Keepers of the Truth

In life I have a philosophy which I try and live by:
Always keep a list of goals to achieve and keep working toward your goals.

This week I have achieved yet another of those goals. I went to the Apple Computers headquarters in Cupertino. Was it an awsome, awe-inspiring experience? No, not so much. I mean I had fun walking around what little of the campus I was allowed to see and looking at the way they designed their offices and how they allowed their employees to do their own thing (think differnt) and such. It wasn't like, "Oh cool I have to get a picture of this or that." I didn't say much of "Look at that guy (I did say that about one guy who just has an awsome feel to him (More on him later)." It was just the joy of being at a place I had wanted to visit for quite a while. I'm the only Apple geek among most of my techi friends. I have a good friend who used to say that I was going to take over Apple one day. I have others who just don't get it. Anyway, I'd always wanted to go to Apple headquarters and now I write this just a few minutes walk from the place where it all happens. I'm still giddy just thinking about it.

Overall, what we did was little, although I now know how to post podcasts and I've used the Apple iLife and iWorks suites which are really cool. I would love to just sit down for a few months and get lost in this stuff, but I know that I'm going to have to go back to my office on Monday and get back to the real work I do. I just hope that I'll be able to use part of what I learned in what I do everyday.

I do want to talk just for a moment about one of the keynote speakers who talked to us. His name is Kim Silverman, Ph.D. He is a man of great stature not only in the way he looks, but also in the way he thinks and acts. He's the principal research scientist at Apple Computers and is overseeing the speech recognition and text-to-speech projects in OS X. First off, he looks just like Professor Dumbledore or Merlin or any of the legendary wizards we see on TV (I also heard him refered to as Santa Claus, but I didn't really see that as much). He spoke and made a presentation that just made everyone of us drop our jaws in awe of his speech. He could make the computer just and dance just with the sound of his voice. It was an awsome sight. Then when we were at a reception later he came out and did magic tricks for us. He's a very accomplished magician and he put on quite a show. He started with a trick where he used me as the audience participant. I was very skeptical at first, but soon, I was just sitting there wondering how he pulled it off time and again. Here he was standing close enough for me to touch and he pulled my card out of a deck multiple times. I had my eyes firmly on the deck and never once did I see how he did it. I thought I had it once, but then he pulled the card out of somewhere completely different from where I thought he'd placed it. I was amazed! Later, after he'd gone around the room doing other slight of hand tricks I got a chance to talk to him. I told him how much I enjoyed listening to him present and see him perform. I told him that it was like magic what he could do with the computer. He said, "I think that part of what makes effective technology is making it act like magic." or something like that. I was just so overwelmed by what he did. If you ever get a chance to see this guy in action I think you too would feel as I did. It was a great way to end a great week!