tech: April 2009 Archives

After a break of a few years (was in Denmark and then Sweden during 2007 and 2008) I made sure to not miss this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas.

The big news of course is the enormous construction projects, planned during the boom, which are lurching to either a conclusion or a halt, depending on the financial temerity of their backers. In the former category (although barely) is the CityCenter development on the center Strip:

The interior of the Venetian expansion, Palazzo, was also on display:

The whole set of pics is available on Flickr and on my own site.

The day after the convention ended we travelled to a ghost town in the desert, for a glimpse of what a previous Nevada boomtown looked like. Updates from there soon.

Holding forth in my talk during HASTAC III, a conference on humanities computing in Illinois. The conference concluded with a dinner for HASTAC Scholars, grad students selected to blog about the conference:

Whole set of pictures online here.

The internal 320gig drive that had been inside my 24” iMac since its purchase last summer had finally reached the point of being too full to hold everything conveniently. In addition, the price of fast Caviar Black hard drives have now fallen to the point where it makes sense to stick a terabyte in my main desktop machine. Out came dozens of Torx screws, plus the 24” piece of glass that covers the front — removed from its magnetic fasteners through judicious use of large suction cups.

I used the technique that lets you keep the LCD attached by one cable, swung out of the way, rather than removing to completely and finding a safe place for it. Inside, the space for the hard drive is at the top center:

One interesting detail I noticed while the machine was disassembled: the back of the front cabinet where the shiny Apple logo resides looks to be a circular cutout in the aluminum, suggestive of a design which would have allowed a semi-transparent white logo instead of the opaque metal one that eventually was used:

Apple’s used backlit logos on products such as its laptops for many years, and there are suggestions next month’s impending iPhone upgrade may also use such a design element.