Wait a minute, it's not the 24th already, is it? Aw, man-- we just totally spaced on the Apple shareholders' meeting! This was finally going to be the year when we hitchhiked cross-country taking the scenic route, meandering along the highways and byways of this great land, immersing ourselves in the true American experience, bonding spiritually with the people, and broadening our horizons... all with the eventual goal of completing a circuitous pilgrimage to the Holy Land that is Cupertino, attending the annual meeting with our stockholding brethren, and finally getting a chance to ask Steve Jobs point-blank what he puts on his Not Dogs-- in other words, whether he's a mustard man, a ketchup man, or a mustard and ketchup man. (It's a question that's been plaguing us for decades.)

It wasn't a total loss, however, since we spent the last couple of weeks engaged in the next best activity on the list of mind-expanding, life-enriching activities:TiVo. And while we may have missed the meeting today, it's no biggie; we can always catch up by scoping out Think Secret's notes from the shindig, which lean heavily towards summarizing Apple's answers to shareholders' questions. That's always a hoot and a half, since it's often the only chance we ever get to hear Apple's take on all this drama we find ourselves wading through day after day. True, sometimes getting the story straight from the horse's mouth provides far less entertaining results than building rampant speculation on a foundation of nothing more than whispered half-truths from shadowy and dubious "sources close to the company," but hey, once a year ain't gonna kill ya.

So squeak your eyeballs across those notes once or twice, because it's actually pretty refreshing to get a second-hand report of Apple's official stance on some of the plot twists that have recently dominated our airwaves. That whole issue of fuller Mac OS X support for older ATI graphics hardware? It's purely a technical issue with old video technology not being able to support Mac OS X's advanced feature set. (Of course, that doesn't exactly explain why those chips can support OpenGL and speedy QuickTime in Mac OS 9 but not in Mac OS X, but whatever.) What about that nasty dust-up involving Finlay Dobbie, the seventeen-year-old developer who was allegedly booted from the Apple Developer Connection because of his age? Not so, said Steve, who called the news reports about the incident "untrue" and trotted out Apple's top mouthpiece Nancy Heinen to state that underage developers can participate with the consent of a legal guardian; Steve reportedly wouldn't make with the details, but indicated that Finlay was dropped because he "did not follow certain rules."

There's plenty of other good stuff in there, including "Steve Speaks" info nuggets on FireWire and Bluetooth for digital cameras, why we can't rotate the iMac's screen into portrait mode, and Mac OS X for Intel (shockingly enough, the official answer to that time-honored issue is a stifled snort of derisive laughter and the dismissive phrase "no plans"). Sadly, however, it seems that the condiment issue never came up (what were these people thinking?), so the Jobsian Mustard-vs.-Ketchup question may well remain a mystery for the ages. Or until we finally manage to drag our hinders out to the mothership in time for next year's hoedown...