atomicbird

Tonight was Stump the Experts, the Mac geek game/comedy audience participation show now in its 17th incarnation as a venerable WWDC tradition. It's now almost as old as some of the student developers here.

Tom Dowdy

The evening started on an uncharacteristically serious note. Earlier this year Tom Dowdy unexpectedly passed away. He had been, among other things, a longtime member of the experts panel at Stump. Fred and Mark started off with a tribute to Dowdy, telling stories from having known him. Instead of a moment of silence, Fred asked for a few moments of over the top enthusiastic applause. The crowd responded with gusto.

The Music

This year I unfortunately did not resume my winning streak of picking up prizes by recognizing songs played before the game began (I could have sworn one of the songs was Miles Davis, but alas it was not). But therein lies an interesting and geeky tale that might just signal the end of this category.

In the past I've won in this category the old fashioned way. Which is to say, I tried to recognize the songs, sometimes running through possibilities on my iPod to confirm the answer. And of course if that failed it was off to Google with excerpts of the lyrics, and to the iTunes store to check on songs not already in my library. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

I might not have another chance though, because Rich Wardwell of Landmark Digital showed up with a complete category killer for the music-ID portion of the game. Landmark is a subsidiary of BMI, which makes its money collecting and processing royalties for public performance of recorded music. To do this it helps to be able to quickly identify music when you hear it

What's the point of all that? The point is that Rich has an iPhone app which listens to music for a few seconds, runs a fingerprinting algorithm, and finds the song and artist information from their database. Rich got six of the seven songs this way, missing only the one that I thought I knew but didn't.

This being Stump the Experts, there's no such thing as cheating (you're allowed to use any and all resources at your disposal). In fact the judges were very impressed and awared Rich the top prize of the evening, a boxed copy of the full Adobe CS3 suite. (I don't know which of the 20 or so versions it was, but the box was big and heavy enough that Rich had trouble carrying it).

By next year I expect half the audience will have Rich's software or something like it.

The Pork Brains

If you read my writeup of WWDC 2007 you'll know about the Pork Brains. This year the saga continued, as several people arrived with sporks offering to eat the brains in exchange for prizes. Mark scared most of them off just by describing the alleged food item, but one persisted. He and Mark went into private negotiation, presumably with Mark seeking guarantees that they guy wouldn't sue if the brains' 1000+% of the daily recommended limit on cholesterol caused him to keel over.

Eventually they reached some kind of agreement, and Mark offered the guy a titanium spork to do the honors. But then they opened the can, and its stench wafted over the stage. Mark then disposed of it and awarded the guy a prize for winning what Mark described as a game of intellectual chicken in which he had swerved first. He also threw in the titanium spork, though it turned out the guy already had one.

The Mysterious Comment

Also on my writeup of Stump '07, someone last week left a mysterious, anonymous comment suggesting that I should go up to one of the microphones at Stump and say a certain something. "Trust me", they said. I was a bit hesitant to get up in front of a couple of thousand people and say something just because some random guy on the internet said it was a good idea, but I decided to give it a try. I didn't get the chance though, as time ran out before I got to the front of the line. Afterward I asked Fred and Mark about it. Mark knew what it was about but only said to make sure I was first in line next year, so we'll see what happens then. I deleted the suggested comment from the Stump '07 writeup so that I don't have 20 people finding it in Google and all of them trying it.

Other Random Bits

• One of Fred's kids asked a question of the audience again this year. This time it was "How many candy bars does the audience have to give me to get a point?" Lots and lots, apparently, because that's how many were immediately delivered, and I'm not sure any points resulted.
• An example of the obscure, difficult questions that get asked: Someone asked what two sounds were hidden in Hypercard 1.0 but were removed in later releases. The experts asked the product manager for Hypercard at the time and some other people but nobody knew. It turned out to be two "very illegal" samples- "Hey" and "Jude" from the Beatles song, which the asker had found using ResEdit.
• A visual question from the experts was to identify two unmarked circuit boards. The relatively easy answer (relatively being the operative word) was the motherboard from a Mac Quadra 840AV (circa 1993). The harder one took several guesses, earning the experts a point for every wrong one, and turned out to be a prototype video overlay board for an Apple II (circa, what, 1981?).
• Another question had an audio clue, with the challenge being to identify it. It was a loud clacking noise. Turns out it was the sounds of an Apple II floppy disk drive calibrating itself by repeatedly whacking the drive head against the stop at one end of its area of motion (a trick Steve Wozniak came up with so that the drive would cost "only" $499 instead of 2-3x as much).

Moving along... Tonight is the annual WWDC Bash (no longer the "campus" bash since Apple decided hiring 8 billion charter buses was too expensive). Rumor has it that this year the band is Coldplay. We'll see.