It's about 4pm on a Sunday and I've had exactly one cup of coffee today, which for me is basically a fast. I slept until 10, made eggs, then sat on the couch doing absolutely nothing productive for two hours while half-watching some infomercial about a rotisserie thing. It was great. I needed it.
Last week was a lot. If you follow this blog at all you know I was neck deep in CES coverage, reading liveblogs, watching keynote streams that buffered every four minutes, trying to keep track of which company announced what on which day. By Thursday I was starting sentences with "so apparently at CES" without even meaning to, out loud, to nobody, while making dinner. My roommate started ignoring me around Wednesday and honestly that was fair.
So today I'm not doing that. Well, mostly not.
Small tangent before I get back to tech stuff: I finally finished the book I've been dragging around since Thanksgiving (it's embarrassing how long it took me, it's not even that long, I just kept falling asleep three pages in) and I'd forgotten how nice it is to read something on paper where the battery doesn't matter and nothing pings you. I own a Kindle Fire and I love it for a lot of things, but there's something about a paperback that doesn't ask anything of you. No update prompts. No wifi icon. It just sits there being a book. I don't know, maybe that's a weird thing to notice, but it stuck with me this weekend.
Okay, tech stuff, but the low-key version.
The word of CES this year was clearly "Ultrabook." I must have typed it forty times last week and by the end I genuinely couldn't tell you what separated one from another anymore, they're all thin, they're all trying to be the MacBook Air, and Intel is very obviously bankrolling a huge chunk of the marketing push behind the term itself. Which, fine, that's how this industry works, but it got to the point where every laptop announcement felt like a copy-paste press release with the logo swapped out. I don't hate the actual machines. I just got tired of the word by day two.
The thing that actually stuck with me more than any single product was Microsoft doing their keynote and then more or less announcing they're done doing the big CES keynote going forward. That felt like an actual moment, not just a product cycle thing. CES has basically been "and now, Microsoft" for years and now it isn't going to be that anymore. I don't think it's some huge tragedy, their focus is clearly elsewhere at this point, but it's the kind of thing that makes you realize an era of these shows is quietly wrapping up while everyone's busy arguing about which ultrabook has the better trackpad.
Otherwise CES felt like a lot of noise around stuff we mostly already knew, more Android tablets and phones running Ice Cream Sandwich, more accessories, more TVs nobody asked to be smarter. I didn't come away with a single "oh, that changes things" moment this year, which might just mean I've been doing this blog long enough that I'm getting a little jaded, or it might mean the show itself is a little played out. Possibly both.
Away from CES, the SOPA fight is still simmering in the background and honestly I think it's going to boil over soon. There was already a hearing in December that went about how you'd expect, a room full of people arguing about the internet, some of whom did not seem entirely sure how the internet works. I've seen chatter that some sites are planning to actually do something visible about it later this week, going dark or blacking out logos, that kind of thing. I'll believe it when I see it, but if it happens it'll be a bigger deal than another Vegas keynote, that much I'm fairly confident about.
Also, completely unrelated, but I switched my alarm tone at some point last month and I regret it enormously. It's this cheerful marimba thing that Apple ships and every morning it sounds like I'm being congratulated for waking up, which is somehow more annoying than a normal beep. I'm changing it back tonight. That's the most important decision I'm making this weekend, apparently.
Anyway. Laundry's not going to fold itself. Back to normal posting this week, I think, there's a Q1 Apple earnings report coming up later this month I want to keep an eye on, and I'm sure the SOPA stuff won't stay quiet for long.