Next week, after celebrating Tonya's birthday on Sunday, I'm jetting off to Santa Clara, CA to speak at and attend the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference from September 30th through October 3rd. On Wednesday, 02-Oct-O2 at 2:15 PM, I'll be presenting a session called "Mac OS X Report Card" in which I'll grade Apple's performance with respect to different aspects of Mac OS X. For a sneak peak at the talk, read what TidBITS Talk participants think of my grades. Also, in "Automating Mac OS X" on Tuesday, 01-Oct-02 at 10:45 AM, TidBITS Contributing Editor Matt Neuburg will be showing how you can use tools like QuicKeys, BBEdit, and REALbasic along with applications like Eudora, Microsoft Word, and FileMaker Pro to turn your Mac into a mindless automaton (better it than you!).

<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/macosx2002/>
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<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/macosx2002 /view/e_sess/3150>

If you've been looking for a Macintosh conference that's somewhere between Macworld Expo and MacHack in technical depth, this one may be your cup of tea. There are sessions of interest to developers, but also plenty that will intrigue network administrators, technologists, and power users. Along with the usual suspects like Tim O'Reilly, Ted Landau, and David Pogue, a number of TidBITS and TidBITS Talk contributors will be speaking, including Glenn Fleishman, Dori Smith, Rich Siegel, Stuart Cheshire, Cory Doctorow, Gordon Meyer, and Dan Frakes. Along with all the scheduled sessions, a number of us will be hanging out in the evenings for informal discussions and a Birds of a Feather session Wednesday night at 9:00 PM - think of it as TidBITS Talk in real time.

<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/19/ speakers.html>
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If you have considered attending the conference, but haven't yet signed up, O'Reilly has extended this 35 percent off discount code - macosx02tdbt - to TidBITS readers. Hope to see you there!