Archive for December 31, 2004

Friday, December 31, 2004

Virgin PR

David Pogue:

The Virgin PR folks checked with the higher-ups, and reported that the Virgin player does not, in fact, have any conflict with SP2 at all. The technician, I was told, was completely wrong. The PR person hinted that perhaps I should give up the name of the technician I spoke with, so that he could be, ahem, re-informed.

Revolution in the Valley

Andy Hertzfeld describes the process of publishing Folklore in a book:

The next time I visited Sebastopol to work on the layout, Michelle showed me a mockup of the cover, that used a black and white Norman Seeff photo that was taken for Rolling Stone magazine in January 1984, the one where Norman told us not to smile. They had colorized the Macintosh and added a bright red background. I liked the photo but disliked the red color, and was surprised to learn that my opinion didn’t matter all that much. The O’Reilly team was adamant, telling me that I wasn’t in a good position to judge, since it was supposed to appeal to young people, a group to which I no longer belonged. Eventually they wore me down and today I even sort of like it. At least I was able to get them to change “Revolutionaries” to “Revolution,” which I thought seemed slightly more modest.

I’d always wondered why the book was titled that, because I’d just assumed that it would be Macintosh Folklore, and the final title always makes me think of Mike Swaine’s book.