MacWorld
I spent most of two days at MacWorld Conference and Expo at the Moscone Center, and it was very not bad, although since I don't own a working Mac and usually try to avoid proprietary software, there wasn't that much there which directly appealed to me personally. But the Mac and the Mac community still have a fairly high coolness factor, and I met some interesting people and saw many people I knew.
I did a couple of circuits around the Adobe booth with my EFF hat on and wearing the FSF's "Free All E-Book Readers & Programmers" button pinned to my shirt (although I didn't approach anyone from Adobe). It seems that most Adobe reps there had probably never even heard of Dmitry Sklyarov; in proper perspective, the Adobe e-Book stuff is a tiny portion of the company's business!
"Adobe's booth is about 60 times as large as [EFF's]." "Yes, but their annual budget is much more than 60 times ours, so we're doing pretty well, if you think about it."
I paid particular attention to companies which were selling audio capture or video capture cards, since we hear so much about attempts (or vague unformed desires) to regulate or ban these.
I picked up an iMic for Sarah from Griffin Technology, a cool technology company which was at the show. The iMic is basically a USB sound card, aimed at the Apple iBook and similar laptops which lack a built-in line input. (I think Apple could do more to document the fact that you need something like the iMic if you want to get audio into an iBook.)
The Yellow Dog Linux people were there and gave me a Yellow Dog sticker.
