Driss-A-Blog

One of the things that I notice when traveling is the shower. I know that it's kind of silly, but during normal days I'm out of the house anyway, so being at a conference is nothing. The thing that hits me most acutely about not being at home is the shower, and it can be a major factor in whether I enjoy the trip. This one isn't making the grade. I have no idea why, but the soap isn't washing off. I don't know if it's the weird ginseng soap that they have or hard water or something else.

So I went off to the convention center this morning. I was kind of frustrated by the fact that there were three HIToolbox sessions but that I was going to end up missing the last one to go to a CFNetwork session. But there was nothing to do, so I went to the first two sessions.

I went to lunch, got my roast-beef-in-a-box, and had a lunch. I decided to pull an Adobe, and as they were cleaning up asked if they had any extra kosher lunches. (One trip to Adobe, all my dinners were kosher bag lunches that I swiped from the back counter before they were removed.) They did, and gave it to me. I dropped the lunch back in my hotel room, and grabbed the card for a free O'Reilly book since it was expiring today. I went off to the booth and got my book.

Then off to two sessions. One on CFNetwork. This is pretty cool stuff, which allows you to do asynchronous I/O on one thread at task time. It's in 10.1, which means that I'll probably go that direction if I have to do major network rewriting. I'm still meeting with Quinn tomorrow, and still bummed that he's only in during the Pixar session.

Session number two was the Java VM engine. Nothing mindblowing, and nothing to help me.

I decided to visit the DTS lounge to work out an issue with adding live-resize windows to Server. I started talking to a tech named Marc who seemed to recognize me. "Avi?" he asked. It turned out to be Marc K, who went to Hillel. So we talked a bit. He'd moved to California about two years ago, and ended up at Apple. He said that he'd seen some incidents come in from me, and he'd made sure that I got a good response. That's so cool.

I was sitting around after the Apple Design Awards with Keith S and other Apple people, and they wanted my (/) TN2034 buttons. That's not at all what I was expecting, but I gave them some, and later Keith asked me for some more buttons to hand out. I'm not trying to start a revolution inside Apple, but it's looking like I'm going to have to put up some web site.

So I'm talking to Keith, and I'm trying to come up with a good Stump The Experts question. I was thinking Apple II, and there turned out to be quite a few good questions on that, but there were too many Apple II engineers there. So I decided on a Newton question: "In numeric order, what are the Newton Ref tags and their types?" Unfortunately, it was never asked.

I called the shop guy back about Shabbos since I didn't get any call back from the shul. He'd told me to call back at 9, so I did, and he got me in touch with a guy who says he can get me a place. So that's progressing nicely.

The movie tonight was "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring". I'd seen that, so I went back to the hotel and started eating my extra roast beef lunch. I haven't yet even touched my sandwiches, and I realize that I'd better start eating them. I think I'll have one for breakfast tomorrow.