My friend and I took Caltrain up to San Francisco to see the exhibit floor for the Macworld Expo at the Moscone Center. This was my first visit to the convention center. When I worked in construction with my father in the late 1980’s, we marveled at the huge hole in the ground that would later become Moscone North underground and the Yerba Buena Gardens on top that opened in 1993. With the expo spread out between the north and south halls, my friend and I did a lot of walking to see everything in eight hours.

Here are my impressions from the expo.

• I loved Apple’s new banner slogan: “What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.”
• I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t announce a Mac Mini with the new Intel dual-core CPU and/or a Mac laptop with an Intel CPU.
• Would have loved to see a booth for the professional certifications to get more information and talk to some people.
• Unreal Tournament 2004, a game that my friend and I both tested on the PC when we worked at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple identity crisis), looked better on a Mac than a PC.
• I was very intrigued by Project X project management software that I might want to get later.
• Picked up a copy of Disk Warrior even though I don’t have a Mac yet.
• Picked up a signed copy of “Mac OS X Tiger Edition: The Missing Manual” by David Pogue.

We collapsed exhausted on the train back to San Jose, loaded down with two plastic bags of magazines and freebies.