Yes, it's true; the AtAT staff is going to miss what might apparently turn out to be the biggest, baddest Macworld Expo ever. We recently discovered that, in a bizarre twist of geography, San Francisco is on the West Coast, which means that our Atlantic-bound butts are, sadly, planted next to entirely the wrong ocean. Whoops! Worse yet, since advertising revenue in today's spiralling economy is barely enough to keep the AtAT staff in Chiclets these days, unfortunately we need to moonlight to pay the bills-- and our manager at Denny's won't give us the time off because of the post-holiday rush. And so, like millions of other Mac fans, we won't get to file into Moscone come Monday to bask in the live brilliance of Steve's Reality Distortion Field. More's the pity.

So while we can't be there live and in person, right now we're pooling our options to score a little second-hand RDF energy via some form of broadcast medium. As far as we can tell, we've got several choices; the most obvious is to tune in for the live webcast, as faithful viewer Jeff suggests. There are definitely pros and cons to that approach; grabbing a stream can be an iffy proposition, and holding on to one once you've got it can be even trickier. Assuming all goes well (and when does it ever?), we'll be treated to a teensy, smeary little video window and audio that makes it sound like Steve is broadcasting from the rear of a cave while gargling. On the plus side, we'd be able to put together a special Stevenote AtAT episode live as events unfolded.

However, we think it's safe to say that demand for webcast streams this time around will be even more out of control than usual, thanks to Apple's patented Rampage O' Hype, so maybe a satellite broadcast would be a safer bet. The AtAT facilities are dish-challenged, but Think Secret reports that at least some of the Apple retail stores will be slapping the show up on their big projection screens. Apparently attendance is by invitation only, but even if we could wrangle an invite, we're not sure we feature standing for two hours in exchange for a clear broadcast. Some of us have knees that are only actually still knees in the strictly technical sense of the word; those of you with working joints, however, might want to investigate the possibility.

For those of you with cable, there's always the chance that TechTV will broadcast the keynote unannounced, as they apparently have in the past; beware, however, as we've heard from many viewers that the running commentary by the "hosts" has been both distracting and overwhelmingly anti-Mac, so we can't recommend that as the ideal solution. Any port in a storm, however. Now that we've thought about it, we're probably going to take our chances with the webcast, because it's always been pretty good to us in the past. And a blood sacrifice to the gods of the streams ought to grease the wheels just fine...