Posts Tagged Steve Wozniak
That time Steve Wozniak taught me to Segway and then played Tetris and pranks through a concert
Posted by Angela Brett in Story Time, video on September 5, 2020
A few weeks ago I posted a video of myself talking about the time Steve Wozniak gave me a laptop, and I said:
A few years later, I met Woz, had pizza and learnt to Segway with him, and watched him play Tetris and pranks all through a concert of The Dead, but that will probably be a different 18-minute video.
Well, last week I indeed recorded an 18-minute video about the time I met Woz; the raw video was coincidentally imported into Photos at the same minute of the day as the previous one, and was one second longer than it.
The final video, with turning the camera on and off trimmed out, is two seconds longer than the previous one.
The background is a little blurry, but in the first take the entire picture was blurry, so in comparison, a little artful background blur is fine.
The short version: I met a friend of Woz by complaining by email that the lights were turned off in Woz’s office, and then met that friend in San Francisco when I went there for WWDC 2004. We met Woz, who had flashing lights in his teeth, at a pizza restaurant, and then went to a concert, where we rode Segways and Woz confused people by flashing tooth lights and lasers at them while playing Tetris.
Here’s a playlist with both of my Woz stories. Perhaps this will be the start of a series of 18-minute videos about my ridiculous life, or perhaps not. I don’t have any more Woz stories, but I do have more stories.
That time Steve Wozniak bought me a laptop
Posted by Angela Brett in Story Time, video on August 21, 2020
People seem to enjoy hearing this story, and Woz’s 70th birthday seems like a good occasion to tell it to more people. I in a lot of details of varying relevance (and was looking down at notes on my iPad a bit to keep track of them), because it my video and I may as well tell it my own way. But if you don’t have eighteen minutes to spare, there’s a short version in the next paragraph (to avoid spoilers.)
The short version: My then-boyfriend left my PowerBook in a phone booth, the PowerBook was held for ransom and not recovered, and meanwhile my sister emailed the Woz (who knew of me from having called me on my birthday half a year earlier) and offered to buy me a replacement.
A few years later, I met Woz, had pizza and learnt to Segway with him, and watched him play Tetris and pranks all through a concert of The Dead, but that will probably be a different 18-minute video.
If you think my life is ridiculous, well, you’re right, but also, you should see Steve Wozniak’s life! (His autobiography, iWoz, would be a great book to read to a cool kid at bedtime.) And check out the events, challenges, and fundraising going on at wozbday.com.
Stochastic induction of epizeuxis is my bird feeder made out of a coconut
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on February 13, 2011
The following video is not an example of creative output on my part, for by giving Secretary of Geek Affairs Wil Wheaton the CERN T-shirt featured, I simply did what clearly needed to be done. I am nonetheless pleased to have induced what I believe to be an example of my favourite word, ‘epizeuxis‘:
Here is a picture of the card that comes with the T-shirt, which has an explanation of the equation (click for the text of the card and a higher-resolution version of the photo):
I have written an ‘origin story’ in the style of Peter Sagal’s, explaining the improbable series of events that led to my being on a boat in a position to give Wil Wheaton a CERN T-shirt, and drawing a parallel between the above video and Peter Sagal‘s bird feeder made out of a coconut. However, it ended up somewhat long (1000 words) and show-offish, and I have been too busy watching concert videos to edit it properly (indeed, I arbitrarily stopped editing it when I noticed the word count was exactly 1000), so I’ll put it below the ‘more’ thingy for you to ignore. I’m not sure whether all of the events are in the right order, but the story is 1000 words long so it’s too late to edit them now. It looks like I’ll even have to include the superfluous second introduction, since I accidentally included that in the word count.
It’s a shame, really, because I promised somebody I’d include the word ‘shanty’, and now I can’t edit it in. But you can’t argue with integer powers of the number of digits most humans have on their hands.
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Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 