Twas the night before Apple, and all ’round the net,
All the rumors were flying, but no real news yet.
Speculations were read, with the utmost of care,
With the hopes that the keynote, soon would be aired.

Apple faithful were restless, their iPhones held steady,
In hopes that Cupertino soon would be ready
To announce a new tablet, for which they’d been fawning,
Ever since Newton left consumers, well. . . wanting.

A capacitive screen, is a definite must.
Since fans of multi touch gestures are us
A size 10″ screen is most likely, “Yes.”
But a front facing camera, perhaps GPS?

Wifi is a given, and the app store is too,
As for syncing iLife, well now that’s nothing new.
Perhaps unlocked iPhones, for non AT&T folks
Since that network’s the butt of quite a few jokes.

Then fanboys will come from within every city
To post about how Apple’s business is shitty.
More rabid than wolves, to the forums, they’ll fly
And tear apart lie after lie after lie.

So iPad, iSlate,
or whatever you’re called.
(I’ll admit that these names
have me somewhat appalled.)
On the web I will read
and on printed news too,
“Apple tablet is out!
It’s brand spanking new!”

So tomorrow I’ll find, on my usual sites
News about Apple with included soundbites.
I’ll witness his Steveness, his demeanor quite proud
About Apple solutions, he’ll talk to the crowd.

But then he’ll announce, how much it will cost
As banks everywhere groan from cash reserves lost.
But there’s always a point, in my ears it will ring,
“Thank you all for coming. But there’s just one more thing.”

Even just web browsing it can get very warm.  So, in order to get past this, I looked online for any sort of utility to measure temperatures.

What I found instead was an app called smcFanControl.  I ran at the default settings and it reported that my machine was getting up to 140 degrees.  (Fahrenheit)

I upped the rpm to around 4000 and now it runs at a more lap friendly temperature of 100 degrees, and 40 degrees really does make a difference in comfort.  The machine overall even feels cooler, and although I know I’m losing fan lifecycles, I would much rather the machine ran cooler than it has been.

First impression is that nothing has changed from the last iteration, with the exception of a few new buttons and two new categories under Events and Photos.

Flickr export apparently only works with Pro accounts.  Way to add value to a Pro account, but not so cool for the folks that have iPhoto, but not necessarily a flikr Pro account.  Facebook connectivity I can’t comment on.

I still don’t have a Facebook account.  I’m playing a game called, “Don’t Join Facebook.”  I may lose eventually, but I’m going for the high score.

Now, onto the big hype, which is Faces.  I have a lot of photos.  A lot of photos.  I’m very interested in tagging them.  I’m very not interested in spending weeks going through each photo and tagging each one.

I love the new Faces feature.  So far, so good, and I’m getting great results for the time that I’ve put in, which is about five hours or so.  I have a full corkboard, and it’s really interesting to see people evolve over the years.  I can only guess at the results for children as they grow older, but if you keep at it, you can have one hell of a slideshow on their birthday.

Next, on to iMovie, but that’s another five hours I’ll have to spend playing with it.

Protip: Learn how to use the keyboard shortcuts for Faces.  I haven’t timed how long it takes me to process X number of photos, but I can tell you that it’s much, much faster than attempting to do it via the mouse.  Like most things.