Well, investors are clearly pretty happy with Apple's Q2 earnings results, because the company's stock held onto that 10% after-hours gain and closed at $29.30-- its highest value since the Great Cliff Dive of September 2000. Apparently massively-increasing iPod sales, surprisingly high iBook numbers, zero debt, $4.6 billion in the bank, Apple's strongest March quarter in four years, and guidance of continuing double-digit growth next quarter were enough to persuade Wall Street to bust open its wallet and break off a piece of that sweet, sweet action. We're still a little unnerved by AAPL going up after an earnings report, but we're coping okay-- especially in light of the backlash over that whole stock options flap.

See, as it turns out, not all the shareholders are thrilled with every little thing Apple does, particularly when it comes to what they call "executive compensation," which we reg'lar folks refer to as "swag for the bigwigs." In particular, CalPERS, a major AAPL shareholder and the U.S.'s biggest pension fund, got a little huffy a few years back when the $1-a-year-salaried Steve Jobs received a $90 million bonus consisting of a free jet and enough cash to pay all the taxes on it. Well, it seems that CalPERS is still a bit twitchy about Apple's whole corporate governance thing, and is also upset that the company still hasn't implemented a "shareholder-approved proposal to treat stock options as an expense."

Faithful viewer river-wind tipped us off to a Reuters article which reports that, because of the stock option thing and because Apple's auditor (KPMG) also performed consulting services for the company, CalPERS plans to "withhold voting its 1.48 million shares" from Apple's entire board of directors and also vote against bringing KPMG back for auditing duties. Yeesh, way to harsh on the post-Q2 celebratory buzz, guys.

The thing is, the reasons why Apple hasn't done the stock-options-as-expenses thing are because: 1) despite shareholder votes, not many others in the option-happy world of high-tech does it; 2) Apple (and many other companies) would be posting losses instead of profits if it did; and 3) the Financial Accounting Standards Board still hasn't finalized a consistent way it wants companies to do it yet-- there's a draft, but it hasn't been ratified, and if Apple makes the change now, it'll probably have to change things around again when the final standards are approved. (Of course, Apple probably emphasizes Reason Number 3 a lot more than Reasons 1 and 2.) Regardless, CalPERS will be doing the Eisnerian "vote of no confidence" thing, only not on quite so grand a scale.

While we personally like the idea of listing options as actual expenses and not tucking them away in footnotes, we can't fault Apple for waiting until the FASB proposal is finalized-- especially since it'd be posting quarterly results that would look far worse than everyone else's, so this is one instance in which "cutting edge" is probably not the right thing to be. We figure, let CalPERS complain; we'll be much happier if Apple expenses options when everyone else does, too, so the whole industry suddenly looks like it's going down the tubes instead of just Apple. And anyway, the CalPERS complaint makes us feel a lot more at ease about this freaky post-earnings stock runup, so it's all good.

You've heard about this Gmail thing that Google announced a couple of weeks ago, which is a free web-based email service with 1 GB of mail storage per account that has all those privacy watchdogs freaking out about what the company's going to do with your only-sort-of-deleted messages. We hadn't mentioned it until now because it's been pretty off-topic even by our standards (or lack thereof), but now we see that Alex Salkever over at BusinessWeek has turned Gmail into a viable Apple-related plot point by insisting that it threatens to render Apple's own .Mac service "obsolete."

Now, we want to be perfectly clear, here: we fully support everyone's right to his or her own opinion, no matter how patently absurd said opinion might be. Likewise, for the most part we feel that each person's choice of whether or not to use recreational pharmaceuticals is his or her own business, provided it's done in the privacy and safety of their homes so it doesn't endanger others.

That said, it's our personal opinion that Alex Salkever should consider upgrading to some higher-quality crack.

See, Salkever's claim is that while .Mac subscribers get "a veritable bag of goodies" for their 99 clams per year, most of those goodies are eclipsed by Gmail's massive-storage email account. For instance, iDisk: "when Google adds the capability to download Gmail to desktop clients," iDisk becomes redundant because "most people store files as email attachments anyway."

Um... yeah. So, can we get a show of hands from all those people in the viewing audience who, for example, finish editing a big iMovie project, email the project files to themselves, and then trash the originals just so they can find all their files as attachments to messages in their inbox? Anyone?

We're not seeing a lot of hands, here. And maybe that's just because, well, we can't actually see any of you, but somehow we don't think the results would be all that much different if we could. And yet Salkever also claims that Gmail can replace .Mac's free copy of Virex, too, presumably because, again, you'd store all your files as email attachments, so Gmail can scan them for viruses for you. Which makes perfect sense provided you "store files as email attachments anyway" and never, for example, download a file from a web site instead of from an email message. Right.

Personally, we happily shell out $99 a year for a .Mac account-- and we literally don't even use the email. We consider .Mac well worth the price for its tight integration with Apple's iApps; select a bunch of snapshots in iPhoto, click a button, and bam-- instant live web page. Ditto for sharing iMovies. And call us nuts, but an auto-synchronizing locally-stored iDisk built right into the Finder strikes us as an online storage and distribution system that's a whole lot less hassle than this insane concept of storing all our files as email attachments. Meanwhile, what about iSync? We've found it invaluable to maintain the same contact info, calendars, and bookmarks across our several Macs, iPods, and Palm-based smartphones-- and we can even get to all that same data from any web browser if we need to. Virex and Backup (plus some free software now and then) are just icing on the cake.

Not that we're opposed to Salkever's suggestion that Apple explore the possibility of an Apple-branded version of Gmail, because who knows? Maybe it would be a good match; it never hurts to explore. But we just don't buy this whole premise that the imminent coming of Gmail somehow makes .Mac irrelevant-- maybe not even from an email-only perspective, because, privacy issues aside, the thing doesn't even support Safari yet.

Somehow we have a feeling we'll be renewing with .Mac come September...

You know, we want to believe that this summer's Macworld Expo Boston will escape its apparent destiny as a flop of cataclysmic proportions-- honestly, we really, really do. You've got to realize, here, our first ever Expos were the '94-through-'97 Boston shows, and we're still treasuring some very fond memories of those shindigs (although no amount of therapy will ever allow us to repress the image of Bill Gates's Big Giant Head live via satellite when Steve announced that infamous $150 million investment/cross-licensing agreement thingy). We dutifully followed the show to New York in 1998, and we enjoyed those shows a heck of a lot, too, but there's a whole "coming home to roost" dynamic to this Boston story that has us rooting for the underdog. Plus, we really like the idea of traveling ten miles to the show instead of two hundred and ten, but that's just us being lazy. And cheap.

But there are some overwhelming odds to consider-- like, say, oh, we don't know... Apple not showing up and the ensuing lack of a Stevenote. And Apple's emphatic absence has made both potential attendees and exhibitors doubt whether the show can possibly be worth the money it'll cost to show up: with fewer attendees, exhibitors figure it's not worth the cost of renting a booth; with fewer exhibitors, attendees figure it's not worth the cost of the flight and hotel room. It's a vicious feedback loop that threatens to cancel the show altogether-- or, if IDG World Expo is grimly set on throwing this shindig no matter what (which we think is likely), it'll probably at least make the show a good deal smaller than Expos of the past. That's not much of a "Welcome Home" party.

To get a sense of how teensy this show is shaping up to be, Think Secret is reporting that IDG's goal is to have 100 exhibitors out there when the Mac faithful venture out onto the show floor. While we aren't sure how many vendors have clocked in for past summer shows, 100 sounds like a pretty low number to us-- and as of a few days ago, with only three months left before the conference starts, IDG "confirmed that 29 companies are on the exhibitor list so far." Twenty-nine. And as we've mentioned before, there are a bunch of heavy-hitters apparently missing from that list, like Adobe, Macromedia, and Microsoft. While we always love to play the role of Beaming Optimists, news like this leaves us reaching for the Rolaids. Clearly the show needs more exhibitors, and it needs them soon.

Driven by our incessant urge to lend a hand, we admit we've toyed with the idea of selling off an internal organ and using the cash to rent a booth ourselves. As far as we can tell, though, the cheapest chunk of Expo real estate available directly from IDG is a ten-foot-square "bare booth," which runs $4,800. Since we don't really have an actual product to push (well, other than shirts and stickers, because you just can't bottle melodrama; trust us, we've tried-- it gets everywhere and the stains are permanent), a booth on a hundred-square-foot parcel of land seems like overkill. Heck, without an actual product to push, we wouldn't even want the booth; we'd just lie down on the carpet itself, or maybe set up a little tent to snooze in. S'mores by campfire would probably violate fire codes, though, huh?

But wait, there's another option that's even more attractive: we could sublet one of those cute little minibooths in one of Xplain's "Special Interest Pavilions"! There's no "Smartass Commentary" pavilion, but AtAT could conceivably wedge itself into one of the other vaguely relevant categories-- say, "Edutainment" (we edutain with the best of 'em), or "Digital Media" (we're digital and we're media), or, for obvious reasons, "Clip Art." Best of all, for just $2,995, we could get a "1-meter station property" with "lockable storage space," one "padded stool" (ooh, luxurious!), an electrical outlet, carpet (with padding, mind you), a wastebasket that'll get dumped out for us each and every night, four of those funky exhibitor badges, a plain-text Station Header (we might stick with the default "Display Name," because it's catchier than "AtAT"), listings in the exhibitor booklet, and lots more.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Now all we need is the organ to sell to raise the three grand. (You didn't think we meant we'd hock one of ours, did you?) So, in the interest of padding the Expo's exhibitor list a bit, does anyone have an extra kidney we can sell? Second-hand's fine.