RandomMaccess

Via a post on Twitter, Rick LePage reports he has received word that Stan Flack, founder of popular Mac news sites MacCentral and MacMinute, has passed away. No other details are available at this time. MacCentral was one of the first major Mac news sites on the web until it was bought and its content incorporated into Macworld.com.

Stan had been ill several times over the past year or so, with MacMinute going on unexpected hiatus due to his medical problems. On June 18th of last year, he told his readers “Monday evening I was rushed to emergency and immediately placed in intensive care due to a serious medical issue.”

In November, Flack faced another unexpected surgery: “At least this time I had a brief warning and the opportunity to alert you as to my circumstances.” he wrote to his readers. “I will be back in the saddle as soon as humanly possible and things will be be back to normal.”

I’ll always remember Stan’s policy of not posting news on Veteran’s Day, instead posting “In Flanders Field,” a poem dedicated to the fallen soldiers of World War I. He was also the first person I know of to “decorate” his site’s logo, changing the stopwatch to an Easter egg or decorating it with a Santa hat. That playfulness and accessibility permeated Stan’s work.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Stan personally, but I was frequently inspired by his entrepreneurial spirit and the example he gave of how much one dedicated person could accomplish when he was doing something he loved. Stan and I shared some friends, and from their reaction to his passing, it’s obvious that he was a very special person.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Stan’s family.

Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber noted a site that removes Garfield from his own comic strip, usually resulting in a better strip. In the category of “there’s nothing new under the sun,” I give you “Garfield Without Words,” which leaves the cat in the picture, so to speak, but silences him. Again, the result is often much funnier or at least more poignant, than the original version. Do people do this to lots of comics? It seems like Garfield gets more than its share of attention.

The slides from my Macworld San Francisco 2008 session on setting up a WiFi network are now available as a PDF file. Thanks to all of you who attended and responded so enthusiastically. I was lucky enough to have great crowds for all four sessions — they were attentive, asked great questions and were very kind with their feedback. Thanks, too, to all of you who have been inquiring about the slides — I’m sorry it took me so long to get them posted.

Click here for the PDF.

Thanks to instructions provided by The Joy of Tech’s Snaggy, RandomMaccess now has a custom icon for those who add it as a web clipping to their 1.1.3 iPhone. The technique is very straightforward. Simply create a 57×57 pixel icon, save it as a PNG with the name “apple-touch-icon.png” and drop it in the root level of your web server. Don’t worry about that glassie effect other iPhone icons have–it will be added automatically (to ensure consistency across all iPhone icons, obviously.) Since the glassie effect makes things at the edges of the icon appear somewhat distorted (pulled in as if the top of the icon has rounded edges), it’s best to keep text or images toward the center.

The icon’s pretty basic right now, but as a “proof of concept,” it’s kind of cool.

I ran into a friend on the show floor who said he’d recently visited the site and was surprised my wife would let me “get away” with what he saw: bikini-clad (and barely at that) women. My first reaction was that the site had somehow been hacked and was now serving up some kind of untoward content. After a little diggig, though, it became clear he had simply mistyped the URL–leaving off an “m” in RandomMaccess. He wound up at a web design company called Random Access, and the swimwear-wearing models in question were on a site the firm had created for one of its clients.

Mystery solved.

Random Access, by the way, was the original name of the Macintosh User Group newsletter column that evolved into this site. I only added the extra “m” because the domain name was already taken.

For anyone interested, I’ll be giving a session at Macworld San Francisco this year. The nice thing is that it’s part of the Macworld Learning Center, so it’s free for all attendees — not just those who sign up for the conferences. I think the idea is to give the attendees a taste of what the conference sessions are like in the hopes they’ll sign up next year. I guess that means if the conference attendance tanks next year, it’s all my fault.

The session is called Creating And Using a WiFi Mac Network, and will run Tuesday through Friday from 1:00-1:45 p.m. It’s a very basic session, geared towards new users. In other words: if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably way too advanced for this course.

My other gig is a real gig. Once again, I’ll be playing in the Macworld All-Star Band at the Cirque du Mac Party hosted by my friends at the Mac Observer. The band consists of Paul Kent, Chris Breen, Dave Hamilton, Duane Straub, Bryan Chaffin and yours truly. We’re even hoping Andy Ihnatko will drop in again for a song or two. The party is invitation-only, but I’ll probably have a few tickets to hand out to people who are really nice to me.

For the first time in years, Macworld Expo has exceeded 400 exhibitors. The South Hall of the Moscone Center is sold out for the January 2008 event, and space in the Moscone West is going fast. This is a tremendous accomplishment for a show that many had written off completely just a few years ago.

Some of the credit, no doubt, is due to Apple’s comeback, but that doesn’t begin to explain the scale of Macworld’s resurgence. I’d argue that the main reason Macworld is back and better than ever come down to the efforts of one man, and it ain’t Steve Jobs.

It’s Paul Kent.

Paul has been the driving force behind the conference program at Macworld for years, and it was always the shining star of the Expo. Even while vendors and exhibit attendees were leaving in droves, the conference sessions remained vital and relevant. Paul — through enthusiasm, integrity and sheer exuberance — continued to attract quality speakers and add exciting content. Say what they would about declining attendance and exhibitor flight, the press never — ever — had a bad word to say about the conference program.

A year or so ago, IDG hired Paul to run the whole Expo — conference program, exhibitors, feature presentations and all. He immediately put his stamp on the entire program — revitalizing the “upstairs” show in the same way he did for the conference sessions downstairs. Paul added content to the exhibit floor, brought in innovative features, won over exhibitors, all while continuing to improve the conference program. The result was the best Macworld in recent memory, and a stage well set for this year’s show.

I’m lucky enough to know Paul and to count him as a friend. I love watching him during Expo. He’s one of the most personable people I’ve ever met — constantly asking questions, gathering information on how things can be even better, making sure his speakers and attendees have what they need. In the midst of the chaos and crises, I’ve never seen him flustered. He is always upbeat, always quick with a solution. Putting him in charge of Macworld may well be the smartest thing IDG has ever done.

People speculate on what will happen to Apple when Steve Jobs decides to retire. Can it survive? Will it continue to innovate? Would it really be the same company? I’d ask the same questions of Macworld Expo and Paul Kent.

For Macworld’s sake, I hope we don’t have to find out for a long, long time.

This isn’t at all Mac-related (hence the “random” part of “RandomMaccess”), but I’ve been playing with my Magellan eXplorist lately and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a handheld GPS unit used for hiking and orienteering — it doesn’t have any maps or know roads, for instance, so it’s not much good for driving directions. It simply shows you where you are using latitude and longitude coordinates. You can let it track your movement, leaving “breadcrumbs” along the way so you can find your way back to camp for example. You can also set waypoints, so you can find a particular spot — like a good fishing hole or a campsite.

A game that’s grown out of the popularity of these devices is called “geocaching.” Essentially, it’s a high-tech game of hide-and-seek. The “hider” puts a cache — usually a container filled with a logbook, pencil and some trinkets — in a hiding place, then records the coordinates and publishes the information to a website so others can find it. Sometimes, some additional descriptions about the location or the cache are provided. Then, the “seekers” try to find the cache using their GPS devices. When they do, they sign the logbook, swap a trinket with one of their own, and report back on the website — whether the cache was where it was supposed to be; in what condition; notes about the surroundings, etc.

It all seems like fun. I haven’t found my first cache yet, but there seem to be a lot both where I live and where I work, so I’m sure I’ll go hunting soon.