We’ve talked about a lot of stuff here in the last week. Let’s do a couple of follow-ups:

The Macworld Announcements:

I watched some of the Quicktime video of the Stevenote Tuesday night. First off, he was, indeed, wearing his usual black shirt. The Engadget pictures made it look browner, but I imagine that has everything to do with them trying to focus on the screen behind Jobs and not his clothing choices.

What I missed from the keynote in the Engadget feed at the very beginning was Jobs saying specifically that he wasn’t there to talk about the Mac this year, that those announcements would come throughout the course of the year.

So, yeah, I imagine we’ll see Apple whipping out a steady stream of Special Events in Cupertino and at other Mac conferences throughout the year.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something Leopard-related in the next two weeks to pre-empt Vista a little bit. I don’t think they’ll release the whole thing, but maybe give a final shipping date and some new features. Obviously, they can talk about the phone stuff now openly. That’ll constitute a good chunk of it.

Yes, the phone is really cool. It’s also too expensive for my tastes.

Update for the Update: Cisco is suing Apple over “iPhone” now. Apple may have a defense.

NBC’s Poker After Dark:

The first week wrapped up in good style, as the player I was rooting for won the whole shebang. That didn’t keep him from being completely overshadowed by the latest histrionics centered on Phil Hellmuth. In case you missed it, PH had a tough decision to make and the table wouldn’t shut up. That annoyed him as a breach of poker etiquette.

I’m of two minds on this whole thing:

First, the table was lively and talkative the first three days of the show, and during the entire tournament up to that point. Nobody ever got quiet whenever anyone had a decision to make. It’s just the way the able was. That said, nobody ever got needled while trying to make a decision, either, and Phil may have been right that it was out of order for the other players to bust on him while he was worried about being busted out of the tournament. But Gus Hansen did crack me up with his needling.

On the other hand, Phil came off as a little brat. He was a whiny loser. He stormed off the set. He couldn’t handle the pressure. He made the situation into something much bigger than it needed to be.

It’s the worst of poker when players become characters and need to live up to their reputations to remain marketable, so that their sponsors will pay them big bucks to wear their logos while they play televised tournaments. I love those first couple of seasons of The World Poker Tour just for the lack of gambling web site logos on hats, shirts, etc. The WPT continues to restrict players to one relatively small logo, but there’s still a lot of colored tape being used to block out the excesses. I understand the need to make money, but isn’t poker ever enough on its own?

In any case, I enjoyed the format of the show. The last couple of hours quieted down to more serious poker, and the show stayed interesting. Watching head-to-head action between the same two guys for a full hour should have been more boring than it was.

I haven’t watched much of the Saturday night “Director’s Cut” episode yet, but I liked that they had interviews with all the players that they cut to them judiciously. It wasn’t a 20 second interview for 15 minutes of rerun. They put some work into this thing.

Watched the first episode of Week 2, which looks set up to have Mike “The Mouth” Matusow take Phil Hellmuth’s position as table wisearse. I think he’s as low class as Shawn “The Sheik” is, though, so I have a clear Rooting Against interest at the table.

Watching Doyle Brunson play in this environment is lots of fun. He’s the grandfather playing poker with all his grandkids, sharing wisdom and advice, telling stories, and smiling an awful lot. He knows that today’s players are just TV-crazed loonies, and he plans to play good poker, instead. He’s warm and funny, without being hokey or dishonest. I like the guy.

And, since it’s early on, there’s a lot of talking at the table about all sorts of cool stuff. I was doing other stuff while just listening to the show last night and still enjoyed it. Poker was secondary, so long as the conversation could be understood.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 7:53 am and is filed under TV, Linux/Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.