For the cross country team's end-of-season gathering tonight, I am using iPhoto to show 300 slides set to music. iPhoto makes it tremendously easy to set this up without a lot of effort (other than sifting through several thousand shots from the fall season to select the best pictures and ensure each of some 70 team members is represented in the show). But since I did the work on my MacBook Air, I had to make an emergency run to the Apple Store in the Westfarms Mall in Farmington this afternoon to get a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA connector so that my laptop could drive the projector. I am constantly amazed how efficiently the Apple Store works. Once I found the accessory in question, an employee scanned its barcode on his specially decked-out iPhone (or maybe it was an iPod Touch), ran my credit card through, thanked me by name, and asked if I wanted the receipt e-mailed to my account--clearly the system recognized my credit card details as associated with my Apple account. The speed of this transaction enabled me to make this trip a surgical strike!
