Hopeless Geek

So I’ve been posting my updates to Twitter during the conference for a couple of reasons: first, if I tag them “#wwdc” then everyone at the conf will see them and that’s kind of neat and second, FB is pulling them for status, so it’s a quick double-update.

Well, I posted this one yesterday: http://twitter.com/ahknight/status/2092801084

Little did I know, the first part of that was more true than I thought. The Stump guys themselves were searching Twitter for references to themselves and the host, at the start of the show, starts off: “So I saw on Twitter that some guy said he had ‘the best question’ for us tonight. Is he here? Is that guy here?” After that initial, “Oh. Crap.” I stood up to take my lumps only for the host to have apparently moved on to something else. As I went to myself “eh, oh well” one of the other folks on stage points “he’s over there!” and I’m subsequently called out entirely.

“Come up here. Come here.”

So I put some things down and start the long walk up to the stage. As I go there, some big video cameras start to float around me (obviously with operators behind them, but as far as I can see they’re cameras with legs). Yay, make me more nervous. Thanks!

I get up to the stage and the host points to the stage and says to come up there. Oh boy. So I do. He then says some things that I’m sure other people remember but around this time I realize I probably have a social disorder of some kind as everyone sounds like the teacher in Peanuts cartoons. I do make out that he’s said that he’s going to abide by the statement I made: the experts will have two seconds to answer my question. Go.

So I paused and organized my question, much to the disappointment of the audience, though the host backed me up a little with ‘what you don’t know is that just standing on the stage makes you lose 25 IQ points’. Then I released:

“What two pins on the LC III were disabled on the LC II? What were their names and their purpose?”

As I rattled off the question I saw the faces in the group change a bit. When I asked the first part, two guys got all happy. When they heard the second part, they lost their expressions. One guy stood up and said, “Oh! It’s Fred and —” something else and the host told him, “We can’t use internal names; we have to use their names.” The guy looked crest-broken and sat down.

A short while later, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. The audience gets a point and you get a t-shirt and a goodie.”

As I started down, an audience member reminded the host and I of an oversight: “So what’s the answer?!”

He dipped the mic towards me. “There’s a pin on both the modem and printer ports called GDI: General Data Input. It could be used for anything but was principally used for hardware hang up and hardware flow control on modems.”

As I walked off stage, I heard one of the experts snip: “What’s a modem?”

Kind of fit in with the theme the rest of the night, that. The show’s been running 18 years and now there are people showing up that were born nearly when it started. Kind of crazy.

Anyhow, I have my Stump #18 shirt and a copy of Photoshop CS3 now.