As I reported here earlier, Apple has been so generous as to offer me a student scholarship for their most outstanding developers conference next week. It’s my first WWDC, so I’m pretty excited and I can’t wait to arrive in San Francisco on saturday evening. For sunday I planned to attend WWDC student sunday, but since this has been moved to monday this year, I’ll try to get a good look at the largest gorilla crowd I’ve ever witnessed at the Great Gorilla Run and you’ll find me at sfMacIndie later that day.
Not only is this my first WWDC, though, it’s also the first time at all I’m in the US, so I’ll happily take advice on which of their beers are safe for a german to drink in exchange for one of said beers. If you’d like to talk to me without drinking beer, that would also be more or less fine, just let me know. My favorite topics include application updates, bluetooth proximity detection, dropping out of college and becoming a pirate, iTunes alarms, the lack of autobahn speed limits and lots more.
PS: Why only why did Apple need to release MBPs so close to WWDC that my placed-at-lightspeed order by far won’t make it to my doorstep before I leave for WWDC? That’s mean!
PPS: You should definitely check out this widget, though. Just so you know how late your order will be. 
June 5th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
European … travelling to USA … with the weak $, you might find it worthwhile visiting an Apple Store whilst you’re there, rather than waiting for the MBP to be delivered!
June 5th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
They have slightly adjusted the Euro prices with this MBP release. Not that it’s really fair even now, but you also have to take VAT (19% here) into account. German customs won’t be happy to see me smuggling a brand new MBP into Germany. Also, I had a 20% ADC discount which I couldn’t have used in the US I guess. So yeah – it ain’t cheap but I guess it’ll be worth it.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Unless there are huge signs at German customs limiting duty-free imports to a few bucks worth of Apple goods with customs duty at a few percent plus VAT. That’s pretty much it about the weak $.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:19 am
American brewer, [url=http://www.samueladams.com/verification/]Samuel Adams[/url], makes some of the best beers in the USA. I especially enjoy their Seasonal beers. If you can get your hands on it, try the White Beer ( an imitation of the Hoegaarden ) or the Summer Ale. The Boston Ale is also quite good. They make over 21 varieties of beer in various styles (Larger, Ale, Porter, Stout, Belgian etc).
June 6th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
I’m no longer a drinker nor will I be at WWDC this year, so please, if you try one of my suggestions, have a second beer for youself and toast my health.
Foremost is Anchor Steam which is manufactured in SF using a steam brewing process. I think they still do factory tours, if you are so inclined.
I was also going to recommend 20 Tank Brewery, but they apparently closed their doors some time back. It was a really great place in the 90s.
More SF beer info at: [url]http://www.sfbeer.org/index.htm[/url]
June 8th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Contrary to the bad reputation (which was well deserved for a long time), America has some outstanding craft beers if you know where to look. On the west coast especially. Here in Portland, just a bit above San Fran, we take beer very seriously.
We have more breweries than entire countries, even more (or so I hear) than Cologne; and often they each put out 6-12 varieties, including seasonals, with the larger ones boasting 20 or more. Right now the fad seems to be India Pale Ale. There are a lot of intense, complicated tastes coming out around that style of brewing; setting them apart from the “English” style. If you like a lot of hops, that’s a good bet. Try Terminal Gravity’s IPA if you can find it; another good one is Widmer’s Broken Halo. Your best bet would just be to check around for a bar that has a lot on tap (a good sign they are fantatics) and ask the bartender for recommendations. Being only a day’s drive away, I’m sure they’ll have some Portland specialties on tap, or at least bottled.
July 11th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
→ AppFresh Development Preview 5 Bugfix Release (Mac OS X 10.4 only)
After an all busy month there finally is a new release of AppFresh. We’ve been trying hard to get as much done as possible, but real life is hitting hard these days (and well…