Grant had a tweet pointing to an article on Australian film critic, Paul Byrnes, who was recently awarded the Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year. What’s cool about his story is that he writes all of his reviews on an Apple Newton MessagePad. Earlier in his career, he suffered a repetitive stress injury and could no longer type without pain.

And after an estimated 2000 reviews, all written in long-hand with a stylus on a paperback-sized Apple Newton, Byrnes last night won the Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year.

This morning, I also read a speculative article on AppleInsider predicting the return of an Apple PDA next year. The article was dubbed the Return of the Newton. I’ll believe that when I see it in person.

I wonder what Byrnes thinks about the iPhone and its multitouch display and soft keyboard. Australia isn’t on the short list of countries getting the iPhone anytime soon. Would a larger, slate or book sized Newton be his next purchase? Would RSI be reduced by using a soft keyboard? There should be a study on this!

After a year of living in Palo Alto following graduation, I moved to Easy Street in Mountain View. I stayed there for four years before moving to Cupertino and eventually Santa Clara. I was forwarded this article about a gun death on Easy Street this past weekend.

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After I came back from Burning Man, one of the most common questions I heard was, “How did your camera hold up to the dust?” My Canon EOS-1D Mark II held up quite nicely in the harsh conditions of Burning Man 2007. Following the trip, I analyzed my photos and could not find a single dust particle that wasn’t in the camera before. That’s pretty impressive, considering I was not using weather-sealed lenses. Sign me up as a Canon spokesperson!

While we were there, two big dust storms his the playa on Thursday and Friday. For the first one, Rae and I were hanging out at our Go Sloth Go camp area (5:15 and Estuary). We heard people cries of, “Dust storm approaching!” and saw this wall of beige and gray coming at us. We were already resting in May and Salim’s spacious tent, so we zipped up the rainfly and hunkered down for the hour it took for the dust storm to pass. This tent was meant to protect against rain and snow, not a Tatooine-style dust storm! After just a few minutes, everything inside the tent was coated in a fine layer of playa dust.

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That was the sorriest display by the Chargers since the 2003 season when they went 4-12. Unlike previous years, the Chargers looked unprepared and out-of-sync throughout the entire game. If this is an indication of how the rest of the season will play out, I’m scared. Let’s hope that the team can get on track for the remaining 14. AJ Smith hired Norv Turner because he thinks he can lead us in the playoffs. Remember, AJ, you have to get to the playoffs first before you can succeed! If we keep playing like we have for the past two games, we’ll be looking at a top-15 draft pick.

Apple has posted details about the iPhone store credit program for early iPhone adopters. Get your $100 credit while it’s hot!

The August meeting for the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, September 12, 2007, in Cordura Hall 100 at Stanford University from 7:30-10:00 pm.

Agenda

19:00-19:30: Sign-in and mingling period
19:30-20:15: Surviving the Burn: Photography at Burning Man
20:15-21:00: DSLR Wars Heat Up
21:00-21:30: Monthly Assignment: Age

Surviving the Burn: Photography at Burning Man

Burning Man can be a photographer’s dream or nightmare. The landscape, people, and creativity on display during the week-long event can lead to beautiful, breathtaking photography. At the same time, the harsh environmental conditions can spell disaster for your camera gear if you are not prepared.

I will share my photos and experience at Burning Man 2007 and discuss how my photography gear fared in the desert of Black Rock City.

http://www.burningman.com

DSLR Wars Heat Up

Nikon and Canon have upped the ante for digital SLRs. We’ll cover the specs on the latest releases, including the Nikon D3, Nikon D300, Canon 40D, and the Canon 1Ds Mark III.

SmugMug Monthly Assignment: AGE

The winner of the monthly assignment will get a free 1-year Pro account subscription on SmugMug for having the best photo of the group!

Only new photographs taken from the previous meeting date to the next meeting date will be accepted.

One day after I get back from Burning Man, I hear that Palm has canceled the Foleo. Though the product hadn’t even shipped yet, it was in such a late stage of development. Palm made the right decision, but the announcement still comes as a shock to me. Very few people were going to buy the Foleo, and it’s better for Palm to kill the product before the market killed it. According to CEO Ed Colligan, the company found itself in a difficult position trying to support two platforms — three if you include the non-smartphone PDA handhelds they sell.

“In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.”

The wording of the announcement is similar to the press release that Apple issued when the Newton was canceled back in 1998:

“This decision is consistent with our strategy to focus all of our software development resources on extending the Macintosh operating system,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s interim CEO. “To realize our ambitious plans we must focus all of our efforts in one direction.”

History may not repeat itself, however. Palm, in its various incarnations and spinoffs, has not done a good job of delivering anything but incremental product updates for several years now.