Over the years I’ve read very positive comments about the Apple Stores but my todays experience wasn’t very pleasant. I already felt that the salesclerk wasn’t in a very good mood when he said “Who is the next?” when I waited in line at the counter. He didn’t greet me and just took the product I handed him. Overall he was very uncharismatic and when I had troubles operating the stupid credit card machine (sorry I have no idea how it is really called) he got very impatient. This thing must have had one of the stupidest user interfaces I’ve every seen. There is a line at the bottom of the screen with a X at the beginning and in my experience this is a sign for putting the signature right there. But no, this is not where you sign, you have to put your signature right over a sentence that is in the middle of the screen. Sorry, but I can’t see the logic in that!

Great, I cached a sunburn on my forehead. Why didn’t I wear my hat today? Silly me.

I just picked up my WWDC badge at the Marriot Hotel. The Student Sunday will be held there too. They told me that all information that is presented to me during all WWDC sessions is “Apple Confidential Information” and I’m not allowed to talk about it. Well I don’t want to get sued by Apple so I’ll try to stay very general in my WWDC blog entries. I hope Apple doesn’t classifies the following as confidential, but this is my schedule for tomorrow:

8:00am - Continental Breakfast
9:00am - Welcome
9:15am - Source Control Using Subversion
10:15am - Unit Testing
11:15am - Design Patterns for Data Structures
12:00pm - Lunch
1:30pm - Hands-on session
2:30pm - Apple China University Program: Inspiring Student Innovation
3:15pm - Creativity: One Technologist’s Take
4:15pm - Q&A with Guest Speakers
6:00pm - Student Career Reception

My last night was terrible. I woke up at around 3:00 and I wasn’t able to fall asleep again. I guess the aftereffects of the jetlag are kicking in.

I spent the day wandering around Chinatown, Telegraph Hill and Financial District. In the afternoon I’m planning to get my conference badge, visit a session at the Apple Store and getting to bed early. Tomorrows Student Sunday starts at 8 am.

The Apple Store wasn’t the only thing I visited today. I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the afternoon.

One item on display especially attracted my attention. The canvas in Jasper Johns painting “Canvas” isn’t restricted by the picture frame. Frame and surrounding are part of the picture (Link to an image). I guess this would have fitted perfectly in my final thesis.

Let’s see. What do you think was the first thing I did today? Go to the Apple Store, of course ;-) So after getting a double tall latte at Starbucks …

… I went to the Apple Store in Market St.

The store is a lot smaller than expected and it was packed with people. The main item on display is the iPod. You can get pretty much everything for the iPod in the store - yes, the iPod socks too. They also have several Macs on display, but all the Mac accessories are hidden in corner on the second floor.

I also watched a session at the Apple Store. It was called “Getting Started With Your Portable Workshop” and it was pretty interesting. I saw that Scott Sigler will be talking about podcasting tomorrow at the store. This is the guy who did the podcast novels EarthCore and Ancester. I listened to both of them but I didn’t subscribe to his latest podiobook. There is too much gore in his stories.

btw I took todays photos with my cell phone. Taking photos with the phone has one big advantage - you don’t look like a stupid tourist ;)

I wanted to post these photos together with yesterdays entry, but I was too tired to figure out how to easily do it in wordpress.

I just arrived safely in San Francisco. The flight was tiresome and I have to admin that I’m not very satisfied with the Lufthansa service. They wanted to serve me a fish as a vegetarian meal and they had no in-seat flight entertainment.
The hotel is nice, but could need a major overhaul. The noise from the street is loud too, but I guess I can life with that.

I got my MBP back yesterday. They tried 3 main boards, but neither worked. They put in my old one so that I can take my MBP with me. In a few hours I’ll be leaving for San Francisco. Let’s hope it will be a relaxing flight.

I took my MacBook Pro to a local Apple retailer today. It’s Main Logic Boards gets replaced, to fix the annoying whining noise it’s emitting. This is the third time my MBP is in repair. Back in March Apple didn’t have a solution for the whining and in June I got a new LCD panel, a new battery and a new power adapter. Oh and btw, the trackpad button is starting to malfunction too. I told them to have a look at it, but this has no priority. I need to have the book back tomorrow - I’m leaving for San Francisco on Thursday.