15 Seconds of Fame
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!!!
Wow what a great Nerd Geek Nirvana week you are having! Well you better bring that prize home and ebay it so you can buy that new computer you want
Congratulations!
hello rich,
this will end up being an exceptionally long-winded “thank you,” but considering your history, and who you are, i’m guessing you won’t mind.
fred huxham and i don’t tend to talk about “stump the experts” much publicly, so a lot of the stuff i’ll be saying here falls almost entirely into the categories of both “new information” and “red’s personal opinion” (which tends to be worth about what you pay for it, and doesn’t necessarily reflect what anyone else thinks).
(it’s also worth noting that i have a strong appreciation for the fact that a magic is better if you don’t know how a trick works, so you may want to quit reading right now. not that you would.)
at its very core, i believe (and i’m pretty sure fred would agree) stump is designed as entertainment. a brief respite from the otherwise driving (and sometimes droning) mental assault of the world wide developers’ conference (WWDC).
we want people to be entertained. it a chance to just relax and have a geeky good time with people who are remarkably unique (in frighteningly very exact ways to you).
assuming we can accomplish that, we’re also looking for deeper “aha” moments. a spectacular piece of apple trivia. a truly heroic display of raw knowlege. a good toe-to-toe of developer-techy-vs-apple-geek.
stumps can be widely variable. they depend mostly on the general attitude and demeanor of the audience — something i wish we had more control over. (stump 14, for example, was particularly vicious, due almost entirely to a surly crowd; stump 15 may well have been the best to date just because of the raw party atmosphere.) but it also depends a lot on the questions we receive from both the audience and the experts.
the advent of a pervasive internet, like all advancements in technology, is a double-edged sword. it makes asking “good questions” more difficult while simultaneously giving us some interesting avenues to pursue that were not previously available (we used a URL in the question last night).
google’s a problem. because anything you that you can just type into a search engine becomes a lot less interesting. to this end, i’ve been heavily prodding experts to use questions that aren’t text based.
but we have to watch the line. i REALLY don’t like questions that simply cannot be answered without inside information. for every question the experts pose, we could ask 50 that are only vaguely interesting, but are heavily steeped in apple lore because they were cancelled projects. we could set up a series of questions that the crowd couldn’t answer, but what’s the point? (for example, one expert wanted to wear his tesseract t-shirt last night and have the crowd identify the project. get it? of course you don’t. and that’s my point.)
fred and i talk a LOT about stump. i’d say every hour we’re on stage represents probably 50 of conversations between us.
fred and i both have a soft spot for 70′s funk and started pumping it through the sound systems pretty early on mostly because we thought it would sound cool in those big rooms (it does). it was somewhere around stump 6 that fred had the idea of asking people what the songs they just heard were.
the expression in the room was priceless.
because here you are, inundated with raw information every day … YOU’VE JUST LISTENED TO THE SONGS … and you can’t come up with them. if a room full of apple developers are anything, especially at stump, it’s cocky.
and you could just feel the air seep out of the room. no correct answers.
i know this is going to sound strange, but when fred and i do stump, we generally don’t have a feel for how well we’re doing. with the exception of stumps like 14 & 15 we both have to rely on general reaction of the audience afterward, as well as some of the outliers we have in the audience. (scott “special k” knaster is also a fairly good judge from the stump seat.)
THE thing i hunt for at stump is that “perfect moment.” the time when the joke, the information AND the geeky heroic-ness of someone combine to create and absolute crescendo. a half minute of bliss where everyone rises up and thinks “yeah, yeah, THIS is what it’s all about.” and i’m here to tell you, it’s harder than hell to find.
last night’s stump started out pretty handicapped. we were missing a few very good experts jim “cap’n happy” reekes, jim “l/ux” luther, dave lyons and scott boyd all come to mind (and if there’s that many missing, i’m sure i’ve overlooked a couple more). all of these guys are not only super-smart, but they are also spectacular at presenting the information they have to the audience.
riding on top of this, of course, is the recent death of tom dowdy. all things considered, he was probably the best expert we had. if he’s missed *anywhere* on the planet earth, it’s on that stump stage. (the audience reaction to his eulogy last night was truly touching — easily the best gift i’ve ever been given by the apple development community. it hit me harder than i was expecting and i wasn’t sure i was gonna be able to fire-up.)
things moved along at a good pace.
it was nice to see the experts take a mild whipping. i could feel the egos deflate point-by-point. they need it. they’re a bunch of impudent bastards.
and then you came to the microphone.
(just for the record, i’m not going to make this “in short,” like you did.)
there’s something about a stump audience microphone that makes people lose a few IQ points. i’m not sure why that is. and you, sir, are no exception.
when someone approaches a mic at stump (especially late in the game) and says they have six out of seven songs, only one of two things can be true: they’re crazy or they’re right. at a place like WWDC, they’re probably right.
when they *repeat* the fact LIKE YOU DID LAST NIGHT AT THE FRICKEN MICROPHONE. it starts leaning a little more likely that they’re crazy.
here’s a hint for the future: talk the way you write. SAY EVERYTHING ONCE FOR CHRISSAKES.
when you finally get around to saying the punchline (and it takes awhile, for reasons only you know) and you get that the first song is plastilina mosh (a band which was NOT guessed from the list last year), i know you have it. i won’t need to hear anything else. in fact, i just barely listen as you walk the list.
immediately my mind is spinning.
there’s only four reasonable possibilities here: you’re a hardcore music guy, you know a hardcore music guy, you’ve somehow got your hands on the intro CD or you’re using technology.
the first two are out. aside from myself, i know three people that can say what those songs are based on their musical background. one is on the stage. the other two are another “type” of person (a record store clerk and a mercenary librarian). you’re not that. and i can sum you up well enough on sight (remember, i’ve written poker books) to know that you don’t know that — you’re a computer geek, your social circle doesn’t reach that direction.
getting your hands on the conference CD is possible. slipping, say, a $20 to the booth guys *might* get it. that would be impressive.
there’s a couple different tech ways. one is you record it and bang it your results against a database … the other is you use recognition technology … either one of those is also impressive.
i’m looking at the floor trying to figure out what’s happened when you get to the end of the list.
it’s amazing. stunning.
i look at fred and the expression on his face is identical to the feeling in my head: bewildered wonderment spiced with a dash of admiration.
your timing of getting that right was absolutely perfect. perfect. perfect perfect perfect.
you were late to the microphone, hitting it at about 80 minutes out of 90. the audience had a huge lead, this would push the dagger ever-so-gently deeper in the heart of the expert vampire. we’d seen several answers, but none that really brought the audience out of their mental seats. and you’d done it all using apple technology crossed with your brain power.
you raised the roof and brought down the house.
and like i said, these moments are incredibly rare. rich, i’m here to tell you, there are *maybe*, six great moments like that in the history of stump … mahboud zabetian asking his question about the laserwriter at stump 3, gus fernadez (vs. tom dowdy) and the burrito question at stump 10 (or so), my going toe-to-toe with the editor of the new york times computing section at stump 12 are not only a few examples, but a majority of the occurances.
they are so exceedingly rare. we can go years without having one.
and you just nailed it. hit it out of the park.
you perfect timing relative to the audience and all the questions asked to that moment (if we’d started the show with that, the audience reaction wouldn’t have been nearly as strong).
and for that, sir, i thank you. those moments, those fleeting glimpses make it all worthwhile. giving the “big prize” has never been easier.
it makes up for people getting indignant over saying it’s the fricken temptations on the system (and then trying to stare me down, no less), the spaced out who are given a free poker book the year before and then complain at the microphone the next year when they’ve lost money, those cards in the question box from the dull intellects that think it’s absolutely hilarious to say “u suck” signed “bobby bob” (i kid you not), those endless conversations with fred where we sweat whether we should say anything about tom or not.
not only is apple lucky to have you as a developer, we were lucky to have you at the conference.
be proud of your work.
thanks, and i mean that sincerely,
m.
p.s. the ONLY thing i wonder about in writing this missive is will it make finding “that moment” even harder? in the military, they say the best way to identify an enemy at distance is to not look directly at it. i might be making a mistake here …
Wow. Just wow.
I was glad we had dinner beforehand at the Metreon. Everyone you had dinner with was so nervous that you wouldn’t get called to answer any questions you were standing their the entire time (I guess Mark didn’t see you until your mic line thinned out). Anyway good job.
And Mark, if you’re still reading this thread. Your response to Rich is fantastic and I tip my hat to you. This is my 9th(?) WWDC and I’ve seen some great Stumps (I even had my own 5 minutes of fame: http://toxicsoftware.com/stump_the_experts/) but this one was without doubt the best. Thanks for hosting it year after year and putting up with us, you do a great job.
It sounds like you have a product there, assuming you can make more off of it than you spend.
Wow Rich. Congratulations my friend. I would have loved to had been there to see it take place. Any chance it could be put on YouTube or the likes? Again, congrats! Great post and responses!
I just listened to an audio-recording of STE I found and heard your piece. The crowd went nuts! Nicely done.
I just found an audio recording of the entire show someone took from the crowd. I’ve clipped out the section with my little piece and have put it up for download. It’s a little difficult to hear, but I’m glad I have it to remember the event!
Congratulations on your achievement. It seems you’ve invented “Verizon Song ID” for the iPhone. http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2007/05/23/verizon-launches-vcast-song-id/
Funny you mention that Molocho. The company I work for owns the technology used by Verizon Song ID — the same technology which I used on the iPhone.