Well…today was the big day. The Keynote. The big announcements. The thing everyone knows about when it comes to Macworld. How did I respond…I hit the snooze button. It wasn’t because I wasn’t excited, just because SLU had bought me an all inclusive ticket, so I could get there a little later. So after listening to the horror stories that people said about needing to get there at 3 am if you didn’t have an all inclusive seat, I rolled in at about 8 for the 9 o’clock keynote. I was met at the front door with someone telling me to head right on up. This was kinda nice after the first day with fruitless waiting in lines.

So we headed up the escalator and were led into another waiting area. Hey, it was warm, inside, and as the one security guard said, they have indoor plumbing inside. After waiting for 45 minutes, we were led up the escalators to the third floor and into the large room. I had been standing in line with a bunch of guys from Intel, so they had the inside scoop. You could either sit in the middle back seating areas or in the front, stage left. I of course went for the closer ones, even though that meant I didn’t get to see the screen.

Walking in, I was struck with the whole thing. Its an amazing setup: hundreds of those lights that pan tilt zoom lights, 5 sound/light engineers in the back of the room, a sound board larger than many traveling musical shows, and 3 or 4 of those huge camera mounts. All of this was highlighted by the great lighting and the singular Apple logo projected on the screen at stage center. Walking in you felt like something big was going to happen. By now you all know what happened, and have probably watched the keynote online.

I’ve watched a bunch of these keynotes online and there is something I must admit. I have never noticed Steve make as many mistakes as he did today. Slips between Tiger and Leopard happened a couple times. There were some other ones too. In any case, it was almost like Steve wasn’t at the top of his game. I was surprised by one other thing. He told us how many things there were up front, and actually stuck to it, no ‘One more thing’.

In any case, I thought the items of the keynote were good. None of them was spectecular. Maybe it was because everyone knew they were coming, maybe because they, despite Apple saying so, weren’t true innovations but more evolutions. There have been small laptops before, others have announced movie rental boxes for TVs, and the iPhone/iPod updates were just that, small changes needed to respond to customer, even time capsule was the announcement of a feature that was supposed to have been in Leopard and was then cut. It was a good show, and the products each have the potential to change the game but one of the coolest things that could have been announced was the Mac Pros released last week. These machines doubled their speed. Doubled. The iPod and iPhone get a minor update and Apple restores a removed feature to Leopard, but thats the big news. Ok the laptop is cool, thats for sure, but there’s some small issues too. Lots more expensive, and no ethernet port? But talking to other people, consumers who the show is truly aimed after, maybe I’m making more out of the ethernet port and non-removable battery. Time will tell. So after the keynote was over I headed downstairs. It wasn’t until later I found out I was supposed to walk by this one table and get a commemorative poster. Once again…Macworld you missed the boat on communicating and managing which way people should walk to get the information.

The session was good again. Continued on how to manage computers. This focused on mcx, management of plists, directory services, and portable home directories. Man, I wish we had all this running at SLU. Even more so, I wish I could convey this to someone just how much we need this. There is soooo much we can do. Power settings for instance. With the directory services stuff configured, we could do so much along these lines. Dan and I are doing everything we can, but we really need a Mac Architect and team to get this implemented. In any case, there is so much we need to be doing, or should be prepping to do.

Talking to other higher ed institutions has really led me to believe that. I had one question that people really couldn’t answer. How do you setup macs to authenticate on the network, but store the home directory on the local computer? That’s basically what we want to do with students, and maybe even with faculty logins for now. I’ll continue to seek out that answer this week at the other sessions. As the time went on in this session, its also become really clear that we as SLU need to be sending people to these conferences. The networking I’ve done here, talking about different scenarios, bouncing ideas of others really is quite phenomenal. These are things we need to be going to. Macworld, Educause, WWDC, SIGUCCS all are conferences we need to be going to. We need to be having these conversations outside DesPeres Hall with other peer institutions if we are going to grow. Sure you can read about it online, watch webcasts, and those all help. But being able to ask questions and get some good talking going about it, thats really quite good.

Its ironic that I’ve come to a technical portion of the conference…and I’m thinking about governance/guidance/management questions.

The Macworld Blast was tonite too. It wasn’t what I was expecting. The party was held at venue similar to a run down Pageant in St. Louis. Microsoft bought us each 2 drinks, but that was it for refreshments. The big part of the night was a concert by DEVO. It was loud, not really setup for mingling, and to be honest for the most part seemed to have made many of the people who got tickets as part of their packages uncomfortable. I guess I’m just getting old.