Stalking Butch Dalisay (and his MacBook Air)

Barfly on the bar; MacBook Air right below.

Thanks to Noemi and Butch, we were able to grab hold of Palanca award winner Butch Dalisay for an afternoon of coffee and expostulations on creative writing. Talks like these usually have an open ended flow for words and ideas thus by the end of the session we were all having photo opportunities not just with the writer, but with his tablet – the new ultra light MacBook Air.

The more obvious feature would be its weight as it is significantly lighter than an ASUS eee (for crying out loud). Of course it costs four times as much but you’re paying for a top of the line Apple product. The thinner form factor and the bigger trackpad are huge pluses to the already stupefying device. I was able to try out the gesture sensitive controls on the trackpad – the pinching and zooming in works for photos on Preview as well as the amazing new gesture of pinching and rotating your fingers to rotate photos as well. Not sure why you’d want to do this – maybe for layouts (?) – but it sure is great eye candy to show off. SRP is about P83,000.00 – the cheapest I’ve seen by far. Not sure about prices from good ‘ol Benedict.

Stalking Butch Dalisay or stalking his MacBook Air?

Oh yeah, so Butch also gave a talk on creative writing and blogging. I’ve known Butch mostly because of PhilMUG so this was the first time I’ve heard him talk about writing with such passion. Usually its the same passion but he talks about repairing disk permissions on the Macintosh using Disk Utility. Yesterday, he talked about repairing the general quality of writing as a discipline, especially with the blogosphere. It’s a double edged sword – an imagery that’s often used when we want people to write more, yet the quality of writing isn’t that great. Well, at least people are writing. The best advice that stuck? Read authors (and bloggers) you want to emulate. For more advice, you can check out a very comprehensive interview with Butch Dalisay by Karla Maquiling of Pinoycentric.

Speaking of writing and books, Kape Isla at Serendra (right across Market! Market!) is a drop off point for Rock Ed’s Book Bigayan Project. Blog and Soul is helping out Gang Badoy and the rest of Rock Ed Philippines for book donations as voluntary “entrance fees” for our events. But if you have books you want to dispose and free up some inventory at home, you can drop off some of your excess books to stock a needing library.