Twitter has kind of sucked away my blogging energy for a while, but I had to come back tonight. I'm at WWDC 2009 and tonight was Stump the Experts, one of my personal WWDC highlights. For the past couple of years I've been unable to walk away with any prizes. This year that changed, while I had fun I'm not sure it would be fair to say that I "won". It's kind of a long story.
Two years ago I wrote up a long review of stump the experts 2007. Nearly a year after posting it someone left a cryptic, anonymous comment saying that I should go up to the mike at stump 2008 and say something. The comment's there but I edited it slightly so that nobody else would know what it was I was supposed to be saying.
So I did. Or tried to, but they ran out of time before I got the chance. After the event I went up to Fred Huxham (one of the event hosts) and asked him about it. He referred me to Mark Harlan (the other host), who laughed about it but didn't explain, and told me to try again the following year.
Mark and Fred in 2007That was tonight, and this time I made sure to get up to the front of the line in time. After some minor dispute about whether I was a year late, Mark called me aside to discuss things. He remembered leaving the message but not why. It came down to a picture I had taken in 2007 and included in my writeup. After looking at it I added "Now tell me: Is Mark secretly the PC in the "I'm a Mac" ads? I'm just sayin...".
Mark took exception and ranted a little, but that was OK. Then he offered me a stump T-shirt if I'd admit that I had actually said that, and wanted to win a shirt that way. I did! But click the picture to zoom in and see what you think.
Random other highlights:
- The first speed question. Someone had posted on Twitter that they had the perfect question for the experts, but they'd probably get it in two seconds anyway. So it was decided that the experts would have two seconds to answer. They did answer, but not in two seconds, scoring a point for the audience.
- One question from the audience was "What was the worst Mac?" I thought they might argue the question for being too subjective or something. Instead many of the experts got into a long discussion of the question among themselves, to the point that many didn't notice new questions being asked. Mark described the question as a social denial of service attack, effectively neutralizing the experts for a while. The agreed-upon answer was the Mac IIvi for, among other things, drawing blood when attempting to upgrade RAM.
- Someone from the audience asked "how is babby formed?", spelled just like it is here. I don't know what the deal is with this question, but Google's currently showing close to 80,000 pages containing the phrase. The answer, according to Wolfram Alpha is that a stork delivers them.
