Greetings from WWDC

I final­ly have a free moment where I’m not in a con­fer­ence ses­sion, am awake, and have Inter­net. (More about that in a bit).

The flight down was unevent­ful. Need­less to say, get­ting to the air­port 2 hours ahead of time proved just enough to get me to the gate about 15 min­utes before board­ing start­ed. Yes, check-in, bag­gage, cus­toms, secu­ri­ty and tra­vers­ing the ter­mi­nal ate up and hour and 45 min­utes. Such are the joys of air trav­el in the 21st century…

Announce­ments noticed upon arriv­ing at San Fran­cis­co Air­port: “Mil­i­tary Per­son­nel are invit­ed to the Wel­come Suite on level…(etc.)” “The cur­rent Ter­ror Threat Lev­el is Orange. Please report any Sus­pi­cious Look­ing Behav­ior to Air­port Employ­ees.” Yes, I’m back in the US of A.

As for get­ting Inter­net when not at the con­fer­ence, when I booked the hotel, the descrip­tion online was Brit­ton Hotel, Inter­net in all rooms, a decent rate, and 4 blocks from the Moscone Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. It turns out that was only half true. Yes, the rate is OK, and they are rough­ly 4 blocks (5 if you count the turn from 7th onto Howard Street). How­ev­er, the Brit­ton Hotel is most­ly a pile of rub­ble, and ris­ing from the ash­es (with con­struc­tion crews start­ing their work around 8AM each day) is The Good Hotel (yes, that’s the name), and Inter­net has been near­ly non-exis­tent. The piz­za par­lor that was sup­posed to be on the ground floor (anoth­er ameni­ty I was look­ing for) is MIA. For­tu­nate­ly, last night it final­ly kicked in around 11:00 PM.

That said, its now day 2 of the con­fer­ence, and I’m try­ing to take in as much as I can, but it is the prover­bial ‘drink­ing from a fire-hose’ syn­drome. Steve Jobs’ Keynote (and announce­ment of the iPhone 3G and its arrival a month from tomor­row in Cana­da) was great fun, and today’s ear­ly ses­sion on devel­op­ing web pages for Safari on the iPhone had so much infor­ma­tion crammed into it that I could bare­ly keep up.

There’s more, but I know after a point, there’s only so much you can take in. How­ev­er, the wildest thing about this con­fer­ence is the fact that there appear to be more lap­tops than humans, and the hard­est thing to do is man­age bat­tery life. For­tu­nate­ly, I’m start­ing to learn where the out­lets and pow­er strips are.

More to come.