https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25X8yD0SCpM

Check out Steve Wozniak’s fun cameo on The Big Bang Theory last night. There’s actually a couple of good jokes.

To celebrate Woz’s 60th birthday today, his wife Janet commissioned this song as a gift.

“That’s Woz,” is sung by Jonathan Mann, an up-and-coming YouTube singing star whose song about the iPhone 4 antenna was played by Steve Jobs at a press conference. Mann followed this up with a song about Jobs. A song once wrote a tune about Paul Krugman that went wildly viral and landed him on the Rachel Maddow Show.

Mann’s song about Woz is a tribute to the Apple co-founders pure geek values. “Do it for fun,” he sings during the chorus. “Don’t do it for the money. That’s just Woz.”

Mann is singing a song a day and posting them to his YouTube channel and his Song A Day website.

(See also Mann’s funny NSFW tribute to heroic JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater.)

Steve Wozniak loves his iPhone 4, but carries a back-up phone because of “death grip” antenna problems.

In a conversation with Dutch journalist Henk van Ess,  Woz says that he immediately noticed reception problems with the latest Apple smartphone.

Henk van Ess: How did you find out about the antenna problems?

Steve Wozniak: The first time I tried I was able to duplicate the problem. My wife was driving me to the airport and as soon as I got a short distance from my home, and no longer on wifi, I tried it by accessing a web page (using Safari on my iPhone 4) and observing the progress bar.

As the bar started to proceed I lightly (‘lightly’) touched a couple of fingers to the trouble area and the progress bar froze. When I lifted my fingers the progress bar continued it’s (sic) rapid progress. Putting my finger[s] back down halted the progress bar again. Lifting my fingers another time allowed the web page to finish loading.”

Steve Wozniak will be taking a break from Segway Polo and dancing the tango to be interviewed on radio program “The American Entrepreneur” Tuesday, June 15.

Tune in from 3 PM – 6 PM (EST) online and call 412-333-1360 to ask Woz your most pressing Apple questions.

Host Ron Morris will be chatting to Apple’s other Steve about his personal history, the early days of Apple, what he is up to nowadays and what Steve thinks of the evolution of the computer industry since he and Steve Jobs launched their fledgling startup in April 1976.

Via TAE radio

The San Jose Mercury News hit stands today with a front page story on Steve Wozniak’s Segway Polo Team training for the International Segway Polo Association Woz Challenge Cup finals next month.

As far as Woz athletics go, this is a smidge more elitist than his recent roller derby hosting gig, it takes place in sunny Barbados from June 10th – 13th.

Segway Polo isn’t a very complicated sport — two teams of five players each try to ram a ball through the goal post of opponents — but that doesn’t mean Woz won’t do anything necessary to win, the paper reports:

Giving the ball a mighty whack, Wozniak watched as his shot dribbled to within a few feet of the goal — and then stopped. Complaining that his wrist strap slipped, he spun his Segway and went hurtling off to the other end, where he attempted to disrupt a shot by his wife, Janet Wozniak, by throwing his mallet at the ball. He did this despite a decree in the Segway polo rule book written specifically to stop him from doing this.

“As you can see,” says Woz’s Silicon Valley Aftershocks teammate, George Clark, “he will even cheat on his wife.”

“Only in Segway polo,” Woz clarifies.

His Silicon Valley Aftershocks team is determined to avenge last year’s defeat in Cologne, Germany. We’ll keep you posted.

Via San Jose Mercury News

Accept no imitations! Reader Rob Kearney wrote us to claim ownership of the genius that came up with the original “i Went Drinking With Gray Powell And All I Got Was A Lousy iPhone Prototype” t-shirt. And he can prove it!

Here’s a interesting story about secrecy and making mistakes at Apple. The story is told by Woz, Apple employee number one (check out his hilarious shirt).

While Woz was waiting in line to buy the iPad last month, an Apple test engineer showed him a prototype iPad. It was just a few hours before the device went on sale. Woz, who is still an Apple employee, fired up the Numbers app. Little did he know, the unit was 3G test prototype, and was not to be shown or used outside of secure areas at the company HQ. Unfortunately, Woz’s playing with it must have somehow sent up a warning flag at Apple.

“… I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I’d seen on Apple’s website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple’s secure area. And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”

The test engineer was fired for betraying Apple’s ironclad rules on secrecy. The device was not to be shown to anybody — not even Woz. (And worse, Woz told Steve Jobs about seeing the iPad that night. Jobs himself said it was “no big deal.”)

On the other hand, Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost an iPhone 4G prototype at a bar, is still employed at Apple.

“Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10% of niceness and 90% of strictness is OK too,” writes Woz.

It seems mistakes are forgiven, but betrayals are not.

Gizmodo: Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell

Woz was camped out all night at the Valley Fair Apple store in Santa Clara, Calif. He seems to somehow have gotten his iPad early, because it’s still a couple of hours before 9AM on the west coast. But here he is holding it with a big sh*t-eating grin on his face.

His verdict:

“iPad delight…wow this is better than I ever imagined!”

Via 9to5Mac.

Ever the genius engineer, Woz has figured out a simple and elegant way to run two iPhone apps simultaneously (otherwise known as multitasking).

He has two iPhones.

Having two iPhones also doubles his battery life.

“By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone,” Woz told Dan Lyons of NewsWeek. “I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I’m talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.”

Genius.

Apple’s been pretty explicit that for right now, there is a maximum order of two iPads per customer… but no one told Apple founder, celebrity dancer and tech enthusiast Steve Wozniak. The affable beardo with the head bigger than the sun has told Newsweek that he’s buying three iPads this weekend.

On Woz’s part, one of the iPads will be the stock WiFi and another 3G model. He’s also ordered an iPad for a friend.

Woz seems to think the iPad will be a big hit: “The iPad could lower the cost of acquiring computers for students. I think it’s going to be huge in the education market. Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don’t want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing.”

As for Wozniak, he’s mostly going to use the iPad for mobile web browsing. “At first I thought, this is not for me. I have the iPhone for mobility and a computer for my computer life. [But] with the iPhone there are certain things it just doesn’t do well, mostly in browsing. It’s horrible to navigate a map on an iPhone because of the screen size.”