Monday at 6am I woke up to the shocking sounds of marimba-as-alarm, jumped in a cab, and headed to Montreal's Trudeau International Airport so I could fly to San Francisco and Macworld|iWorld 2013. Or so I thought. Turns out mother nature had freezing rain on the menu, so the plane that was to carry me to Toronto for the first leg of my jaunt couldn't even get to Montreal. Delay the first.
By the time the plane showed up and we got underway, it was clear I wouldn't make my connection, but there was nothing I could do. Luckily, by the time I landed in Toronto, Air Canada had texted me an automagically re-booked flight. Unluckily, it meant a 6-hour layover. It was right around then that I figured out that while I'd brought 2 mophie power station duos with me, I'd forgotten the two Lightning cables to go with them... D'oh!
Martin Reisch, who'll be shooting the show for us, was luckier. He flew through Denver and everything was on time. Note to self: Don't fly through Toronto again.
70% battery power remaining, and due to the shoddy Rogers reception in Toronto's Pearson International Airport, it was going fast. I put my iPhone in airplane mode and started using my iPad mini the way I normally use my iPhone. I walked around with it, checked my flight schedule with it, played Letterpress on it -- Loren Brichter totally kicked my ass, using "XEROX" for the win -- used Twitter and iMessage to keep up to date, and keep everyone else up to date. And it worked really, really well. I"m not saying I want a 7.9-inch phone, but it once again proved the utility of a tablet smaller than 9.7 inches.
After some Starbucks and a ridiculously over priced $10 turkey sammich (seriously, Starbucks at Pearson, you think you're Heathrow now?!), I found out the airplane that was supposed to take me to San Francisco was also delayed. My 6 hour layover was going to be about 8 hours. Delay the second.
The Wi-Fi at Pearson was horrible, the 3G was horrible, and there was no power at the gates. So, I ended up seated on the floor next to an outside the men's room. And there I blogged for the next 7 hours.
Because while I was stranded in frozen Toronto, Apple was releasing iOS 6.1, ADN was releasing their File API, Facebook and Google were updating apps, and I had a bunch of other stuff to trouble shoot.
My iPhone was down to 30%, thanks to my having to make some calls and the signal quality sucking. My iPad mini was at 70%. Finally, we boarded and eventually took off. I was San Francisco bound.
We made pretty good time to the gate, and thanks to the lateness of the hour, I made great time to the hotel. Tired but more hungry than tired, I met up with Martin and we headed to Chieftain for some hardy pub grub -- just after their kitchen had closed. D'oh! Again!
Still, we got to see Moscone West decked out in its Macworld|iWorld garb, which was nice. (See the panorama up top for the inside view).
Luckily Steve Streza of Pocket fame found us and brought us over to Mel's for some late night Diner fare.
Tomorrow should be fun. We're heading up to Petaluma where I'm going to do MacBreak Weekly live with Leo Laporte and the gang. I'll blog about that later, or you can follow me on Twitter to watch it unfold in real -- sometimes comical -- time.
