I’m back. Connectivity in my San Francisco hotel sucked so I didn’t even bother to try to blog. Then when I got back to So Cal I was immediately buried by the shit that had piled up in my absence. Happy 2007.

I am so glad I did MacWorld. I shot a ton of video during the keynote. Actually when I was in the three hour line waiting to get in, I ran tape and later discovered that whenever I closed my LCD it didn’t pause recording. There may be some interesting moments in the audio. Now all I gotta do is find the time to go over the recordings. Ack. It’d been seven years since my last MacWorld prilgrimage and all I remembered was the amazing energy of being there for a steve jobs presentation. From what I later heard, Steve was particularly on top of his game and really charged up for this presentation.

It’s hard to communicate what this trip meant to me…

I know my former love tolerantly smiles when I go on about visiting the Apple Store on the Cupertino campus and has no idea what it meant to spend the day and have a great lunch with folks i’d been listening to on the net for a couple years. Who the hell would take off from work spend their own money to stand in line for over three hours to hear about some tech gadgets, plus the cost of flying to SFO and hotel room in said city?

When I got back I talked to my students about the iPhone and showed them a quick slide show from the pix and video i’d taken. They were all excited about it, but couldn’t grasp what it meant to be there when it was presented for the first time. Funny thing was when I said I’d probably get an iPhone when it came out, they concluded that I was just some rich dude with money to blow on such toys. Too funny. A few of my 8th graders warned that they were gonna roll me when I got the phone. Kids are so special.

Only thing that I regret is that I didn’t stay for the whole week. Next year. It was great but sticking around for the whole week would have been better. I got a chance to sit-in on a taping of macbreak weekly and I got a picture with Leo Laporte. When I came to San Francisco in 2000 I thought about visiting Tech-TV and again during a summer visit like three-years ago. I smiled when I was in the keynote and Leo walked by just before the end (later I figured that he left early to do some video spots). He jokes that we’re a really small, some would say insignificant, audience. But the truth is that we’re a community of several thousand souls trying to make sense of this place we happen to find ourselves in. It’s not about Steve’s reality distortion field (though it is very powerful). It’s that whole thing about how powerful we can be when we put our hearts to it (see Tower of Babel). Beware. JBB