I've never seen so many well-dressed nerds.

Official number of conference attendees is 3,800, and they're all carrying powerbooks, it seems, and all competing for space along the walls to recharge.

Makes for a strange ecosystem of people sharing power cables and network connections.

One really cool thing was that during teh sessions someone would start a wireless peer network called "SubethaEdit Note taking" where everyone on the network would use the collaborative text editor SubethaEdit and they would work together to take really good notes of what the speaker was saying.

This is teh real potential of the Apple platform, when you get lots and lots of people who al luse this great stuff together in a room and put their heads together. When you're a lone mac in a windows world you don't get to enjoy things like spontaneous IM contacts with iChat or multi-user video-conferences.

Something that I noticed happening in one of the subetha sessions was that someone was typing fast enough to transcribe everything that the speaker said, and someone else trailed along just a little correcting the spelling and formatting mistakes that the note-taker would make.

I'm sort of at a boring table here with no one saying anything to each other, but at other times someone would ask a question and get great answers from random people hwo just happened to be nearby. Californians are friendlier than Maritimers and Mac people are friendlier than PC people, so the combination is really something.