Animation courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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February 2008
Back in January, I wrote a summary of Larry Chiang’s article, How to Work the Room, a guide to “gracing” your way through a social or networking event (the article was inspired by a Guy Kawasaki post, which in turn was inspired by Susan RoAne’s book, How to Work a Room).
Of the ten tips listed in Chaing’s article, two were centered around being more of a host than a guest. This doesn’t mean that you should take over the party, but doing some host-like things, including introducing people, making the other guests more comfortable, saying “hi” to wallflowers and offering to help to the host.
People at the TED Conference (TED is short for Technology/Entertainment/Design, it bills itself as “group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value”) witness a great example of the “be more of a host than a guest” principle. At a panel discussion featuring these people:
- Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
- Queen Noor of Jordan
- Carl “All the President’s Men” Bernstein
- Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert
- Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda
…a “technical glitch” stalled the panel discussion. Normally, this sort of interruption results in a lot of embarrassing dead air and a restless audience, but according to this Wired article, Robin Williams stepped in and helped out:
Cellphone photo of Robin Williams at TED taken by Paul Holland.Before the host, BBC World presenter Matt Frei, could finish his introduction of panelist Sergey Brin from Google, he announced there was a technical issue. Frei didn’t quite know what to do with the empty air while waiting for a fix and joked that the voice in his earphone (the producer) was telling him a long, elaborate political joke about Poland.
That’s when a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were conducting a live news feed, joking that he was reporting live from TED but “couldn’t understand a fucking word” and was “wondering why at a technology conference everything is running so shittily” (at least that’s the word I think he used; it was hard to hear the last word through the audience’s laughter).
The crowd by then had realized it was Williams. Encouraged by their reaction, he continued reporting to some unseen BBC anchorman from his seat: “Well, they said they found the wire, but it’s not plugged in.”
Williams was then invited to take the stage and the crowd roared. He spent the next ten minutes or so riffing on Stephen Hawking (who spoke at TED earlier in the day from Cambridge, England) and the end of the universe — which will take place “exactly in one hour,” he said, looking at his watch.
He joked again about the technical glitch, indicating that although the BBC wasn’t working, audience members “with their phones are going, ‘I’m getting all of this!’” And it was true. Dozens of people were capturing the stand-up act on their phones.
He riffed about a new Apple product called the “iWhy?” and a few seconds later said he had just one question about the British royal family: “All that money and no dental plan,” he deadpanned, which got a lot of laughs and a few sympathetic nods toward the BBC presenter sitting behind him (who appeared to have perfectly fine dental hygiene).
He didn’t spare panelist Brin and Google, noting that if you walk into Google you see everyone in front of their computer sitting on exercise balls, “which I think is how they’re hatching new employees.”
And Israel got a mention as well, since it was launching a new internet service called “Net-an-yahoo” (riffing on Bibi Netanyahu’s name).
The glitch was finally fixed but not before TED curator Chris Anderson asked Williams to come back the next day and lend the proceedings some more of his good cheer.
(An aside: Did Kim Zetter, the author of the article, have to use some form of the word “riff” three times in five paragraphs? We should send her a thesaurus.)
This sort of emergency is why I take the accordion with me — it’s helped me help out a host in a number of situations.
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The L.A. Times has an article on the blog Stuff White People Like. No wonder I like the blog — it was created by a guy who came from Toronto after he was chatting with a Filipino friend.
Here’s a noteworthy excerpt from the article:
Lander, who arrived in L.A. from Toronto 2 1/2 years ago, came up with the idea for the blog after talking to a Filipino friend about how much they both liked the HBO police drama “The Wire.” For some reason he’s already forgotten, they both wished that more white people watched the show. Which got him thinking: What exactly do white people like?
By “white people,” Lander doesn’t actually mean the more than 221 million Americans who check that box on the decennial census. But that’s part of the fun. Lander is doing to whites what scores of journalists and politicians do to non-white minorities every day, “essentializing” complex identities — that is, stripping away all variety and reducing them to their presumed authentic essences.
One irony-deficient reader complained that the blog was less about white people than it was about yuppies. And without knowing it, she was cutting to the heart of the joke. Lander is gently making fun of the many progressive, educated, upper-middle-class whites who think they are beyond ethnicity or collectively shared tastes, styles or outlook. He’s essentially reminding them that they too are part of a group.
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In addition to making an appearance at BarCamp Austin, I also plan to be at South by Southwest Interactive (a.k.a. “SxSWi”)…
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This would make an excellent T-shirt design. Or perhaps the crest for a high school! Or a LiveJournal!
Diagram courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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One of the more popular entries in this blog is Conservapedia Obsessions, which revealed that according to Conservapedia’s own stats page, 9 of its 10 most-read pages had the word “homosexuality” or “gay”. That was back on November 20th. Here’s what their stats page says are their 10 most-read pages as of February 28th, 2008 at 12:32 p.m. EDT:
- Homosexuality [2,345,324]
- Main Page [2,321,525]
- Teen Homosexuality [410,002]
- Arguments Against Homosexuality [330,024]
- Homosexual Agenda [327,081]
- Wikipedia [316,012]
- Ex-homosexuals [314,977]
- Homosexuality and Choice [310,178]
- Homosexuality and Anal Cancer [297,747]
- Homosexuality and Health [291,253]
Still obsessed, I see. Hence the joke:
Q: How many Republican politicians can you fit in the closet?
A: Evidently, all of them.
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It’s been circulating around the net for some time, but just in case you hadn’t yet seen it, here it is:
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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Archaic and benighted as this old-school conservative poster may seem to us, it would probably be acceptable in some parts of “flyover country” and much of the Middle East:
Poster courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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In just over a week, I’m going to have to face off against the TSA Gangstaz (warning: It’s a rap video — contains some not-safe-for-work language)…
[Thanks to Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood for the link!]
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A wag who goes by “monobrau” said: “He was a douchebag, but the current crop of conservatives are colostomy bags.”
Second funniest line: “Gore Vidal Wins!”
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In this present time, when “conservative” and “intellectual” are increasingly less likely to be used in the same sentence, I have to note the passing of William F. Buckley Jr., who has been described as someone who (as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol puts it) “legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement.”
Here’s a snippet on the Associated Press article on his passing:
Fifty years earlier, few could have imagined such a triumph. Conservatives had been marginalized by a generation of discredited stands – from opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to the isolationism which preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Liberals so dominated intellectual thought that the critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were “no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand “athwart history, yelling `Stop’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it.” Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft.
My favourite Bill Buckley moment is a minor one. Back in the early nineties during our days at Crazy Go Nuts University, my old pal George and I used to laugh at his appearance on TV ads for his magazine, the National Review in his “Thurston Howell the Third” accent. We especially loved the bit where he said it was “quite possibly the best magazine”, do a little sideways glance and then finish the sentence with “…in the world!”, after which he’d put a couple of fingers over his mouth, as if he were amazed by his brief insouciant moment.
I may have not agreed with all his stances in the National Review or on his public affairs television show Firing Line, but I always found the man thought-provoking and entertaining, whether in his own forums, or outside them, such as his numerous appearances on the Tonight Show during Johnny Carson’s era.
I remember reading an article in Spy magazine that asked who could take over for Buckley once he stepped down or passed away. The candidates all seemed to be pale imitations of Bill (with the possible exception of P.J. O’Rourke, whose writing I quite enjoy).
As a technical evangelist, I have to credit Buckley’s work as a political evangelist — I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t borrow from his bag of tricks. As an accordion player, I must also tip my hat to Buckley for taking up an offbeat keyboard instrument with a bad reputation: he plays the harpsichord.
Besides, any man whose mere presence could make Ayn Rand stomp out of the room in a huff had to have been all right.
Requiescat in pace, Mr. Buckley.
Links
- Associated Press piece on Buckley
- New York Times piece on Buckley
- National Review editorial piece on Buckley
- Wonkette’s piece on Buckley, which hits the nail right on the head by opening with “You’d never know it by reading National Review today, but that conservative magazine used to be an important, interesting and intellectual journal. That’s because William F. Buckley Jr., who died early this morning at the ripe old age of 82, was a hell of a writer…”
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I am extremely pleased with the way DemoCamp 17 went. We had some great demos and Ignite presentations at the Toronto Board of Trade dining room, followed by one of the best post-DemoCamp after-parties at the Duke of Westminster. My thanks to all the attendees, the presenters, Jay Goldman for doing a lot of the heavy lifting and the very kind folks at the Toronto Board of Trade.
Pema Hegan of GigPark sent me a scan from today’s National Post, which appears below:
I transcribed the article about DemoCamp:
DemoCamp Warms Up to Toronto Tech Crowd
More than 400 people packed the Toronto Board of Trade conference hall on Monday night for DemoCamp, a loosely organized gathering of Web entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technology enthusiasts.
Startup companies that made an impression on attendees included Kaitlyn McLachlan’s AskItOnline online survey Web site and Alain Chesnais’s SceneCaster 3-D embedded imaging application.
But the real crowd-pleaser of the night had to be WirelessNorth webmaster Tom Purves’ fast-paced Ignite presentation on why the Canadian wireless industry “sucks.”
Although he was preaching to the converted, Mr. Purves spent just over five minutes pointing out the high price of Canadian cellphone service and compared different price plans from around the world. For example, did you know that Rwanda has better cellphone plans than Canada? Or my favourite stat of the night: According to Mr. Purves, one megabyte of wireless data transfer on Rogers’ network costs $50, a measurement not seen since the early 1990s, when relatively minuscule hard drives cost upward of $1000.
For his efforts, Mr. Purves was rewarded with a standing ovation.
Needless to say, Monday’s DemoCamp was the largest turnout in 17 different meetings. With the Toronto Board of Trade firmly on board (no pun intended) with DemoCamp’s main intention — to foster and develop new Canadian tech talent to the global market — there’s a good chance we may see a local success story sooner than later.
Or maybe cheaper cellphone plans. The jury’s still out on which will happen first.
David George-Cosh
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Limoncello is an acquired taste, but if you’re like me and like it, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s a liqueur that’s easy to make. Here’s a comic that explains how to make your own Limoncello, courtesy of Chad Essley’s TabletPC Sketchblog:
Click the comic to see it on its original page.
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What if some of the most popular sites went to a college house party? Here’s what Those Aren’t Muskets! think:
[This was also posted to Global Nerdy.]
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