Macworld SF 2007 recap, Part 1

It's been a full month since I attended the 2007 Macworld Expo in San Francisco: plenty of time for everyone else to have forgotten about it and about darn time for me to recount my experience with unnecessary detail.

Although the week of Macworld officially begins on Monday, the only activities occurring are Conference Sessions and on-site registration. The real activity begins on Tuesday, when the keynote is held in the morning, followed by the opening of the Exhibit Hall. While my media registration gives me access to the 9 a.m. keynote, preventing me from having to wait in line all night, the media registration opens at 7:30 a.m. This pretty much requires spending Monday night in San Francisco.

But the real fun began on Sunday night when I was preparing for my Monday evening drive to San Francisco; going over the information I had received regarding my registration. The registration confirmation e-mamil from mid-November noted "U.S. attendees who register on or before December 11, 2006 will be mailed their BADGE cards in mid December." and another, later e-mail noted "If you registered prior to December 11, 2006 your media badge will be mailed to you in advance." Seems pretty clear to me. So where was my media badge? I did not recall it being mailed to me, but that didn't preclude me from turning my home inside-out looking. The search was fruitless, and I desparately e-mailed IDG World Expo (Macworld's organizers) and promptly received a reply that "Everyone has to pick up their badges on site." OK, I was safe. But it was the first sign that not all the information I had been given was actually true.

Hotel space goes fast in San Francisco during Macworld so it's best to book as early as possible. I booked a hotel room for Monday night back in November after my registration had been accepted. As with a previous year, I booked a room from a block reserved for listeners of Your Mac Life, which resulted in a nice price discount. This year's Your Mac Life hotel was the Pickwick, which is only about 2-1/2 blocks from the Moscone Center. When you're going to be spending all day standing and walking, you don't want to start it off walking many blocks from a far-off hotel. The Pickwick offers complimentary high-speed Internet access, but when the entire hotel (and city) is filled with Mac geeks, shared Internet connections are brought to a crawl. When I launched iChat, my AOL Instant Messenger Buddy List drew in slow motion. I think it took a full minute to list which of my Buddies were Available. Also keeping me a little cut off was my phone, which was getting no signal. I assumed that was due to my location in an upper floor of an old hotel in the middle of a big city. It's tough just to get good radio reception in downtown San Francisco. I was planning on using my cell phone as a wireless modem for my laptop to live-blog the keynote, but this lack of signal prevented me from testing that out. So I just plugged it in to make sure I would have plenty of charge for the next day.

At 9:47 p.m. the night still felt early to me, but it was quite the opposite for others. I received a message from someone on the local network in the hotel that if I was interested I could join a group meeting at the Apple store at 4 a.m. to get in line for the keynote. Moments like that make the media registration extremely valuable and are what prompted me to desperately tear apart my home looking for the media badge.

I'm no stranger to waiting in lines. I went to Disneyland and Disneyworld in the 1980s (before FastPass would make its debut); I waited outside the Beaverton G.I. Joe's in the early morning with Noah to purchase tickets for Aerosmith's "Get A Grip" tour; I've attended WizardWorld, WonderCon and the San Diego International Comic-Con, waiting in lines for autographs or to see early film footage; and at Paramount's Great America, Megan and I waited in line for nearly 2 hours to ride "Stealth," possibly the longest line I've ever waited in (and yes, it was worth it). But I do not think I would relish sitting unsheltered in San Francisco at 5 a.m. See how much fun Google employees had doing it: Macworld keynote campout. So I was one of the lucky ones. I got lots of sleep, checked out of the Pickwick and walked a few blocks to pick up my media badge (without incident).

To Be Continued in Part 2: Welcome to the crush

Until then, play "Where's Eddie?" in this photo