Annoying people at conferences

I sat down in a session today and the person next to me was eating raw carrots. She (yes there are a handful of women here) kept crunching and crunching. I moved seats, but it was still annoying. Do people lack common courtesy or do they not realize the are disturbing my peace?

In another session, the guy next to me started cracking his knuckles. If I smacked him, would he have stopped? Why should I have to tell people to be kind? I can handle typing at the conference because there is enough other noise to mask it; however, the knuckle cracking and the carrots are just plain annoying. I guess many of these people don't get out much and don't need to be courteous to others.

In my last session of the day, the lady next to me took off her shoe and started cracking her toes. To top it off, she banged on her keyboard at 100 miles per hour; the keyboards on the MacBooks are really annoying when people type fast. I could live with that (sort of), but cracking her toes almost put me over the edge.

Babar is staying above me

Babar is staying above me; I hear him stomping around. I was going to ask the front desk if they allowed animals in the rooms, but I'm not sure they'd get the joke. In most cases, heavy stompers don't realize that they're stomping, but what can I do about it? Going upstairs and confronting Babar would not be a good idea as I could get trampled.

WWDC - Day 2

Well, there isn't a whole lot I can say. I respect the NDA I signed and therefore can't reveal the contents of any sessions. However, I can say that I almost fell asleep in a number of sessions; some of the presenters assume zero knowledge from the attendees. While that may be the case for a number of the developers, I've been doing this for awhile.

I did run into someone that I knew from college; Dean Dauger has been a Mac developer for ages. I remember in college he had a prototype Quadra 840 AV. I thought it was so cool that he had prototype Mac hardware.

I'm still quite excited about iPhone; I just need some good ideas for some apps. Some of my posts in about a month may reveal more information and some of my concerns about the iPhone, but for now, I have to keep quiet.

Oh, I've been reading more and more about the pricing and it looks like the minimum AT&T plan for the iPhone 3G is $70 per month. That is a bit steep compared to the awesome plan I have; however, I got my plan at the start of the smartphone era before carriers really knew what was going on. This, of course, keeps me with Sprint as no one can match it.

WWDC Keynote - My take

Lots of web sites have their opinions on the WWDC keynote (pretty much all I can talk about all week), so my comments will be brief.

I really, really wanted a new MacBook Pro; my machine is now 2 years old running a Core Duo processor and not the newer Core 2 Duo. My machine is quite sluggish and as soon as Apple announces new MacBook Pros, I'm ordering one. Likely by then, I'll be able to get a 320 GB 7200 RPM drive which will be great, but the machine won't be available soon enough.

The 3G iPhone was a given, so that wasn't a surprise. The GPS wasn't a surprise either, nor the enterprise features. What was a pleasant surprise was the $199 price. This pretty much means that the number of iPhones is going to sky rocket and the market will be huge. I'm hoping that this will translate into more work for me with companies wanting me to build iPhone applications.

The rest of the keynote really wasn't all that catchy. I was hoping for the "one more thing", but we didn't get that.

One thing that the person next to me commented on is that Steve looked a little thin and that Phil Schiller may have gained the weight that Steve lost. Could that have affected the pizzaz of the keynote? Was Steve not feeling well? Or did Steve not want to upstage the 3G iPhone? It's quite probably that this conference will be basically an iPhone conference. Another thing that surprised me is that Apple will basically have a 2 month lack of iPhone inventory. I guess this will cause people that bought not to be pissed off by getting an older model, but 2 months of sales is a lot to sacrifice.

I've noticed that there are a ton of people that haven't done Mac or iPhone development judging by the list of sessions. With my 6 years of Cocoa experience, I hope that this gives me a leg up on doing iPhone development. We shall see; I'm sure that there are a number of talented developers that will create excellent applications (I've been amazed at some of the demos I've seen).

Today has been a long day and I'm quite excited about the iPhone; I keep running into people I've known for years and have enjoyed talking to them about what the iPhone means and where it is going. I'm not sure what the rest of the conference will hold, but it better slow down or I'm going to collapse before the end of the week!