So tomorrow is the first day I have going back to work after the Winter vacation. I caught a break in timing, in that the semester started on a Friday, and I don’t have classes on that day. This week, Monday is a holiday. Tuesday, tomorrow, will be my first day back. And a good semester it should be. I have three classes, but they are back-to-back on two days of the week, which means slightly longer but many fewer days. I’ve got the web site up to speed, and it all looks well-prepared and ready to go. I just have to figure out how to deal with it all with a broken foot.

One particular point of interest will be the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, with Jobs’ keynote coming at (I believe) 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Japan time. (Rumor roundups here and here.) If, as is predicted, the new Intel Macs come out, this should change the computing landscape some, and that’ll mean changes possibly for my students as well. It’s always good when something big is happening in the field you’re teaching, it gives you a chance to go over all the aspects with your class.

In the past, I have set aside half of one class session each semester to demo the Mac OS, in part to give students another point of view to better understand what an OS is, and in part to show them how cool the system is. Perhaps more than that, they see how I use it myself every day–my monitor is almost always mirrored on the class monitor, and they can see how I navigate through things. And every semester, a good number of students come back very interested in the Mac, despite having seen little else but Windows machines all their lives. I know that if I could tell them they could get Mac and Windows all in one package, a lot more of them would make the switch.

So it should be a fun semester. Heck, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to convince my school of the wisdom of shelling out a few bucks for a Mac Mini, should it become available with Intel and Windows. Our IT people wouldn’t know what to do with a Mac, but hey–I can do maintenance that side of things a lot easier than they can. It’ll take me a lot less time, and be cheaper for the school to boot!