Today is probably the last day you will find people wandering around San Francisco in their black, mock-collar, WWDC jackets before their head off to their places of origin to share their knowledge. Well, share what wasn’t suffocated by one of Apple’s infamous non-disclosure agreements.
This is the first year that I have lived in San Francisco for WWDC, Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. It didn’t make a huge difference in my life as I was not in attendance at WWDC. At $1,500 for a ticket, I decided I’d be better off catching up via TUAW and MacRumors. I did benefit from some of the awesome people that came into my city for the week-long conference.
The first night of WWDC I had dinner with a fellow Mizzou alumni Geoff Pado and Tyten Teegarden as well as Twitter friend Luke Irvin. After a few drinks, Luke and I decided we should rent a car and drive up to Petaluma California for a visit to the TWiT Studios. There maybe, just maybe, we could meet one of our favorite nerds, Leo Laporte.
And that’s what we did. Thursday morning I picked up Luke and we made our voyage north. After we reached the TWiT studios, we nervously gathered our things and headed up the steps.
We were immediately greeted with the friendly smile of a TWiT staffer. She provided a quick tour of the operations and then lead us on set where we watched the making of Windows Weekly. If you look carefully during that episode, you’ll see the right side of my body enter the frame a few times. Oops!
One of the guests on the show was Aaron Hillegrass from Big Nerd Ranch. He was super interesting and fun to listen to, equally as congenial.
When the show was over, Leo talked a little tech, signed some autographs and posed for some photos. You always hope that the people you look up to are as cool in real life as you think they are from your side of the screen. In this case, Leo was even cooler. Just so down to Earth and genuinely interested.
He asked us what we did, if we were from the area, did we go to WWDC, etc etc. Some how we got onto the topic that I am a blogger, I had brought up earlier that I once wrote about him winning an Emmy… Anyways, he pulled up my blog on the live stream and began reading my blog post about the mysterious iPhone I saw last week.
That was super cool, I must say. He even left my blog up on the live stream while everyone else went out for lunch. Though it didn’t have much affect on my blog traffic. :-\
Afterwards we checked out the new TWiT studios which look pretty awesome.
We rounded out the trip with a jaunt a little further north to Healdsburg where Luke and I did a wine tasting at Seghesio Family Vineyards. Quick introductions to all of my friends there, tasted around eight wines from Arneis to Zinfandel to Omaggio.
Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hit up any other wineries or check out the amazing food in Healdsburg. Perhaps next time.
