Macworld '07 - The Beginning

In an effort to keep my blog posts a little shorter, I am going to break up my blog posts on Macworld '07 into at least three separate posts. This is because I know there is at least three separate blog posts that will come out of this and since its been two days since I was at Macworld most of the hot stuff has already been reported by someone else. My posts on Macworld will tend to focus on the Educators Symposium I attended and the walk around the showroom floor with Dominic Bigue and Geoff Hinman from Capuchino.

Well, the day started for me with a ride over from Fremont on BART, which I was initally hesitant to take over to Macworld at Moscone Center, but I decided that with the traffic, bridge toll and whatever pound of flesh some parkling lot owner was going to forcibly take from me it was easier to do the public transit thing. Because of this, I arrived earlier than my compatriots and walked around a little ahead of time. I also needed to use the restroom, so I headed inside and almost ran over David Pogue from the New York Times. I subscribe to his blog and his talk at last year's TED conference is something I show all of my classes. I introduced myself and quickly made a fool of myself by babbling for 30 seconds. I apologized for nearly running him over and he mentioned he was giving a talk in a few minutes. I didn't look into where it was because I assumed it was a 'premium' conference session, much like a 'E' ticket ride at Disneyland in the 60's and 70's. As it turned out, Dominic arrived later and was able to just walk into and see most of David's talk and when we met up, he started to tell me about this cool session he had just seen... man was I bummed!

The three of us; Dom, Geoff and myself met up at the location of the Educators Symposium for the 10AM start. The keynote was given by Dr. Monica Beglau of the University of Missouri. She is working with educators using a training program called, eMINTS. Wesley Fryer, another of the speakers, took detailed notes about all of the sessions of the symposium and blogged them on his blog, 'Moving at the Speed of Creativity.' The one session he left out was his own, which I thought was one of the best and I will blog about separately. The best thing about Dr. Beglau's talk, including the fact that they couldn't get the technology to work for 5 minutes, was the graphic on the first powerpoint slide. A small mouse, suspended over a mousetrap like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. About 10 minutes in to her talk, our conversations turned to interesting ways to commit hari-cari and the more comical references to John Belushi as the owner of the 'Samurai Delicatessen.'

Good thing that Wesley Fryer's talk was next....