Apple side

MacBook with Mac OS X 10.7.3 and Keynote [$19.99 for the Mac from the Mac App Store, or $9.99 from iTunes for iPhone or iPad]

iPad/iPhone with Keynote Remote [99c from iTunes for iPhone or iPad]

Windows/Android Side

hp mini netbook with Windows 7 and PowerPoint 2007 with the Boja PPT Remote Control Server

Asus Transformer tablet with Android 4 [ICS] and Boja Powerpoint Remote Control [free from Google Play]

CC/GNU FDL Photos I used in the presentation:

Keyboard by orangeacid: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/204145200/

Portrait by borediq: http://www.flickr.com/photos/borediq/286201990/

!!! at Festival do Norte: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:!!!_no_Festival_do_Norte.jpg

American Muscle Car 2010 by sinamigos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sinamigos/4710060863/

Guy Kawasaki by SpecialKRB: http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialkrb/3317209561/

Guy Kawasaki explaining his 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

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I don’t usually review restaurants, but until @burger goes wide enough to get a Tesg review, I’m jotting down a few thoughts here for the curious.

Atburger is so far only one store, with the potential to become an upscale fast-casual burger chain in the vein of Five Guys or Fuddruckers. Ann Arbor has neither of these yet, though Five Guys is coming to State Street soon. @burger has been open since July so now seemed like a good time to check it out.

The good things about the @burger website are the slight CSS rotation effect on the Story page, and the coupons on the Coupons page. The bad thing about the @burger website is its favicon. At that resolution, the @burger logo is too small to read, and in fact looks like a cartoon boner. I would’ve framed a closeup on the @ personally.

Ordering at @burger is a lot like ordering at Noodles & Co., or the self-serv option at Buffalo Wild Wings that I think the servers secretly hate me for. You place your order at the register by the front door, pay there, and receive a beeping vibrating tag that you hold up as a beacon when your order comes out. They bring it out for you, like Noodles, no tipping. You pull your own fountain drinks. @burger has beer taps at the register too, but they were not labeled and they didn’t seem to be serving beer. Maybe beer is only at dinner? Not sure.

Good things about soft drinks at @burger are Coke products at the fountain, and lemon wedges. Bad thing is no Cherry Coke.

The burgers come in “Small Appetite” and Regular. 7oz [the regular] doesn’t sound like so much on the menu but it was quite filling. The good thing is that it was grilled! With grill lines and smoky taste and stuff. The bun was quite good too. Sort of a cross between the Fuddruckers bun and those soft rolls you get with your meal at Bob Evans. It was maybe not quite big enough for the burger.

After they’d been open a while they started to offer bottled beer and the tap ultimately included PBR and some regional brews.  They had some odd t-shirts for sale too.  A pixel-art “1UP” burger was cute, but I couldn’t see anyone wearing the “@HOLE” shirt.  Five Guys appears to be thriving, and Liberty Street continues to languish after a slew of recent store closings and an increase in panhandling.

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Hitler seems to be a recurring theme in Louis CK’s humor:

Louie namechecking the Fuhrer again when announcing season 2 of “Louie.”

A new webcomic about Hitler as an insufferable Williamsburg type.  [Not the Jews of W'burg, the hipsters.]

And of course all the Downfall videos. Is it safe to assume he would hate to be laughed at in this way? I hope so.

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Sprout is co-owned by Comcast, Sesame Workshop, HIT Entertainment and PBS.

I know you don’t want to go to Bed Bath and Beyond because it’s just such a cliche, but they actually have these Pillow Pets, though you may have to ask for them at the counter right now [a lot of the toys are off the sales floor during college move-in].  At least save a few bucks.

Back to grinding my main axe: Sprout.  There are a few things you can do to protect yourself.

Watch [and DVR] real PBS.  A lot of your local PBS stations have a second and a third channel now with the conversion to digital TV; sometimes these channels are a time-shifted version of the “prime” channel, so you may be able to watch PBS Kids shows at odd hours [in Detroit, WTVS 56.2 does this].  Some PBS stations use the second channel as a “Family” channel with an expanded kids lineup  [in Toledo, WGTE 30.2 does this].  Either way, these are real PBS stations with the standard sponsorship rules.  Sprout happens to carry shows that also air on PBS, and sometimes refers to themselves as “PBS Kids Sprout,” but most of their on-air graphics actually omit the PBS Kids branding in the flower, and you get the feeling that if PBS complained enough, they could quickly rebrand as, oh, I don’t know.  NBC Sprout.

Watch the Sprout shows other ways. Last I checked there was quite a bit of Dragon Tales on Netflix Watch Instantly.  Or you can get DVDs of the shows.  My local library is a terrific resource for so many of the shows we also watch on Sprout.

Can you reason with kids?  I can’t.  Avoid my fate.

BONUS: If you watched Sprout back in the day and liked Kevin reading cards on the Birthday Show, you will love him as a grown-up Ryu on the webseries “Street Fighter: The Later Years.”

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1. I bit the apple years before my children were born.  90% of the stuff that is pushed on Playhouse Disney viewers, like trips to Walt Disney World?  This life, I lead, is the stuff that happens between trips to Walt Disney World.
2. See?  Advertising works.  Especially when there’s less of it.
3. I want to take a moment to say here that there are few things cuter than real, small, baby-sized blue jean trousers.  Which makes these jean-colored Huggies even more bullshit.
4. On a related note, can someone teach me how to dougie?  Teach-me-teach-me how to dougie?

But it reminded me of a short film that hit the net a couple of years ago, which starts out as a harmless shill for a forgotten Judd Apatow comedy but quickly goes “off the rails” in a meticulously crafted “spontaneous” manner.

Compare the lady’s shirt to Craig Robinson’s shirt. Craig Robinson, I assume, wore the shirt to be ironic. What’s this lady’s story?

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[For a little background on this place, read the Wikipedia article on Kmart or google "prototype kmart" for the first few sentences of one of the old articles from Detroit newspapers when it opened in '02.]

I read about the White Lake Kmart in the Freep, years before we moved to the area, and actually got lost on two separate occasions stopping in to see it on the way home from support clients in Detroit’s northern suburbs.  After we moved to Oakland county, I was delighted to discover that it was not that far from our place.

I started shopping here because… well, I’ve always had a soft spot for Kmart.
I guess that’s because I grew up going to Kmart stores all over downriver, and even a couple of the locations of their predecessor, S.S. Kresge & Co.  They were based in the area.  Walmart hadn’t become Walmart yet.  Heck, there were a small handful of Meijer stores in the area and they closed at, like, 11pm.

Although “societal mores” made it difficult to wear the clothes to middle school, the Toy department was epic.  So was the electronics area, with its Nintendo Entertainment System, right there on the counter, that you could totally play.  I bought my first hip-hop album at Kmart.  It was “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper” by Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.  [My second one was "Raising Hell" by Run-DMC.  Had to go to Discount Records for that -- you know, because of the language.]

When we started to consider moving back to the Ann Arbor area, I realized that I was going to need to document this store to show it to my friends.  I had occasionally mentioned it in conversation — “oh yeah, I’m on my way home from the PROTOTYPE KMART near my house,” to — to what?  Impress them?  Make them think I lived in Tomorrowland, only with pontoon boats?  When pressed I would invariably describe it as “actually, quite like a Target, only green,” but I knew that didn’t really do it justice.

My other reason is that the retail world has changed so much since this store was developed.  Kmart has entered and emerged from bankruptcy and is now headquartered with its parent company in Illinois, far away from Troy — so this store will probably not get another makeover the one it got, in its time.  Most of the green accents in temporary signage have been replaced with the usual Kmart red, and this will probably continue until it is remodeled.

I spend far too much casual time on blogs like Labelscar and Malls of America, looking for pictures of the old days.  I didn’t grow up hanging out at the mall, exactly, but at the same time I have very vivid memories of them.  It is why, when we found out the child was coming, I told my wife it would always have a camera.  She has a nearly indestructible camera, and as much room as she needs to store her photographs.  Pictures are memories.  Mundane things are still memories.  Want proof?  Look at all the people mourning Livonia Mall.

I hope this store doesn’t get knocked down to accomodate a Home Depot, or anything else, in my lifetime.  But if that should happen, I think of this small set as a few handfuls of earth, ready to help fill the memory hole.

One thing I’ve never worked out was, how the hell did the stuck-up kids knew what discount store your clothes had come from, anyway, if they spent all their time at Jacobson’s?

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Realmac’s Little Snapper is included.  Last year’s bundle included Snapz Pro, a similar product from Ambrosia [though the annotation and web storage puts Little Snapper closer in spirit to a product like plasq's Skitch].

Espresso is a competitor of Macromates‘ TextMate [MH1].

Features in Acorn [and Picturesque to a lesser extent] sound a lot like Pixelmator, from last year’s bundle.

I am curious how developers from previous bundles feel about this.  Not enough to ask  them or anything — this isn’t Waxy — but it’s easy to see who isn’t bothered.

Ambrosia is apparently still on board, because WireTap Studio is included this year.  Likewise for MacRabbit [CSSEdit] and Espresso.  Boinx is a three-time MacHeist star, first with FotoMagico, then with iStopMotion, and this year with BoinxTV.  And I just realized, RealMac is the maker of RapidWeaver from MH1, which could be considered a competitor of Espresso.  [You could also note that FreeVerse (last year's WingNuts 2) is back with Big Bang Board Games, but it's not like you only need one game to do your job the same way you might only need one text or photo editor.]

Maybe I’m making a tempest out of a teapot?

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SUSAN TUSA/Detroit Free Press

I would daresay the gallon of pickles in the trunk [not pictured] is as much of an economic challenge as my decade-old Japanese sedan, but this makes for a better sign, right?

If I ever see her at a light, I’m going to encourage her to find a union sign shop to make her a nicer sign.  Even the Westboro Baptist folks have prettier signs than this.

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