In just six days, I’ll be heading down to San Francisco to attend Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (also known as WWDC). After all of these years, I’ve never been to one of these. I’ve been to more MacWorld Expos then I can count, and even attended 2 or 3 years of MacHack, the annual code-all-night-and-show-off-your-clever-kludge-in-the-morning event in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve had programmer friends suggest I go to this, but it always seemed to come at a time where I was either on vacation or just returning from/just getting ready to go on vacation. Now, with San Francisco being a lot closer, and my luck this time (or bad luck, depending on how you look at it) of not working, I can finally see what all the fuss is about.
Boy, this year there is a lot of fuss. WWDC is entirely sold out. According to Steve Jobs’ keynote from 2007, there were over 5,000 attendees that year, 159 sessions, 94 hands-on labs and 1,200 Apple engineers on site. Jobs will be doing the keynote again this year, and the schedule for sessions already says there are well over 150 this year, in 3 tracks, iPhone, Mac, and IT. I plan on going to mostly the iPhone and Mac sessions, and there are a couple of key sessions on Wednesday morning regarding User Interfaces on the iPhone that I’m really looking forward to.
Tips from a Past Attendee
I noticed an entry online from someone who had attended last year, and they recommended, among other things:
- Be Prepared
Bring a water bottle. The Odwalla juices on offer are *really* sweet and run out quickly, and there’s no way you are going to stay hydrated from drinking that and coffee/tea all day. There are plenty of water refill stations all over the Moscone.
Bring a jacket/jumper. Unless you come from Norway or Siberia, you’ll probably find the weather in San Francisco really chilly when the wind gets going. Dress in layers. Even if you don’t plan on getting out much, the labs and lunch areas are *really* cold at times too.
Bring extra cash for food…Unless you’re on a tight budget like me, bring extra cash for getting food outside of the Moscone if you want to keep your spirits up throughout the week. All food at the Moscone is cold, including breakfast. Lunch is served in plastic boxes.
- Get to San Francisco early.(He includes some info about jet lag - not a problem for me, thank goodness).
If you plan on sightseeing around San Francisco, do it before WWDC instead of after. If you’re a developer, WWDC will give you a huge buzz and you won’t be able to resist quickly flying home after the conference is over to start working on the new stuff you’ve learned.
- Have a blog or website? Put a picture of yourself or your team online.
There are loads of people who would love to talk to you about your product, your blog or your site during WWDC. The first step in making sure that people can even find you during the conference is to make sure they know what you look like in the first place.
- (This one surprised me): Don’t waste time planning your schedule far in advance.
The session and lab time-schedules change during the conference. You may also change your mind about attending certain sessions during the week itself, so don’t waste too much time planning your schedule too far in advance. Just plan a rough guide during the plane and you should be set.
- Partition your laptop hard drive before you leave.
If Apple is going to give out a new developer seed during the conference, you won’t be able to resist installing it on your laptop. I’ve personally heard of two fellow attendees who, in the excitement of it all, installed the developer seed onto their existing Mac OS X installation without first backing up. Ouch. (Good thing this isn’t an issue for me).
- Live close to the Moscone.
Attending technical sessions and labs all day is tiring work. Commuting for a long time after each day at WWDC will quickly sap your energy. Do yourself a favour, and don’t bum off your friend’s apartment on the other side of the city to save a few bucks. Get yourself a room somewhere close to the Moscone and get a lot more energy throughout the conference. (Check. I’ll be staying only about 4 blocks from Moscone this time.)
- Business cards.
Whenever you receive a business card, write a description about the person on the back of the card as soon as possible.
You’ll thank me later when you’re on the plane, sorting through the huge stack of business cards you’ve received, and you’re trying to recall whether “Johnny Foobar” was the guy you met during lunch with an awesome new idea for your app, or the guy that you’re supposed to send a review license to. (I learned this one a long time ago)
- Make use of the labs.
Your mileage may vary with the labs, but personally, i’ve got a huge amount of value out of the labs. Broken code got fixed, new features got implemented *on the spot* and magic developer dust was given out. It’s been awesome. (Again, probably more useful for a coder)
- Talk to everyone around you.
The food at the Moscone may be tragic, but the lunchtime conversations are awesome when you manage to find the right group. If you’re an indie, you know how hard it can be to get a good technical discussion with anyone in real life, so you really owe it to yourself to find a good lunch group. The amount of energy and buzz you get out of it can carry you for a long way throughout the week.
Don’t limit yourself to lunch either. There’s great conversation to be found just standing in line. Just try not to do that at the long queues for the male restroom. (duly noted)
So there you have it. Thanks, Joe.
Today at 10:00 AM, supporters of the CBC Radio Orchestra met at the Queen Elizabeth Fountain. We waved to traffic going by on West Georgia, and heard speeches describing how protests like this one were going on in Montreal and Toronto (and also in Romania, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper is currently visiting).
Some passed out song sheets (also with all of the names of all the BC Members of Parliament, to send handwritten letters to). We sang some a couple of protest songs — to the tune of Three Blind Mice and Baa Baa Black Sheep (or Twinkle twinkle Star, if you will). My favourite bit was the second verse of the Baa Baa Black Sheep:
Bah, bah, humbug to the stingy beast
In his office way back east;
How can pencil-pushing jerks
Screw composer’s hard-earned works?
Bureaucrats don’t know their avant-garde
From a hole in their back yard.
Then the whole crowd marched a block south to the main doors of the CBC. Some of the radio orchestra members gathered at the door, and there were more speeches and chanting. There was no violence, and I think that frankly, the folks in the building were glad we were there. After all, I think they would have joined us if they could have. Here are a few other photos (the rest are on Flickr):
Since she’s gotten back, Pam has said that she’s been seeing the world (including our home) a little differently lately:
- While the coastal mountains may look big to us (and they certainly loom large enough that I use them to orient myself whenever walking downtown), the Andes Mountains in the south of Chile and Argentina make them look small.
- The icebergs she saw were ‘roughly the same size as the container ships’ we saw yesterday in English bay. Bear in mind that this is just the visible tip of the object. 7/8 of it is underwater.
- While it’s been pretty much dismissed as a myth, Pam did notice that the water going down the drain where she was always went down clockwise. We did a little test here and although the bathtub goes counterclockwise, the guest bathroom sink went clockwise as well. I stand by the opinion that the Coriolis effect, while clearly having an effect on large-scale weather patterns (like hurricanes), does not produce enough force on small localized phenomenon in order to lead to a consistent direction either way when things go down the drain. Instead, in these cases, it’s more a function of the size, shape, and angle of the bowl or tub.
- When they left South America, the captain of the Pam’s ship said: “Say good-bye to trees for 10 days”. Indeed, there wasn’t a single tree on any of the photos Pam took on any of the islands or the coast of Antarctica. A landscape without a tree is something I’d have a hard time getting used to.
- Moss (which was found on these islands) always grew on the South side of rocks (as opposed to the North side here).
- Birds in Antarctica (including the Penguins, Terns, Albatross and Petrels) were all much larger than the birds we see here. They call the Cormorant (which we sometimes do see here) a Blue-Eyed Shag.
- Even on a cloudy or rainy day, you need sunglasses in Antarctica because the reflecting snow is so bright.
I’m sure she’ll think of others as they strike her.
While I was at Northern Voice, Pam’s final email came in:
There won’t be many photos from the Zodiac cruise through Pleneau Island, also known as ‘The glacier graveyard’. Getting from iceberg to iceberg for observation proved to be a wild ride. Wind, waves, and snow hindered picture-taking for all but those being paid to do it. The rest of us clung to the side robes with heads turned into sleeves. I suppose we learned that form of protection from the penguins.
When icebergs become grounded, it’s erosion that shakes them apart, eventually becoming ‘burger bits’. It might take an iceberg 10 years to rot. They look snowy from a distance but up close you see accumulated rocks frozen in the solid ice. We cruised through icy chunks where a leopard seal hid out and taunted Zodiacs trying to land.
The next day opposite weather in quiet, sunny Cuverville Island. We observed more gentoo penguins in a big smelly rookery. One of the guides noted that in the past 3 years, snow cover has retreated from the shore exposing sharp rocks and producing new mosses. We could hear the penguins squish as they stepped across the tour trail.
In the evening a British base commander lectured on ‘A Year in Antarctica’. He described how a particular scientific group physically and mentally handled a 12-month rotation. In addition to working in pairs, they also had to deal with personal annoyances such as soup slurping. If a coworker got the better of you, they were asked to ‘repair a meter’ in the outermost hut. (It was equipped with essential overnight gear.) When the base supply vessel returned the following year, the commander explained that, naturally, outgoing crew went through withdrawal and grief. Replacements were to allow them a few days for introspection before they left.
Our stops over the last 5 days have included Deception Island, Petermann Island, Halfmoon Bay, Paradise Bay, and Neku Harbour. We crossed 66-degrees south latitude, a joyous moment for the captain, within spitting distance of the Antarctic Circle, the furtherest south this vessel and this captain have ever been.
We’re now thinking about home. Tonight at the Captain’s farewell party ‘Las Penguinas’ my picture-taking buddies and I will reminisce about this incredible journey to the awesome Antarctic.
Pam will be back on Tuesday, and I’m hoping that her photos will be up shortly after that.
The news from your’s truly is that today I finally was able to go back to work, after about 5 days of on-and-off fever and chills. It sure feels good to be almost normal (coughing and weakness is fine by me compared to that other stuff). Unfortunately, during my retreat into a fetal position under the blankets, I missed about 5 days of sunshine, or so they tell me. Never saw any of it. So much for any Vitamin D that doesn’t come out of a bottle…
Anyway, at least Pam wasn’t here to have to hear me whining about how crappy I felt. The news from her is quite a bit more interesting and far more uplifting:
We’re all back inside after a morning of seeing and smelling Gentoo and Adelie penguin colonies on Petermann Island. We had to tread very carefully as the little guys blend in with the rocks. Fortunately guides were placed next to chicks sleeping on the path. As we knelt to take their pictures, some curious chicks approached to nibble on camera straps. At some point you don’t take pictures but just have to take a breath and stand in awe in the quiet, majestic, surroundings.
Today’s snow got everyone in the mood for exploring, but after the crew planned a festive BBQ on the pool-deck, we had other ideas. Entertainment was provided by a band and passengers willing to dance in the slush (including me), and then an impromptu snowball fight broke out and everyone, including the captain, were on deck as some point.
Outside temperature is about 39°F/4°C. The red Explorer jackets are quite warm, as are the insulated rubber boots. It’s a good thing they are waterproof, as we have to step in “decontamination” buckets before and after leaving the ship and zodiac rafts.
Just moments after everyone came in from lunch festivities, and as the crew was breaking down, the ship suddenly rocked, hard. Chairs tipped over and there was a loud crash from the kitchen followed by another crash on the return wave. The captain has turned off the stabilizers as they also slow the ship and having them off is better for navigating around ice. He’s announced that as of an hour ago, we’ve come farther south in this ship than ever before because of the good weather and relatively ice-free conditions. We’re actually now less than 6 hours sail from the Antarctic circle. Although we’re not planning to cross, it’s exciting to have come so close to that point on the Earth.
Yesterday evening (after 2 landings and a zodiac cruise past ice shelves 40 metres high) we started heading through the Lemaire channel. The Channel is in every guide book of Antarctica. A National Geographic ship was in the area and we watched it disappear thru a tiny speck of an opening off in the distance. At around 22:00 the captain invited everyone up to the bridge as we slipped through the passage. With shear mountains on either side, and glaciers, which could have spilled off at any moment perched atop them, we glided into the opening and away from the sunset. The captain got a round of applause; it was an unforgettable moment. Many people have been moved to tears, (me included), by the astounding beauty of the scene.
Pam goes on to say that her next message will come on the sail back toward Tierra del Fuego.
Here’s the kind of picture those guide books of Antarctica have of the Lemaire Channel:
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