braindump

After the craziness of the first day of the conference with the Keynote, the rest of the days settled into a pattern which went a bit like this: breakfast, session, morning tea, session, lunch, optional lunchtime session, session, afternoon tea, session, session, dinner. Hunger was obviously not a problem, although brain overload often was.

Stump the Experts

There were a few other events of note throughout the week as well.

On Tuesday evening, there was a design awards ceremony, followed by the traditional “Stump the Experts” session. This is a free-form quiz event, the audience versus the experts (mainly comprising Apple staff members). The audience tries to stump the experts with obscure questions, and some questions are posed for the audience as well. I arrived late, and so missed hearing the musical questions (which they didn’t replay). After listening to one guy try to answer the Stravinsky question, I offered him my help, if only he could sing a bit of it. He replied that, being Stravinsky, it wasn’t possible to sing (which is fair enough). We failed to answer the question, but we were so persistent that they gave us tshirts (the prizes) anyway.

Large pizza modelled by Tom

There were a number of parties held throughout the week. I went to a bit of the Webkit party at The Thirsty Bear, and then joined the queue for the free tacos as the overflow of the iPhone launch party (which was to celebrate a bunch of games being launched for the iPhone, not the iPhone itself being launched). This party was so oversubscribed that they arranged for free tacos for those who couldn’t get in; however, the line for the free tacos was so long that we didn’t even get those. We went out for some extremely large slices of pizza instead.

Yerba Buena Gardens full of geeks

Thursday night was the official party at the Yerba Buena Gardens, just across from Moscone West. They had a variety of cuisines available (Italian, Japanese, American) and a choice of three terrible domestic beers and a good beer that ran out too quickly. There was also a band playing: CAKE, an indie band from Sacramento. At one point, someone spotted Scott Forstall (senior vice president of iPhone Software) just next to us; Luke wanted a photo with him, which he agreed to. I then took another with me as well, using the super-subtle arm’s length technique…

Scott Forstall with Luke and me

Friday night was a farewell dinner for AUC people at a local Italian restaurant, where in the fine American tradition, they served huge portions, particularly of the double dark chocolate cake. It’s been a very good week, but it’s gone extremely quickly.