Life Is Rich

Andy Warhol once commented about the fleeting moment of fame that each of us may experience once in life. I feel like I just had one of those experiences. While I feel like I can form a fairly eloquent response in written form through the allowance of time and thought, I’m no where near quick-witted enough to pull off a tuned verbal exchange. Maybe it was the cucumber juice (yuck) that I drank at dinner in the Metreon…

As I have mentioned previously, this week has found me at the excellent Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) – my 3rd year attending said event. Wednesday nights are traditionally filled with the Apple Design Awards where the years most extraordinary development efforts are rewarded. Following the awards is a 16 year tradition known as “Stump the Experts“. For an hour or so, a large audience of nearly a thousand folks trade questions and such with a panel of Apple employees – the experts. Prizes are awarded (usually t-shirts) for correct answers. Anything goes to divine the answers – Internet, Wikipedia, Google, books, source code, etc.

A traditional aspect of this event is six or so songs picked by the hosts, Fred Huxham and Mark Harlan, are played while the session is getting setup between the awards and the Stump the Experts. These songs are often fairly obscure. The audience can try to guess these songs for t-shirts as well.

While eating dinner with a number of WWDC attendees prior to these two events, I attempted to show off a little creation I have been toying with for my iPhone that exercises the services of my day job (Landmark Digital) – an ad hoc audio recognition application. It was suggested that I use my little app to determine the songs being played. Amazingly, the app got 6 of the 7 songs. I queued up in line for the microphone to give my answers.

At this point, realize that I’m in a room with a bunch of excellent developers and a stage filled with thirty or so long-time Apple employees. When I was called upon, I stated that I had six of the seven songs but I wasn’t sure if it was fair, since “my iPhone told me what they were”. The response from the hosts was something like this: “That’s fine – it’s not like you recorded it on your iPhone and it told you what they were”. My response was, “well, actually, I did”. In short, at this point, the crowd went wild, the hosts walked to the back of the stage to pick up the grand prize (Adobe CS3 – about $1500 in software), and I was floating on cloud 9. Mark Harlan shook my hand and complimented me from the stage in a way which was very inspiring. It was an almost out of body experience – especially since I was participating in witty banter in front of a thousand people (not part of my standard biological makeup) and using some of the technology that I helped implement and receiving kudos from my peers.

What a blast. I’m not sure if that was my 15 seconds of fame, but if it was, it was really cool.

UPDATE: Found the audio of my moment in the spotlight!!!

I’ve pretty much always used a source code management system in my daily development since the day I learned they existed some dozen or so years ago. I used to use CVS for my personal projects (and CVS, PVCS, Dimensions, MKS, and ClearCase at work). Then Subversion (SVN) became the new hawtness and I switched to it – a fairly easy thing to do since it was very similar in many ways conceptually and continued the philosophical tenet of a centralized repository. Now, in the indie Mac blogosphere – and certainly in the open-source world, SVN is old and busted and a new generation of revision control systems seem to be making their way onto the field – the distributed revision control system.

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Someone asked me what my hobbies were the other day. I said I had none. I wake up, go to work, come home, work some more, spend a little time with my family, work a little bit more, then sleep, then start it all over again. Weekends are generally the same, except remove the going to work part… In the past, replace some of that work at home, time with family, and sleep, with WoW. So I guess WoW was my hobby and now I’ve replaced it with work. Not fun work like coding personal projects – day job work. All work and no play makes Rich a dull boy.

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