Steve Wozniak hasn’t given up his desire to appear in the spotlight: after hamming it up on “Dancing with the Stars,” he’s going to show his adorable mug at a Roller Derby event on March 6 in San Francisco.
Woz will be on hand when the Bay City Bombers Roller Derby team takes on Thunder at the Kezar Pavilion in Golden Gate Park. Tickets for the “family friendly evening” are $5-$10, organizers expect a sell out.
“Steve Woniak has been a Bomber fan for a few decades,” said team owner Tim Patten. “He will be the official game starter at the event.”
(Too bad they spelled his name wrong on the flyer.)
No idea whether the “official game starter” means he’ll be taking an initial spin on the banked track, but we really, really hope so.
Steve Wozniak recounts a nice bit of Silicon Valley folk lore in this excerpt from the Discovery Forum interview where he talks about how he got the idea of bringing color to the Mac after staying up four nights in a row to meet a deadline for Atari.
Wish sleepless nights brought me that kind of inspiration…
Lower the pitchforks, everyone. A mere day after everyone’s favorite hirsute, technosexual bear became widely vilified on Mac blogs for claiming that the HTC Nexus One was his new favorite gadget, the Woz has clarified matters to Gizmodo:
Actually, everyone got it wrong. My favorite phones are my iPhones. When asked what my favorite gadgets were I took it to mean new gadgets I was playing with (that I considered good). I am not a switcher but I’m not going to tell people that the Nexus One is not a good gadget. Same for the Droid. I continually buy and play with new hot gadgets because I gets asked about them all the time. I have had prior Android phones that I didn’t consider good. I usually have between 2 and 6 different cell phones on me, more when there are interesting product introductions.
I try mainly to make good comments but I’m honest about flaws too. I don’t get into arguments trying to claim that there are objective reasons that make one person’s phone better than another’s. It’s subjective. You can’t win such arguments, only have a stressful life doing so. I have no problem praising and learning from non-Apple products as well as Apple products, when they are good.
Okay, Woz, we’re placated for now. Just don’t let it happen again.
Oh, Woz. How can your allegiances be so fickle? We always supposed that when your heart finally exploded in a bright toxic sludge of congested cheese curl powder, you’d die on your Segway with an iPhone in each hand. You were a goofy hirsute geek with an unflappable allegiance to the company you’d helped create. And now what do we hear? Your new favorite gadget is, the HTC Nexus One.
Steve Wozniak takes reader questions put to him by tech reporter Arik Hesseldahl for BusinessWeek.
The interview lasts just under 10 minutes (embedding wasn’t agreeing with our powerful wordpress system, so click on the above image to watch) the questions:
What is Fusion-IO and what does it do?
You once said “never trust a computer you can’t throw out the window,” can we trust cloud computing?
What would your life have been like if you grew up outside the Bay Area with access to the Homebrew Computer Club?
Which Sci-Fi futuristic technologies will come to fruition next?
What’s beyond solid state storage?
And a throwaway question with a cagey answer about the presumed Mac Tablet…
Haven’t happened to see Woz on TV since Dancing with the Stars, he is on much more solid ground talking tech than dancing the tango, but is still pretty entertaining.
However, Woz said he’s never asked Jobs directly about his health.
Jobs is expected to return to Apple at the end of next months after taking six months medical leave to concentrate on his health. In a January letter to Apple’s employees, Jobs said his health issues “are more complex than I originally thought.” He lost an alarming amount of weight in 2008, leading to speculation his cancer had returned. Jobs was treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004.
Reader Jay Floyd was cruising L.A.’s Sunset Strip on Thursday afternoon when he spotted Steve Wozniak fleeing some video paparazzi on his Segway. See the photo above — you’ll need a microscope to spot Woz, who’s behind the dark blue SUV.
Says Jay: “He was crossing Crescent Heights at Sunset Blvd, and went whizzing down the strip on the sidewalk. Some videographer paparazzi popped out to take pics.”
The video paparazzi must have been from TMZ.com, which has obsessed over Woz since he dated comedian Kathy Griffin and burned up the dancefloor on Dancing With the Stars.
But as with any great tabloid story, there’s a sex angle. Woz was either on a Segway date with a sexy blonde, or chasing afer her.
Explains Jay: “If you look ahead of him, there was some way-too-pretty blonde woman on another Seqway. Not sure who that was.”
So who is the mystery Segway bombshell? Unfortunately, Jay didn’t have a gigantic zoom lens to snap her mug.
“I only had my iPhone so I couldn’t zoom,” he says. “A bit ironic, I suppose.”
Full pic after jump. Plus useless fuzzy pic of mystery blond.
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers and one of the most recognized engineering geeks in the world, joined the Board of Directors of TechForEducators.com – a Sausalito, CA-based purveyor of goods and services designed to improve the performance of educators – the company announced Wednesday.
“Woz inspired a generation of technologists – including myself,” explained Matt Spergel, President of TechForEducators.com. “The Apple II was an engineering tour de force and an amazing learning tool. We are deeply honored to have Steve contributing his infectious optimism and creativity to our company.”
Wozniak has a strong record of support for children and education, having been a founding sponsor of the Tech Museum of Innovation and the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. He also “adopted” the Los Gatos School District, near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment.
In partnership with the Kids In Need Foundation, TechForEducators.com provides exceptional value to education: for every $1 a customer spends on product at TechForEducators.com, $1.25 worth of free school supplies is also provided to impoverished students. The company carries quality products at competitive prices, all with a money-back guarantee.
“TechForEducators.com represents the best in trying to do good things for our students and teachers,” Wozniak said. “I’m looking forward to the great things they have planned for education.”
What gadgets and software applications do you use on a day-to-day basis?
Steve Wozniak: I have such a crowded life and crowded schedule. When people send me a link with a gadget, I’ll look at it and buy it if it looks interesting, but I don’t have time to check out everything I’d like to.
I do have a Nixie Tube watch… The biggest benefit in my life comes from my Segway, which I use everywhere I am. If I’m going to San Antonio, for example, I’ll load it in the car and just go everywhere with it. The other crucial thing is my Verizon wireless card, which I have to have because hotel Wi-Fi is just so unreliable.
What are you using to manage your email?
Steve Wozniak: Eudora….The reason I do is, it has an incredible feature that every single mail client should have.
Any feature in the menu list, any action there, can be added as a button. I changed it so I have a vertical menu bar, so I can have tons and tons of pre-made buttons saved right where I want them up top, and I learn where those place are. You can script actions to the buttons, too, so I can quickly copy messages to my assistants. There are scripts I wrote for joke lists so I can forward a message, remove the brackets and formatting, and make sure all the original attachments are included, to a pre-defined “joke” group. Apple’s Mail app just isn’t scriptable enough to really handle my mail buttons.
Some of the buttons will re-direct mail with quote marks, or not. I’ve got another script that will actually customize a mail forward, like my own version of mail merge. So even if something’s going out to 400 people, I can set it to single out certain people and take away all the forwarding markings, so it looks like I singled out someone to send them mail. Which is, I hope, a nice little moment for them.
