Macworld, Day 1

I did not attend the final, non-Steve, keynote this morning, but followed it on Twitter while eating breakfast at Sears Restaurant and then waiting in line to get into the Exhibition Hall. (Yes! IDG, the firm that runs Macworld, finally got excellent ATT reception and WiFi throughout the Moscone conference facility.)

One Tweet was from Matt, a fellow iCards alumus, asking me if I had the new-product cards ready to go live. That triggered some unpleasant flashbacks of keynote Tuesdays, spent dashing from the Exhibition Hall in SF to the office in Cupertino, and back.

I spent an hour in the South Hall -- which is the main exhibition area with the Apple booth -- before heading off for a lunch date at Mel's Drive-In (which is not a drive-in). The Apple booth itself was much sparser than in previous years. It was U-shaped, with the big-screen presentation theater in the middle (showing off new elements in iWork and iLife) and a one-on-one demo bar. At one side of the U was a modest table with the new 17" Mac Book Pro, and at the other side were tables with iPhones and iPods.

Lunch with with Dan, a Seattle friend who now lives in Tennessee and is part of the team that produces Your Mac Life and is currently onsite at Macworld. We chatted about a whole range of things, including our excitement over Rae's engagement to Todd. (An amusing topic because Dan met Rae through The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out, which links to Rae's blog.)

I arrived back at Moscone to discover that Tom, a Berkeley/Seattle friend, had jumped in and helped out at a booth to the extent that he'd been given $50 worth of merchandise as a thank you. He'd also discovered that a friend of his, at Google, was demoing a Google Earth add-on that lets you steer the Google milk truck while surfing on a hacked Wii balance board. I went over and surfed on it, and can hardly wait to get one. There is no penalty for speeding!

I made it to the Kensington booth to shop for what is to be my one technology purchase for the trip: a wireless (USB) mouse. Several of the mice were quite flat, but one was more egonomically curved, and I'm going to use the show discount to order it on line (or pick it up at the Dr. Bott store at Moscone tomorrow).

As usual, a day tromping around Moscone was exhausting. I'm back at the hotel, getting ready to go over to meet my cousin Michael and his fiance at a new restaurant, Orson.