Mission Accomplished. I was a Guest Auctioneer at the WGBH Auction and I succeeded in not making a total ass of myself. I know this because afterwards, WGBH gave me the highest accolade they accord to Guest Auctioneers: afterward, back in the green room, they didn't object when I poured myself another ginger ale and took another cookie.

Not Making An Ass Of Yourself is an excellent goal whenever you appear on television, whether you're strolling through Rockefeller Center during a "Today" show taping or hosting your own eight-part series about The Lost Underwear Of The Phoenicians for the Smutty Discovery Channel. It's really the only thing the PBS people are looking for in a Guest Auctioneer. Why, last year, a DJ from one of those "Morning Zoo" radio shows said "Yeah, baby!" once too often and a squad of burly roadies from "Antiques Roadshow" beat him senseless right on camera with the very andiron he was meant to be auctioning. I remember that the andiron, with a couple of the DJ's hairplugs still stuck to it, sold for $1300 a half-hour later and WGBH never fails to air the tape during pledge drives.

If you've done television often enough, you've got it down to a real science: at the last possible instant after they tell you you're about to go on, but only when you know the camera is pointed away, you check your fly. It's a juggling act and sensing the right moment requires experience. "Bad" is when unbeknownst to you, the barn door has slowly creaked open during your walk from whatever backstage Detention Center they've been keeping you in to The Spot Where You're Supposed To Stand, No, Look For That Little Bit Of Tape, There You Go, Now Don't Move.

But "Worse" is when you aren't aware that the camera is on and thousands of viewers think you're touching yourself inappropriately.

When you're introduced, you look straight at the bridge of the nose of whoever is introducing you, even if that little piece of tape on the floor that you're not supposed to move away from is forcing you to look behind your own right shoulder as you do so. If you look at the camera or anywhere else, you'll look like a feeb.

Don't touch your face for any reason whatsoever. Take your time speaking, and concentrate on the syllables.

Ach. Look, I'm rarely asked to do TV, and when I am, it's usually all edited down into the 15 seconds of focused clarity that I hide within any 5-minute monologue. Or possibly I'm just part of a slow pan, because the "X" in "Red Sox Rule" is painted on my stomach. In any case, it's never a big deal.

Being a Guest Auctioneer at the local PBS auction is No Big Deal among No Big Deals. But it's still television, and regardless of scale doing anything in front of a live TV camera is like going to a party and asking 100 women to sleep with you. Before you begin it occurs to you that while there is a very slim but very real chance that something highly positive will come from the experience, you're giving a great many total strangers an open invitation to think of you as a powder-blue polyester tuxedo in the great formalwear shop of Humanity.

Hence, the need to pick up these Little Lessons as you go along. For instance, a collectible plate was among the table of items I was auctioning off and I'm wearily certain that if this had been my first time in front of a camera, I would definitely have mentioned Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels twice.

That's why I always carefully screen anything I'm given to read. Viz: The Nazi propaganda minister who aided in the specific and coldly-efficient extermination of over 11,000,000 European civilians is "Goebbels." The maker of adorable Hummel collectibles is "Goebel."

Thus, I muttered "Good catch, well done" to myself as I uncapped a marker, obliterated "Goebel" wherever it appeared on the card and substituted "GO-BELL" in big letters.

Check out an iMovie of the whole event and see if your reaction to this video is the same as mine: that judging by this geek's delivery, perhaps he's been spending too much time listening to old tapes of Bob & Ray's Overstuffed Warehouse commercials.

 

I have finally begin converting content from the old site and putting it up on this one, fulfilling a promise I made...um...okay, well, let's just say it was a month ago.

So if you long ago despaired of checking the top page of the site to see what was new, the cumulative disappointment and loss of faith being too much for your poor little heart to bear, you might want to start checking in from time to time.

 

It's raining heavily -- just absolutely totally pissing down here -- which means (a) No Going Out For A Constitution-Stirring Long Walk, (b) No shuttling boxes and boxes of junk into my storage locker...well, let's save us all a trip and narrow it down to No Doing Anything Productive That Involves Going Outside. And while there is indeed some housecleaning that I could be doing, I have elected to pursue Professionally Productive endeavors. Mostly because that means I can spend the rest of the day in bed with the remote control and the PowerBook.

I'm still straying dangerously close to spending the day doing actual work. So there's nothing for it but to post a few little tidbits which yesterday seemed too insignificant.

We begin with a letter from Random House that FedEx delivered on Friday: The dictionary I wrote for them some years ago has finally been remaindered. In the "real" publishing biz, "remaindered" is a sad word, but actually, I was rather pleased by the news. If it were a novel, I'd be reaching for the bottle of Stolichnaya that I've been meaning to buy and keep in the freezer along with two shot glasses (which is the only proper way to drink the stuff, or at least I fancy myself as the sort of hip sophisticate who would say such a thing). Novels are written for the ages and Great Art is never remaindered because Great Art is always in demand.

But of course, "Cyber-Speak" isn't great art, it's a funny little dictionary I wrote, and I'm certain that the fact that I made up half of the terms in it kept that Remaindered letter away for at least two more years. That's the dull and depressing part of writing computer books: the writing takes you about as long as the book remains useful to the consumer. My first book was on Telecommunications, and the fact that this is probably the first time I've typed or read the word "telecommunications" since I wrote the book should give you a clue as to how perfect the timing was.

("But I really want to write big sections about the Internet," I had insisted. "Compuserve and AOL and BBS' are great, but no one's really introduced people to Usenet and Archie and that sort of stuff." I was begrudgingly allowed to expand the Internet section to a whole 3,000 words...)

So cool. "Cyber-Speak" did OK. I'd have to do some math to figure out how well it sold, but it did far better-than-average for a computer book.

Naturally, Random House didn't send me this letter as a sympathy call. Before they sell off remaining inventory, I can buy case-lots of the book at cost. I'll probably go in for a case or two. I'm rather fond of the thing and after my last office-cleaning I put all of my remaining copies together and discovered that I was down to my last seven. Eight copies is enough to last a lifetime. Seven is enough to make me worry if I really should give a copy to that nice person who had written me such a lovely letter.

Besides, that letter reminded me of a sweet little scam a former Speaker of the House once had going. Ethics laws bar Congressmen from accepting large gifts or large donations, and lest these people to whom we've entrusted one third of the Federal government get any bright ideas, the law also says that if they accept an invitation to come in and speak to a trade group or somesuch, they have to do it for free.

So Speaker Foley wrote some phoney-baloney little book and had it printed by a vanity publisher. When he gave the keynote address at the annual convention of the United Federation Of Sugar Producers Who Feel As Though The FDA Should Recognize Imported Sugar As Some Sort Of Commie Plot, he was appearing free of charge, as the law stipulated. But the law didn't say that the UFOSPWFATTFSRISASSOCP couldn't buy 5,000 copies of the Speaker's book at $14.99 a pop, provided they promised that they just wanted to see if the Speaker's gift for the written word equalled that for the spoken.

Last week I had lunch with someone from a financial-services firm as a precursor to coming in to speak. Oh, no, absolutely not; I wouldn't HEAR of accepting an honorarium...

Last night I went to the Coolidge to catch a twentieth-anniversary screening of "Raiders Of The Lost Ark." I shuffled in alone after a pal punked out on me at the last minute.

It was definitely one of those times when I wish I'd brought along a card table and some signage. I wanted to sign up the whole room and form some sort of Action Committee: Everyone in the theater was me.

Or at least, my segment of the population. Clearly this was a roomful of people who weren't exactly young but not exactly middle-aged; clearly not parents; clearly wading at the fringes of, or submerged to the depth of their thrice-pierced eyebrows in, some flavor of Alternative Lifestyle; wearing clothes that were neat and clean but clearly designed to impress no one. Like a meadow filled with fireflies, the theater was occasionally dotted with the random glow of a PDA's backlight kicking on. The girls all had the look of a woman who got teased a lot in junior-high but had gotten over it by college. I think it has something to do with those cute glasses.

Well, suffice to say that if a male criminal was seen fleeing the Coolidge, a savvy police artist would just bring the Shaved Head, Ponytail, Sideburns, and Goatee plates from his Identi-Kit. That would have pretty much covered any potential guy being described.

All I know is that if politicians fear the elderly and the soccer moms and the newly-rich, why can't they be taught to fear this awesome mass of humanity who are only working at the video store until they finish their novels? All we need is a mailing list, I'm sure.

And this morning -- just in time to beat the rain -- was the MIT Flea Market again. It's a good day if I come home with something I never thought I'd see, or if I come home with a pile of good pictures. It's a great day if I come home with both.

I sure broke my old record of poundage-per-dollar. Today's catch consisted of a banned medical device that shoots purple plasma through a glass domed wand...guaranteed to cure whatever's going through the neighborhood, particularly if the root cause is gullibility. I finally found myself another Lisa. This one's a real junker (no cards, no drives) but it's just what I was looking for: a dirt-cheap (ten bucks) and unsalvageable unit that I'd have no qualms about carving up.

I have one working Lisa, and one pristine Lisa case. I don't want to touch the Lisa because it works. And I don't want to touch the case because it's perfect, never been touched. But this ten-dollar Lisa will eventually become something less probable.

And then I bought a hard drive. I bought it because I had twenty dollars in my pocket and because it was just so damned beautiful. It's an old Winchester system from a piece of Heavy Iron. It's about the size of two acoustic guitars placed side by side and weighs, I'm guessing, about eighty pounds. Capacity: 2.7 gigabytes.

(By comparison, the hard drive in the PDA I was carrying had a mere one-gig capacity. But be fair; this one is about one inch square by 1/8" thick and weighs only a few ounces.)

The real reason I bought it was because I have a storage locker. Sometime in the future I shall be shopping for a house, and as the agent walks me through room after room of yet another property, she will be talking about Natural Light and Baseboard Heating and Triple-Paned windows. I, on the other hand, will be evaluating these candidates based on whether or not there's a really great place to show off this hard drive.

It is a work of art. I say that without irony. Parts of it are shiny bare metal, others are enameled in safety orange. Bits of it are smoked plastic and others offer a completely unobstructed view of its workings and innards. It absolutely would not look out of place sitting on a pedestal under a spotlight.

This drive is also a case study in the economics of flea markets. I first saw this same drive over a year ago. When it was priced at $180, I only took a picture...because what did I need a big old hard drive for? At $20, I took it home...because, hell, it's a big old hard drive for twenty bucks! And I'm reasonably confident that someone from the War Department will read this, shout "That's the part we need to finally repair the EM-50/KH188!" and bango, I'll flip it for a profit.

(Well, look, it was only twenty bucks and I'm in the sort of financial league where once a month I can blow twenty bucks.)

I'm back in Dearborn for another MacHack Conference. Dearborn, truth be told, is not nearly one of my favorite vacation spots. Actually, I imagine that if God had to re-make Hell -- only this time on a far, far cheaper budget -- it'd come out much like this. The taxi took me past one office building after another, each one more grotesquely cold and efficient than the previous one, and I have to admit that having to park your car and walk into that give days a week would probably have the same cumulative impact as the Burning Cavern Of Living Human Tongues does on the damned.

The Holiday Inn ain't bad, though. It's your basic, middle-of-the-road, spare but clean and cheap lodging which I always turn to when I'm footing the expenses myself. I've been put up in my share of super-deluxe suites and frankly, so long as it has the three basics (King-sized bed; a reasonable variety of cable channels; a clean bathroom with no mirror facing the toilet) I'm happy.

The midnight keynote ended a little before 5 AM. I'm finally back in my room and feeling a special sort of sympathy for Iditarod mushers. It's pitch-dark and I'm bone-tired...but the human can't go to sleep until he takes cares of the animals.

In my case, I unload my satchel and my gunbelt and arrange selected contents on the room's low-slung dresser. The cellphone, the PDA, the PDA's sled, two battery packs for the digicam, and the battery for the PowerBook are all plugged in and recharging and their power LED's are lit and blinking in red and green, making the dresser look like that one house in the neighborhood that puts on such a minimal effort at Christmas decoration that they stick out even worse than if they'd done nothing at all.

It's not that bad. Actually, I'm only up about an hour or so past my bedtime. And I sure wouldn't have left early. MacHack had reassembled all but two or three of the principal members of the team that created the Mac. Each is exactly the sort of people I find interesting: incredibly creative and insightful people who, counter to stereotype, are drawn to engineering careers.

Listening to them tell stories of working at Apple -- which is largely a euphemism for "Dealing with Steve Jobs" -- I felt like I was attending a panel discussion with the writer, director, cinematographer, and principal actors of "Citizen Kane." They all did something remarkable that utterly changed the landscape. They know it and they knew it while they were doing it, and at the time they endured as many challenges as a loving God or even a nice, peevish Old Testament variety would allow.

Now I'm on 112 minutes of sleep and I still have to write a bit of MacHack coverage before I go to bed. I anticipate spending 500 words describing an odd sort of TV show I saw this afternoon on the CBC (MacHack is close enough to Canada that the hotel cable system gets their national TV service), wandering through another 300 trying to tie it into what I saw today, and then calling it a night and hoping that my editor actually chooses to forward my invoice to Accounting.

(My apologies if these posts look a little squirrelly. it turns out that the one thing I didn't do before leaving for Detroit was put the last of my YellowText scripts on this new Titanium Powerbook...I've got the bits that convert the text but not the bits that put it on the server, so I've got to do a lot of it manually)

I think I've finally figured out what CBS' "The Early Show"'s target audience is: people in hotel rooms who aren't sure what channel "The Today Show" is on.

I'm going to continue to insist to strangers that I'm a well-organized and capable person who has long-since mastered the art of avoiding obvious problems by simply thinking ahead. Still and all, there's the chance that someone will bring up the fact that in 2001, I arrived at MacHack in a serious sleep-deficit situation, at which point I will have to concede that well, OK, good point, maybe I shouldn't date their daughter after all.

MacHack technically should be my place to shine, circadian rhythm-wise. Its schedule acknowledges the facts that many of its attendees normally live three hours behind Detroit time and that most of its attendees live and work in fear of the Giant Sky Day-Ball. "Never return a phone call before 10 AM" is a paramount rule of etiquette for a start, and anything really important isn't scheduled until 8 or 9 PM.

Last night's "second keynote" started at 9, ended at about midnight...and then about 40 pizzas were delivered, followed by about two hours of mingling, hitting up people for help with hacks-in-progress, responding when hit up for help with hacks-in-progress, and most importantly returning to the big ice-filled trash can every four minutes to see if the Cokes are cold enough to drink yet.

So I didn't get back to my room until about 3 AM. I fed all of the various sets of rechargeable batteries and then flipped on the TV to CNN Headline News to see someone speaking about how "All In The Family" broke new ground in television as it helped America to heal the wounds it suffered during the societal turmoil of the Sixties...which made it perfectly clear that Carroll O'Connor must have died. Oh, well.

Here I am, after a refreshing and deep 4 1/2 hours of sleep. Morning is the perfect time for frenzied and serious work because I want to spend the afternoon and evening eating pizza and abusing the fast connection to the 'net. I didn't actually write down my agenda, but it seems like every ten or twenty minutes I remember another 20 megabytes of content that I wanted to download some day and then off I go to MP3.com or adcritic.com or somesuch.

Yesterday afternoon I edited all of the photos I'd taken during the first keynote and indulged in what should be a logical and natural, but is in my normal life delusionally-impossible, final step: sending them all to a photofinisher and get prints. Because AT&T Broadband (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Evil Bastard Corporation, Ltd.) still hasn't delivered high-speed access to my neighborhood, I'm stuck with a 56K connection to the 'net so I usually only upload two or three at a time.

MacHack's connection is about thirty times faster. But naturally, roughly five minutes after I started the file transfer, word spread that Apple had just posted an update to Mac OS X on its servers...so a connection that could have sent 40 photos to the service in about ten minutes also had to deal with nearly 90 people trying to download a 12-megabyte updater all at once. It was sort of like that Who concert where the promoter decided that it was a good idea to just burst open the doors to the auditorium and let 10,000 fans run in.

Woz' "second keynote" was aces, but I've just noticed that it's 9:23 and I need to get to work if I'll be able to knock off for the day at 1 PM so off I go. So just enjoy a couple of photos.

Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents copyright © 2001 Andy Ihnatko.