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Last night, I met none other than Mr. Starbucks-Coffee-for-Free himself, Ricky Manzano.

Here you can see Ricky having… Starbucks coffee for free! Hehe, I made sure I bought him the cup o’ joe.

Here’s a small world story. I pick up Rick at his cousin’s house and, lo and behold, I see Mr. Kyo Suayan, fellow Philweaver mod emeritus. He turns out to be married to Rick’s cousin, Anna. Last time I saw Kyo was at the Philweavers Bay Area EB at Macworld 2002. We surely can hang out more now that we’re neighbors.

Rick is flying back home to the Philippines tonight. Bon voyage, bro. It was great to have met you.

O’Reilly, the publisher of computer books, is known for depicting various fauna on their books’ covers. Being that I am interested in Mac computing, I noticed that the books pertaining to versions of Apple’s OS X, like Panther and Jaguar, do not feature big cats on their covers. Instead, they feature dogs. Now, why would O’Reilly do a seemingly illogical thing like that? Choosing a panther for a book on OS 10.3 would be the easiest thing to do. But no, they chose a beagle instead.

This year’s Macworld gave me the opportunity to ask someone at the O’Reilly booth the reason why cats aren’t being used on OS X books. The nice lady behind the counter told me that for Macintosh book covers, they’ve always used dogs. This is confirmed by a post at MacSlash by an O’Reilly employee:

We chose to use dogs on the covers of our Mac books long before Apple chose to release versions of Mac OS X with kitty names.

Our earliest Mac book, REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, sported a greyhound on the cover, so we decided to follow that motif and run dogs on the cover of all of the Mac books. There’s a bit more to this story, but that’s basically the gist of it.

I wonder whether O’Reilly’s decision to initally use a dog has something to do with Apple’s unofficial mascot back in the day, the dogcow. This was a system icon of a dog that was often mistaken for a cow. Now that’s one hoofed animal I don’t think you’ll ever see on O’Reilly’s covers.

I suppose I’m not the only one who deems Jollibee worthy of a Macworld snapshot. PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak posts this picture up and says this of the Philippine fast food chain and Mac fans:

If any of you follow international news, the Jollibee fast-food franchise is out of the Philippines and notorious for rousting McDonald’s. Since its early marketing victories, it is now expanding, and this is one of the first in the US, right across from Moscone Center. It was packed with Mac fans. I only mention this because I observed an interesting phenomenon in the press room. They had four sandwich selections in huge piles. There was ham and cheese, beef and cheese, chicken salad and vegetarian. The beef sandwiches were clearly the most popular, while the vegetarian sandwiches had almost no takers. This, to me, marks a fundamental change in the general Mac community. Also, outside the halls, there were an inordinate number of smokers puffing away. A nervous, meat-eating crowd of smokers—all Mac users. Danger looms.

[link courtesy of Hudahelru at the PhilMUG Forums]

My Macworld pics get linked from Cube-Zone!

are up.