- Thursday, Aug 10th
0.44h - San Francisco, USA | The last nights without much of sleep really start to ask their toll now. The WWDC is one big rush, leaving hardly a few minutes to do anything without running to the next thing. Really cool, but dead tiring. Going to bed at 2am and waking up at 7am to rush for the first sessions doesn't leave any time for something else. I think I will sleep all the way back. This morning I didn't want to skip the first session, but it wasn't easy to wake up. I did everything as fast as I could, while quickly giving a phone call to Tânia, and checking the internet. There I discovered about all the trouble at the european airports and I immediately realised the problems it would give me tomorrow. At the first session (I only arrived 15 min late), I checked the websites of the newspapers and of British Airways, and it didn't look good. I realized I had to do something, certainly when I read that cabin luggage would not be allowed. After what happened on the way here, I don't think it's wise to send the cube this way, and neither my computer without a backup of the whole thing...- However, we first had the Biococoa demo from 10-11am, for which two people showed quite some interest, which was very nice. After that Phil and I went to the Apple Store and after to CompUSA to buy an external harddrive. I had decided to backup my computer on it, and Robert Kehrer offered me to drive along to Cupertino for the campus bash. On our way we would then go to a FedEx store and prepare a package with which we would send both the disk and the Apple Design Award Cube to my home address in The Netherlands. That is safer than taking it in the suitcase, at least I hope. The rest of the afternoon I was busy making the backup in the Science Connection. It was nice to further meet the guys from MacResearch, including one friendly chap who works and lives in Cambridge, UK. We are actually on the same plane tomorrow. It seems we're lucky and flight BA286 will go. In contrast, the morning flight tomorrow BA284 has been cancelled! Let's hope everything will just work out fine.
- The drive with Robert and three other Apple people to Cupertino went fine, and was a lot of fun. After we dropped of to of them, we went to the FedEx store in Cupertino. In total it took us 1 hour to arrange everything, with a resulting package of 7.5 kgs on its way to Aalsmeer, The Netherlands. It costs a whopping 127 dollars to ship it, so they better not loose it. That is one iPod Nano! But I'm happy to pay for it if that will make it arrive safely. As I was so late, I didn't go to the Apple Store on the campus, the line was at least 400m long if not more. Instead we went for a beer and some food. Charles was there as well, good to see him again. Peter, Phil and I had lots of fun discussing KPKit, a Kernel Panic API running on top of Core Panic. We even came up with the idea to ask at the Cocoa Feedback Form for a didShowKernelPanic notification, or even better for a shouldShowKernelPanic callback. Anyway, complete nonsense of course but funny it was. After the ride with the bus back to San Francisco (I think I slept most of it), I had one more task to do at the hotel, to fix my back. I have repaired the whole in the bag by stiching it manually, I hope it will stay intact. Let's see how things will go tomorrow, hopefully I can make it home on saturday with suitcase and all. Wish me good luck.
Thursday