Okay, so I've just discovered the world's most entertaining time waster - the new Photo Booth software that comes with the built-in iSight camera on a Mac.

More photos here.

Last week I was in NYC participating in the first BlogHer Business Conference. Since its inaugural conference in the summer of 2005, BlogHer has been a focal point for women's voices in the blogosphere, both in its conferences and on the BlogHer website, an effort which I am proud to be part of.

As a business woman and a woman with a blog that has evolved into a business, what better place to meet peers and share ideas than at a women's conference devoted to the more professional aspects of blogging. Diva Marketing's Toby Bloomberg and I have been to all the conferences so far, and we shared a moment or two of awe at how far things have come, since July 05.

Well, a week has passed since BlogHer06, and I have finally recovered my voice, worn hoarse by two days and 3 nights of almost non-stop interaction with the hundreds of intelligent, interesting, expressive, and opinionated people, mostly women, who made up the conference. Why do I love the BlogHer conference? The reason is similar to the epiphany I had the first time I attended a women-in-business conference at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I received my MBA. Having worked in the technology field for twenty years, and having attended countless professional conferences, my world, at least in work, has been almost entirely made up of men, and with it men's interests and attitudes about the world. Sitting in the classrooms which are usually occupied mostly by men, it was almost magical to look around the room and see bright, open, intelligent faces of women, women more concerned with contributing to the discussion and connecting with others than sounding smarter than everyone else.

I have four younger brothers, I have worked in technology, and I have trained in martial arts (mostly with men), for most of my adult life. I enjoy the company of men. But sometimes, it's just more fun to hang out with women. We tend to be more supportive of each other, and therefore more willing to take risks, e.g. display more vulnerability, in front of each other.

So this is the appeal of BlogHer for me - relaxing, engaging, and talking about subjects that interest me profoundly, with women. Every other conference geared toward the web, blogging, internet technology, etc. is top-heavy with men. And often the same men too, doing the speaking rounds at all the conferences.

The holy grail of web collaboration has arrived. I just got a demonstration of Macromedia Breeze today during a business meeting. Wow. This is what we were trying to invent several years ago at Multitude (now defunct). These programs - WebEx, Placeware, etc. - never work on a Mac, at least not seamlessly. In today's meeting the initiator in San Francisco was on a PC, I (Sacramento) was on a Mac, one participant was on a PC (East Coast) and another on a Mac (United Arab Emirates). We all logged in as visitors and we were there, on Mr. San Francisco's computer, seeing all his mouse clicks. It just worked. Nothing to install (perhaps because I had the latest Flash already installed?), just through a web browser. Oh yes, we were all on different browsers too.

Haven't tried the VOIP (don't really need it with FreeConference.com) and didn't use the video. Video conferencing, unless it is with my bestest friends, is over-rated in general. Much more useful to have the white-boarding capability that works.

Of course, it's priced for business not for personal use, making it steep for casual collaborations, but extremely reasonable for corporate. The per-user Pay-Per-Use plan is about $20 per participant per hour.

This is not a comprehensive review of Aperture, Apple's latest software for photographers, but some observations from one month of using of the product. Aperture is designed for "professional" photographers, which I am not. I am an amateur photographer, concerned mostly with managing the thousands of photographs I am taking, primarily of food, for my food and cooking weblog. I'm what one would call a "pro-consumer", who has outgrown iPhoto. Note that I am running Aperture on a dual Mac G5, with a 23-inch cinema display.