Sometimes depsite all your planning, it all falls apart.
Not living in San Francisco, actually I don’t even live in the US, I knew it was going to be impossible to attend the MacWorld 2008 Keynote in person. Though I didn’t realise until listening to MacBreak Weekly that it’s like an iPhone launch if you want to actually get in there in person, it starts at 9am, but you really need to start queuing at 4am – now that’s dedication.
So I couldn’t be there in person, like I was ever going to get there!
I didn’t really want to “view” the keynote by watching the Macrumors’ feed, or refreshing Engadget on a regular basis, or watching multiple tweets on Twitter (which I believe went down during the Keynote). I do like watching the stream (as though it was “live”. I subscribed the Macrumors spoiler free link. However fifteen hours after the Keynote, no e-mail giving me the link, I thought to myself, either there is no stream (there had to be, it said it was going to be made available on the Apple website) or (more likely) the Macrumors e-mail service had failed! It hadn’t completely failed, the e-mail telling me about the steam eventually arrived eighteen hours after the start of the Keynote!
So I went to the Apple website, obviously saw the MacBook Air on the front page and thought ah well, and clicked the link for the Keynote stream.
Now maybe it was my connection or my computer, but could I get the Keynote to stream? No.
I tried on two different connections with no luck. I tried on about four computers with no luck.
Probably too many people trying to access the stream.
I am not a great fan of streaming, as too often (with long videos) I want to pause the video as real life gets in the way, you know phone calls, coffee, e-mails, etc… I have found with some streaming, if I pause the stream it never restarts, so I need to start the whole stream from the beginning.
I even tried to find online a place to download the Keynote with no luck.
I was resigned to the fact that I was not going to be able to watch the Keynote this year. Ah well I had found out what was released and I had seen the sixty second version.
So imagine my surprise when looking at the top podcasts in the (UK) iTunes Store when there was the MacWorld 2008 Expo Keynote.
Well I am downloading all 900MB of that then!
I am surprised that not only was it available, but that Apple hadn’t really mentioned it on their main website.
Still downloading, and you know about everything that was mentioned, so leave me to enjoy that distortion field which is Steve Jobs.
One more thing…