tech: June 2007 Archives

The day started with lines out the door of every Starbucks within a 5-block radius of the Moscone Center, probably a function of not only WWDC but also the 9am morning rush in downtown San Francisco. I ended up getting the morning latte at an independent place just south of Market:

The ability to take pictures within the conference itself is of course restricted due to non-disclosure agreements, but the public areas outside the sessions and labs were fair game. The theme for the banners this year is Leopard, the upcoming 10.5 release of Mac OS X:

Though breakfast and lunch are technically provided by the conference, there's only so much food-service cuisine you can take. For lunch today we went one block north-east to the new 'wichcraft restaurant, a spin-off of the Las Vegas spin-off of the Craft steakhouse in the MGM Grand.

No Apple conference would be complete without the wall of Cinema Display panels used for scientific visualization and/or animation display. According to an anonymous staffer the company originally didn't realize the opportunity with installations such as this, despite the obvious profit on a dozen 30" displays. Now, however, such display walls are receiving increasing support in graphic tools like Quartz Composer:

Though each session has a string of power strips along the edges of the room, you aren't always guaranteed a charge opportunity if you aren't near the walls. So a vendor set up a special cart with these custom-built Li-Ion battery recharging slots:

One of the few things I can say that doesn't violate NDA is that there are way, way too many laptops with Bluetooth enabled within range right now:

Today is the day before Apple's 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. I'm flying into Oakland today, then hopefully getting registered at Moscone before making a quick trip up to Pt. Reyes with Sándor.

In preparation for next week's conference, I dug through my collection of t-shirts from the 1990s, when I was active in the Berkeley Mac scene. Some contenders included Berkeley Systems' Flying Toasters, from their After Dark screensaver, as well as a something I got for working a booth on the UC campus for Apple.

The winner turned out to be the souvenir t-shirt from the Fall 1990 New Products Introduction. This event, held on October 15th at the San Jose factory, heralded the introduction of the Mac IIsi, Mac LC and Mac Classic. Thanks to help from Mike Alderete, who was serving as an Apple Campus Rep for UC Berkeley at the time, I got a ticket for the introduction of these three new "low-cost" machines. I think there's also a picture of me in the 1990 Annual Report, actually -- was probably the youngest person there. Seventeen years and four states later, the t-shirt, a little faded, was still in my closet.