Solipsism Gradient

By a happy coincidence, I was notified in time that tickets for WWDC 2011 had become available, and booked one – they were sold out in less than 9 hours! Even though Brazil now has an online Apple Store, as well as Mac and iOS App Stores, developers still must send a (gasp!) Fax to Apple in California – no paying over the Internet, as we used to do before the stores came online. I’ve complained to Apple Developer Relations, hopefully this will be updated to current technology the next time around.

My air tickets should be confirmed in a few days, so far it looks like I’ll arrive in SFO on June 2nd in the afternoon. WWDC will start on with the keynote on Monday morning, June 6th (my birthday!) and end on Friday afternoon, June 9th. I’ll leave town on the morning of June 14th. As usual, the actual conference days and nights will be extremely busy, but I’ll probably have time for a meeting on other days.

On Sunday, June 5th, I’ll be getting my badge at Moscone betewen 14:00 and 15:00 (that’s 2 to 3 PM local time ;-)) and there’ll be a meet-up for Brazilian developers afterwards. Keep an eye on the blog for any changes and updates.

I’ve also found an interesting place to practice some table tennis: the San Francisco TTC at 953 DeHaro Street. Should be fun… I’ll take my trusty old racket and the new one I got courtesy of the nice folks at CocoaHeads Beijing two years ago.

We’re officially back in Belo Horizonte, by the way. Texas was way too hot and there was no convenient cooler place anywhere nearby, so we went back a little early. However, our new place won’t be ready for another month or so; meanwhile we’re in a hotel. Feels weird to play the tourist, but now I’ve got my iMac set up and everything ready to get back to coding.

Austin proved to be more pleasant than Dallas, with interesting museums and green hills and canyons outside the city.

Then we drove southward to San Antonio, stopping off in New Braunfels along the way. The latter is a German immigrant town, and on our visit to the local museum we were tipped off to a Gartenkonzert scheduled at the Beethoven Männerchor in San Antonio, a local Gesangsverein (singing society). It was interesting though somewhat surreal –  German beer and specialties and all the old music I vaguely remember from my childhood.

After an interesting day in downtown San Antonio the heat drove us northwards to the small town of Fredericksburg, also built by German immigrants, where we’ve now stayed a couple of days. The weather reports on our originally planned route were extremely discouraging, so we’re now planning to return to Austin tomorrow where we’ll decide on where to go.

We got in at the monumental DFW airport and promptly went off to a hotel to get rid of the jetlag and check attractions in and around Dallas.

I can report that Dallas is a maze of straight-ahead multi-lane freeways, all alike, and it’s all flat. Every place looks quite like every other place, and it’s quite confusing to someone who grew up in the Brazilian highlands. I’m really glad that I rented a car with GPS, and that GPS is gradually getting better – the voice generation part still deserves upgrades, however.

That said, we visited the Dallas Arboretum, which is quite impressive, and the JFK Sixth Floor Museum on Elm Street, as well as the nearby Holocaust Museum; small but chilling. Also, of course, the requisite shopping malls and grocery stores. 😉 Yesterday we had an excellent time visiting friends in Denton.

Today we drove down to Austin, where we plan to stay a couple of days. After that, the idea is to drive clockwise along the Southern border, then North in the direction of Taos and the New Mexico Canyons, stopping off at Carlsbad Caverns along the way.

As usual, my hope is to get some work done in the evening. Stay tuned.

While we’re setting out on our vacation in the Central USA, I’ve been thinking about what I should write in a WWDC wrap-up post – and it’s been surprisingly difficult. Update: also read John Gruber’s excellent wrap-up.

As usual, most of the juicy details are under NDA, and I try to be careful with that. Some details about Xcode 4 and LLDB have been published, others have been leaked, and this is indeed the parts I liked most; and I don’t doubt more will be made public Real Soon Now.

I can say some general things about the sessions. While there were relatively few Mac OS X-only sessions – Damien Sorresso’s excellent launchd talk was the one I found most enlightening – to my surprise, there were many sessions that applied both to iPhone OS/iOS 4 and to the Mac. I did audit some non-Mac sessions and most of them were informative and well-presented, and I find myself quite interested in doing an iPad app.

While over 2/3rds of the developers present, supposedly, were doing only iPhone/iPad development and were new to that platform, quite a lot of Mac old-timers were present and I had great fun meeting most of them. I was also gratified to, again, being told several dozen times that someone likes and is using my RBSplitView framework.

As usual, I found San Francisco is a great place to visit – and to eat! Special thanks to Russell of the San Francisco Apple Store for helping me buy my iPad and a brace of accessories, and to all of you – you know who you are – who helped me commemorate my birthday.

I just arrived in San Francisco a few days before WWDC, which starts next Monday, June 7. By a coincidence, June 6 is my birthday – will turn 0x3B. 😉

Let’s hope Uncle Steve has a nice present for me; I just came from the local Apple Store, where they don’t have any iPads in stock.

Occurs to me that it’s been some time since I updated my world map of visited countries, so here’s the latest:

52 countries visited, still lots of places to fill in!

OK, the cruise part of our trip was successfully concluded, with visits to Da Nang, Vietman (the old city Hoi An was the highlight of our trip so far), Sanya (Hainan Island, China) and back to Hongkong; I’m posting from the airport there. Now we still have a week to go in Frankfurt and Paris. Hopefully broadband there will allow posting some pictures; stay tuned.

Progress reports on the coding front are to follow soon, as well.