Apple protesters don disgruntled iPhone costume

Over the past few months there have been a number of protesters spotted at various local Apple store locations, but I have to give it up to these guys (MTD Drywall, from Gilroy, I believe). Not only did they go to the effort of building out a full-on disgruntled union-protest iPhone costume (with near-accurately placed “proximity sensor” eye-hole), they also came up with the snappy phrase, “No service… for workers!” Clever. Full size version over at my Flickr stream.

Fake Steve caught on tape flipping out about Veronica

Remember where FSJ said he kind of threw a fit when Veronica walked in the room? He wasn’t kidding. Definitely a moment, glad someone got that on tape.

Meeting Fake Steve Jobs

So last night Veronica, Niall and I went to the Fake Steve Jobs reading at Books, Inc. in the Castro. We show up, and, well, FSJ describes it best: “I recognized Veronica right away. I had to stop — for a moment I could not speak. If it weren’t for the nitroglycerin tablets that I keep in my pocket at all time, I might have keeled over. How do I describe the effect she has on me? Folks, Veronica Belmont is beautiful on Internet TV, but that is nothing compared to how she looks in person. She friggin glows. She’s incandescent. Ryan, standing beside her, still seems to have no idea that their relationship is doomed.”

It’s kind of funny how this guy — like so many bloggers — just kind of breezed in and rattled the cages of both piss-taking tech journos and high profile tech moguls. And his dealings with Forbes should be taught in journo school: during the day he was asking his editors for a long overdue raise and promotion (which he was denied), at night those same editors were courting the still-anonymous FSJ over email. Dan does seem to get that FSJ has a half-life, though. Forbes has a year deal with the blog, but it didn’t sound like he’d want to carry on with it forever — which is probably for the best (although I know a lot of people hope he will). Sometimes you need to end things before it’s over, you know?

Me? Some self-inflated part of me likes to think I gave Fake Steve his big break (and started the whole stupid “Real whatever with Fake Steve” meme — here, here, here, and here, and so on). But let’s face it, the wit and humor that hooked all the early-reading tech insiders was pretty irrepressible, and classic satire needs no help.

A series of roads

People have been pinging me all morning about the Bay Bridge roadway collapse in Oakland, which blew up after a gas tanker exploded just before 4AM this morning. Being that the driver is safe and the only thing the Bay has to fear at this point is even more severely snarled traffic jams, I’d like to take this opportunity to repurpose and horribly butcher a contemporary classic:

They want to deliver vast amounts of commuters over the Bay Bridge. And again, the Bay Bridge is not something you just explode something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of roads. And if you don’t understand those roads can be destroyed and if they are destroyed, when you put your car in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that road enormous amounts of cars, enormous amounts of cars.

I call bullshit on Valleywag

I wish I could say I’m shocked that Valleywag’s Megan McCarthy picked up my pal Kevin Burton’s phone — and proceeded to look through it — when he stepped away for a moment at STIRR, but I’m not. I wish I could say I’m shocked they didn’t apologize to Kevin, but I’m not. Or that that they’d rehash the same bullshit story about Kevin being a WiFi-sniffing stalker (which he’s not), but I’m not shocked about that either.

Instead it’s the same spin they try and put on all these stories. (And I should know, I’ve shown up on Valleywag more than once.) They know they totally screwed up, crossed the line, and committed a completely sickening cardinal sin of “citizen journalism”, but instead they fire back with an ad hominem attack. At best, they’ll give a totally disingenuous public apology that’s so sarcastic you’d think it was a teeth-gritting four year old paying lip service — and maybe, just maybe, they’ll fire-but-not-fire Megan.

What happened is defamatory, slanderous, and strictly nauseating. It sets the entire blog community back. These are peoples’ lives, this isn’t a joke. And it’s exactly this kind of stuff that makes it hard for professional blogs and bloggers to get taken seriously. I think if Kevin wanted to legally pursue this, he’d probably find he has a case on his hands. For all our sake I kind of hope he does.

SF Chronicle covers “bedouins” and office-free employees

Today The SF Chronicle has an A-1 story on the new tech office: anywhere, any time; it’s one part report on a new generation of telecommuting / virtual-office working / decentralized employees, and one part account of tech bedouins — including my pals Niall, who took the above photo, Kevin, and Om — a subset of this class of “web workers” who, tired of sitting at home, are making coffee shops and coworking spaces their new work environs. The article focuses mainly on entrepreneurs, the driving force behind the DIY business ethos. But this phenomena obviously isn’t limited to people striking it out on their own. While I’m still convinced that a significant number of the people at SF coffee shops are unemployed or have odd work schedules (as evidenced by their ceaseless Craigslisting), there’s no denying that the number of laptops + lattes out there has grown exponentially in the nine months I’ve been living here.

Myself? I like to think I represent the Fortune 50 crowd of coffee shop drifters. It might be a little more pro to sit at home surrounded by gear and papers and such or — god forbid — report to AOL’s downtown offices, but I’ve been working virtually since 2002 (with a stint in 2004-2005 working in an office, I quit for Engadget in 2005) and man, sometimes you really just need to get out of the house and be among the peeps!

Overheard in SF: the draft

For whatever reason, the topic of instituting the draft has come up a lot, lately. It’s this unspoken assumption, I suppose, since Bush’s “troop augmentation” strategy as outlined in our last State of the Union. That assumption being, of course, that as we continue wallowing in the totally amoral quagmire that is Iraq (and as things continue to escalate with Iran, among other countries), we’ll revert back to the days where the nation’s young men are semi-randomly called upon to “serve” democracy. (What double meaning those words have.)

Today I was at a local florist where the conversation, oddly, turned to the draft. Mentioning the shooting that occurred just a few steps away from my apartment, one rather corpulent white man mentioned to his two pals that he had his iPod had been robbed by a black youth a couple blocks away, and that laptops are routinely being stolen from the coffee shop around the corner; his disenfranchised middle-class white pal started in under his breath: this generation needs a draft to thin out its numbers, get the dregs off the street. Both cronies agreed. Having some small background in cultural studies and liberal arts — and still being of prime drafting age — I bit my tongue and flashed a dirty look as I left, seething.

Was I really at a florist in the Lower Haight in San Francisco? Is this really how people feel? That my generation’s “wasted youth” would be better served in Bush’s war(s) in the middle east? I… I don’t even know how to end this post, but I should probably do that now before I really fly off the handle.

Wow

I think today might have been my single most favorite day of my entire professional career. Breaking FairUse4WM is a close second though. More later today when I land.

Widgets Live! hardware panel tomorrow at 4:30PM PST

Not surprising at all, but Niall and Om managed to sell out their Widgets Live! conference, at which I’ll be moderating the hardware panel featuring Michael Maia (PortalPlayer) and Steve Tomlin (Chumby). Should be lots of fun, hope to see you there!

What a day

Well, it’s all over — a month of planning, finagling, sacrificing small animals to my MacBook Pro, and begging our techs to please, please not let us go down this time. We stayed up for the first Jobsnote ever (I’m definining “up” as available 100% of the time with absolutely no lag, delay, or indication that we were at abnormal traffic levels). I know that sounds absurd, AOL firepower and all, but let’s put it this way: the last Jobsnote I covered back in February, we actually melted and destroyed an enterprise-class router. But not only did we stay up, we had probably the best Jobsnote ever; teams, coverage, content, it all just coalesced. (Can you tell how much I’m glowing?) Our readers seemed to think so too, rewarding us with millions of page views (thanks everybody!). But if you thought today was fun, just wait until later this month — we’ve got some real fun stuff planned. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to nap, and when I wake up I’d really rather not think about frickin’ Apple.