle in the church. It fills me with a secret sorrow.

All I can tell you is that when I arrived at the coffeeshop, something made me order the 75-cent can of Coke instead of the $1.69 bottle of juice…

Over on Twitter, @JeffCGD asked me what I thought about the Logitech diNovo Mac Edition wireless keyboard, which got name-checked in my previous post. I started to say “It’s fab.” But I soon realized that it was too fab to really talk about in just 140 characters. I headed to Logitech to grab an image for a blog post and that’s when I discovered that my favorite keyboard had been discontinued.

It’s still widely available but that’s still stinks. The diNovo features my definition of the perfect keyswitch design. Fifteen years ago, I might have preferred big, chonky noisy keys with lots and lots of travel. That was back when “my main computer” was a desktop that I sat down behind, as opposed to a notebook that I drag into bed off the nightstand.

Today, a classic keyboard leaves my fingers a little confused and out of sorts. I’ve trained them to tap the keys instead of pushing. The diNovo feels like the sort of keyboard you’d get on a notebook if the designers didn’t care about a keyboard’s size, depth, and cost. The keyboard you get with the Mac is the same keyboard you’d get on a notebook…which seems to miss the point.

The diNovo looks great, too. And even though it takes up very little room on my desk, its size comes only at the expense of wasted bits of casing and plastic that served no purpose anyway.

So why did Logitech can this product? I haven’t a clue. They still sell the super-duper edition: the diNovo Edge, which is a Bluetooth keyboard that integrates a trackpad and other little bells and whistles. But cripes, it’s another hunnert bucks!

There seem to be two options. You can just buy a diNovo Mac online — stocks still appear to be plentiful at Amazon and elsewhere — or you can buy Logitech’s Illuminated Keyboard. The keys are backlit, it’s corded, and I’ve never used it…but it’s still an active product. It uses the same keyswitch technology as my beloved diNovo Mac, so hopefully it’ll have that same great feel.

I try not to be too fussy about keyboards. It’s easy to become just as precious and annoying about your favorite keyboard as some writers are about The Perfect Pen and…

(Hang on…I need to channel the Great Spirit of Creative Twitbaggery…)

“The creamy perfection of the classic Moleskine; the smell of the leather and the slight crackling sound as I spread it flat on a table at my favorite coffeeshop. The way it accepts the ink, which, when I am truly in connection with my Muse, flows not from the pen, but from the mysterious wellspring from which all stories are spun…”

(Note: you are not a Creative Twitbag if you use a Moleskine and are fond of pens. You are undoubtedly a Creative Twitbag if you’ve ever described your writing tools in that way. If your writing tools inspire you only to write about how you feel about writing, you should probably switch to something that costs less than a dollar per unit at the drugstore.)

I do love my diNovo, though. And this new knowledge makes me wonder if I shouldn’t, you know, stockpile one or two of these for a rainy day.

Until Friday, when the release date for the iPad (April 3) was finally announced, all of my iPad-related projects were hovering in Fantasyland. It was great. There would be a lunch, great ambitious plans would be made, and the meeting would end with a mutual chuckle and an acknowledgement that really, the project wouldn’t make any great leaps forward until we knew the ship date and had some idea of when we might get our hands on an actual iPad.

Now? Yeah. Things…have changed.

To answer an increasingly popular question: no, I don’t have an iPad. I’m up against a real deadline, too. On the morning of April 4, I leave for a whole week at the Conference On World Affairs. If I have an iPad in my hands, then it’ll be one hell of a great opportunity to test the iPad in a very tricky and critical environment.

I’ve yet to find a computer that works exceptionally well during a trade show or a conference. It’s a bit like selecting a piece of gear for a lunar expedition. Size, weight, power requirements, the parameters of what I need to get done during my time on the surface, and usability in a hostile environment all come into play.

A full notebook can serve any function I could possibly need. But I often leave my room at 8 AM and don’t return until after dinner; that’s a lot of stuff to be toting around all day. The battery only lasts a couple of hours, so I’ll need to bring the power brick and hope that I can find seats near outlets. And in many scenarios — like sitting on a panel — a big laptop isn’t exactly a discreet way to take or access notes.

A netbook? It’s tiny and light and has a four or five-hour battery, so we’re off to a good start. They keyboard is tiny and no fun to work with, though, and even a Hackintoshed one probably won’t run the sort of software I need. As for the iPhone, it lives at the intersection of casual nonchalance and emphatic power, but I certainly can’t write anything with it. And I’ve tried and failed to use it to host the various notes and cheat sheets I often rely on when I speak. It’s just too small.

So as a consumer, you can imagine how keen I am to test out an iPad in this kind of environment. A big screen on a slim device that runs a modern OS and exciting apps, which weighs a pound and a half and is an inch thick, with ten hours of battery life and a wireless keyboard that I can touch-type on? Gimmegimmegimme.

If it works. Which is still an unknown. Again I remind myself and the world that I have more experience with the iPad than almost anybody outside of Apple…which only means “I played with the work-in-progress for a half an hour at the media event in January.”

If I don’t board that plane with an iPad…I would surely be the saddest little boy in all of Puppetland. On one of my first panels of the Conference, I will be distracted by a familiar glow in the crowd. I will lean into my mic, interrupt whoever’s talking, and say “You, in the eleventh row…is that an iPad? Um, can I see it?”

Pathetic, I know. But that’s what’ll happen.

Let’s not even contemplate such a thing. The iPad will go on pre-order on Friday. If thousands of people with no particular mandate from an eager readership will have them on April 3, then so shall I. The worst-case scenario: I simply go to the Apple Store early that morning and look for a bleary-eyed person who looks as though they’re too exhausted to keep a firm grip on their iPad. See, kids? There’s a solution to every problem if you look hard enough, and tell your driver to keep the engine running.

In the meantime, I’m preparing for the iPad. I’ve already bought my first two hardware accessories: the Apple Wireless Keyboard and a Pogo Sketch stylus.

I liked this keyboard the moment it was released. I thought it was v.v.cool. My fellow Americans, I did feel lust in my heart and I wished to own it. But here’s the thing: the main selling point of the Apple Wireless Keyboard is that it’s small enough to travel with. Any computer I’d be traveling with would also, you know, have a keyboard built in.

So I didn’t dare live the dream. Ah, but in January it became something I needed. Nay, I was now practically obligated to buy it because it works with the iPad.

(But for good measure, I bought it with Amazon Associates credits instead of real money.)

I’ve had it set up with my iMac. It really is a lovely keyboard. Photocopy your notebook’s keyboard, scissor out just the bit with the keys, and there you have the Apple Wireless Keyboard. The keyboard deck itself is stupid-thin, but it’s all made out of aluminum so I think I can throw this into my laptop bag (or my Stylish iPad Envelope) with a certain fearless elán. I’m also pleased to find that it’s a handy alternative to my big Logitech diNovo keyboard when I’m podcasting. It frees up space on my desk for the microphone and a recreational beverage.

Sometimes my first instinct about a product misses the point. I think that’s what happened with the Pogo stylus, though I hope the official scorer will credit the company with an assist.

When it first came out, it was absurd. The whole point of the iPhone was that you didn’t need a stylus. Using a Pogo was like buying a 60″ HDTV and then projecting 8 mm movies onto the screen, or something. Its only possible selling point, as I saw it, was that it let you use your iPhone or iPod Touch in cold weather without taking off your gloves. Even there, you’d probably look at the original price tag ($25) and decide that cold fingertips would help to build character.

Things have changed since then. The price is $15 and there’s a new Stylus model that has a pocket clip, but that’s not the big deal. Now, there are a whole bunch of great drawing apps for the iPhone.

I bought the Stylus at an Apple store on Sunday, with no sense of urgency. I had time to kill, so I moved on to a restaurant in the mall and started fiddling with a drawing app while I waited for my burger. It arrived ten or fifteen minutes later. I’m not sure how long it was. I had become engrossed in sketching, and my food got a little cold before I finally dug in.

Apps like Autodesk SketchBook (my favorite drawing app) are fun even when you’re just using your fingers. But it’s a different experience when you have a stylus in your hand. The business end is thinner than a fingertip, so it’s much easier to see what you’re drawing. Plus, I stopped painting with my fingers a long time ago. I think it ended right around the day I came home from school with yellow paint inside my nostrils and my Mom yelled at me. Drawing with a pen in my fingers feels more intuitive and natural.

I do have a simple complaint about the Pogo Stylus: you don’t get a little cap or something to protect the drawing end. C’mon, guys. Even an 89-cent Paper Mate ballpoint comes with a cap.

But I can’t even remember the last time I got so engrossed in a drawing that I lost track of the clock. It was another huge win for the iPhone in general. If there’s a single feature that elevates the iPhone from the rest of the pack, it’s the way that it urges and enables me to maximize the amount of time I spend thinking and doing and creating, each and every day. I’ve got ten minutes while I wait for a burger to arrive, three minutes at the post office while as a clerk explains the concept of a “forever stamp” to the unenlightened, six minutes waiting in the subway…it all adds up. I leave the house with my iPhone in my pocket, and I come home with new photos, new drawings, a few tiny things written, many pages of books read, and a better sense of the news of the day.

I accomplished (okay, “accomplished”) all of that in crumbs of time that otherwise would have gone to waste. I don’t get that sort of effect from other phones…least of all from Android devices. If there’s a signature advantage to iPhone’s apps, it’s that you’ll want to use them.

Android apps tend to stop short of being both productive and engrossing. Most Android apps come with a cost: an overall clunky user interface. How motivated am I to draw a picture of the parking lot outside my table? Not very. How much trouble am I willing to go through to do it? Not very much. With an Android drawing app, I’d sigh and end the activity the second or third time I drew a little bit too low on the screen and accidentally activated its Search menu. If it had been a Nexus One in my pocket on that Sunday, it might have occurred to me to draw something with a sketch app but I probably would have just used it for simple distraction: as a way to avoid thinking.

The iPhone can be just as effective as an Android phone as a catalyst for thought-avoidance, of course. That’s not how it usually works, though.

My iPad prep work continues apace. Right now, I’m trying to get my hands on a case or a cover. I’m also trying to line up as much iPad software as I possibly can. The iPad will be released on a Saturday and that’s significant because the CBS Saturday Early Show goes out on Saturday, y’see. Which means that there’s an excellent chance that on the morning of April 3, I’ll be on TV trying to contain my opinions to a smooth four or five minutes of live television. I’m hoping to have a bunch of apps on “my” iPad that won’t be on any of the others being shown off on TV that same morning.

I should mention that The Early Show’s studio is on the same plaza as the Fifth Avenue Apple Store (its big, signature glass cube is only twenty yards away) and my segments usually go out live at about 7:30 AM. It’ll be a total zoo out there. Every specimen of Our Kind Of People will be on full display, excited about getting their hands on the iPad. Needless to say, I can’t wait. I’ve never been at an Apple Store for a release. Usually I need to be up all night writing so I’ll have plenty of stuff online on That Special Day.

I’m 10% sure that I should wear my tuxedo, as though it’s the Oscars and we’re on the red carpet.

I’m also 10% sure that if my segment is at 7:30 and the store won’t allow people in to get their iPads until 9 and I have a working iPad in my hands, I’d probably better wear shoes that are comfortable for running…

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Business travel is a high-class form of homelessness. At least it is from a certain perspective only available to somebody who’s never actually been homeless. Maybe it’d be less tacky to simply state that for the past 8 days, I’ve been living like a drifter with maid service. I checked out of my downtown hotel on Sunday, hopped on BART, spent two days with friends in Berkeley, hopped on an Amtrak train, and woke up this morning in Sacramento after a really swell talk to MacNEXUS.

(My minimum goal during these speaking gigs is to not do anything to inspire either a panicky rush to the exits or an angered rush towards the podium. I’m happy to say that I far exceeded these simple goals last night. The group was warm, cheery, well-groomed, well-mannered and above all, highly-indulgent. These are all qualities treasured by a humble wandering minstrel such as I.)

All of these beds and scene changes have had the effect of stretching out the perceived duration of this trip. It’s starting to feel like the Andy Ihnatko Pan-Californian Goodwill tour. Normally, Macworld Expo is bookended by a single day before and a couple of days afterward: I’m done, home, and dusted in a week. This year, I’ll be home on Thursday…Day 9.

It was totally worth it, of course. I’m reminded of just how many good friends I have in the San Francisco area, and how rare it is that I’m here long enough to actually see most of them.

Still: nine days is a long time to be away from home, even if you’re a bachelor whose only dependent is a life-sized soft-sculpture of a Dalmatian. As I packed up my hotel room on Sunday, I reflected on the fact that most people don’t long for a full day of work. But that was my mindset as I combed the room like a CSI investigator, looking for splatters of cables and chargers. During a heavy conference like Macworld, I can only write for an hour or two in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening. It leaves me feeling antsy. I pine for the luxury of a deep, day-long creative soak and going to bed at 4 AM believing that Great Things Have Been Accomplished.

(Accent on the word “believing.”)

Which is why I decided to call an audible on Sunday and extended my stay in Berkeley. My friends had invited me to stay the whole week. I had declined and opted for an overnight. It’s no reflection on them; even I don’t enjoy my own company for more than a few days at a time. But I discovered that my pals’ new house is (a) gorgeous and (b) large enough that I could easily sneak back in there today and live there for many weeks unnoticed if I were so inclined. So instead of retreating back to San Francisco after my overnight, I spent alllll day Monday and much of Tuesday writing and working, nestled in the sort of tranquil California valley landscape that will make you want to adjust your wire-rimmed spectacles, peer out over the horizon, and call out “Uh-oh…chop-pers!” Assuming that you, like me, grew up watching “M*A*S*H.”

After a couple of days in this peaceful environment all pressure gauges are now reading zero and all caution and warning indicators have been reset to the Off position. That’s no mean feat after a big show; normally it takes me a little while before the buzzing leaves my ears and I feel fit to rejoin humanity.

The only cost of this last-minute change of plans can be seen hanging in the bathroom right now: a set of freshly-laundered socks and underthings.

Yeah. See, I was supposed to go back to my San Francisco hotel on Monday, where I’d checked my suitcase and its remaining clean clothes. My original plan was to rent a car at SFO, drive to Sacramento for the gig, and then spend today touring. That was before I discovered that Amtrak could take me from a station just a few miles away from the Berkeley crash pad to within walking distance of my hotel…for a fraction of the rental cost. I’m looking forward to my jaunt back to San Francisco…Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service takes you through marshes and meadows, for the most part, and the terrain is mostly just as pretty as the New England coastline that wheels past your window on Northeast Regional trains.

It was a great trip. Personally, professionally, creatively…pick a category. But I’m booked on the redeye tonight and I can’t wait to get home. My dog might be a lifeless toy, but Buster is still my dog and I’ll be very glad to see him. If I know Buster, he’ll adhere to his obedience training and won’t jump up and lick my face. He’s suchagoooddogggggg!!!!!!! I fully intend to tell him so as soon as I walk through the door.