Funny (or not) enough, the day before leaving to Milan my MacBook Pro’s motherboard (sorry Apple, I know you call it logic-board) suddenly dies and my computer is rendered useless. Exactly what happened in April, when I came to 360Flex in Milan, and also one day before. Well, this time it was a bit less painful since I started doing full backups after that. So, my workstation is now working fine after some minor annoyances on Zhai Pei’s (Tina) white MacBook. Changing it from Chinese to English was OK, apart from occasional menus and dialogs appearing still in Chinese but still struggling to get used to 13 inches opposed to 17. Speed is OK, just slightly slower, anyway, this is mostly for programming this week. Not sure if the Hello Kitty huge sticker in the back of the laptop will be discreet at all. Apparently this “logic board sudden death” (NVIDIA related) thing is common enough for Apple to provide free replacement (that will be my second). All in this article in case you have the same unpleasant surprise.

Yesterday at the hotel I already found someone I met in that conference back in April and I’ve been told most other people I met will be around. I came earlier to pick my badge, in case there would be a huge queue (like in Adobe Live London 2 years ago). The conference includes breakfast and lunch but I had breakfast at the hotel. I got a nice messenger bag, some freebie stuff and an event t-shirt… XL size (XXL was the other choice). Kind of predictable since most MAX conferences are US targetted.

Apart from all the tables, sofas, pillows and lounge-like huge space for people inbetweek sessions and labs, there’s a few Nintendo Wiis plugged to big plasma screens all over the place (8 at least I counted). There’s people already on them, boxing and jumping around… but that would be suicide for me after the full english breakfast!

I am going for more coffee now. The 3 hours of sleep or so I had after restoring my laptop stuff into this one, plus advancing with some work yesterday night thanks to my typical “hotel insomnia”, plus getting out of bed today around 6am are starting to fall on me, I only slept well the 4 hours on the train from Geneva. And the day is going to begin in a few minutes. I hope it does not involve as much alcool as in April, at the end of the daily events (Please, Adobe!). Will keep possible interesting things posted… including possible people barfing thanks to the Wiis.

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