Wednesday Conferences and Presentations

The rest of the week consisted mostly of very enlightening conference sessions and entertaining feature presentations. On Wednesday, I started my day with a MacLabs session on using Terminal and bash scripting. It was very easy to follow and very interactive, and the speaker was able to answer almost every question. He even provided a PDF reference sheet so we didn’t need to take notes. Overall, the conference made me much more comfortable with setting aside the GUI and using the powerful core of the operating system.

After lunch, I had another session on running your Mac smoothly. The speaker was Dave Hamilton, CEO of The Mac Observer. I had my doubts about this conference at first, because I thought it would consist of information I already knew. Some of it did, but there were a lot of tips I didn’t already know. It was actually quite humbling. There were some tips for general maintenance, some tips for preventing problems, and even a few for what to do when serious problems do occur.

My first feature presentation was right after this session, and it was Macworld’s “Best of Show” presentation. Interestingly, it was held in the same room as the keynote, albeit with fewer people. My Platinum Pass gave me priority seating again.

The editors of Macworld Magazine took the stage to present what they believed were the most significant announcements at the show. They even managed to include the MacBook Air on the list.

Diggnation was supposed to be having a live podcast from 5:00 to 6:00 at the Podcast Studio in the West Hall, but they had to cancel for some unknown reason.