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sticky-beerness-feet
also continued from last week...
Well, not all of them were wrong. As P.T. Barnum might have said, "not all of the people can be wrong all of the time."
It was, in fact, a skateboard, very much like the one Michael J. Fox rode in Back to the Future. The launch day press rush was pretty fantastic, and I was lucky enough to see it from the perspective of the somewhat loud and awkward inventor.
Rasselas, as thanks for my initial article on our meeting, invited me in for a pre-show peek at the thing to be unveiled. He began calling it "Spicy Cheese" that day, I believe. One of the engineers working on the actual implementation of it mentioned, while we were waiting backstage for the man, himself, to walk out on stage and present his invention to the world, that it had had various codenames, and that Spicy Cheese had sprung up just in the last few days, when they got closer to the deadline they'd set for showing the public just what all the hype was about.
"Why 'Spicy Cheese'?" I had asked.
"I don't know, for sure. We'd been naming different revisions after different spices, and none of us could think of anymore, so we moved to naming them after spicy foods. Thankfully this was only our third spicy food iteration."
The atmosphere was electric. Unlike most of the product launches of the day, there weren't any sandwiches, and not a piece of sushi to be found anywhere, no beer, no drinks at all, not even water. This was the cause for the first rush of buzzing through the audience, which soon mixed and mingled with the buzz of what people had read on their way into the conference room -- eight-wheeled scooters that could read your mind, something making use of the patent Rasselas had filed for "use of polymer fabrics in cold temperatures with mechanically operated sealing contraptions," and some sort of self-replicating jam preserves, the never-ending jar of strawberry jam, wags were calling it, were the big ones that day. They'd all popped up in the last twenty-four hours before the press launch of this mysterious invention, found by eager kids digging around the US Patent Office website, through old interviews Rasselas had given, and by reading into other articles that mentioned products to watch this year. I have to say, old Rasselas capitalised on all the buzz: he had two gigantic plasma screens at either side of the podium showing a web project his team had thrown together, to track what it was people thought his invention, this "Spicy Cheese" was, almost in real-time. That was how I knew how the latest gossip was going.
That same approach to research had landed me in a few embarrassing columns where I first, well, first I claimed that I'd gotten a glimpse of what it was, over in the corner of the warehouse during our first interview. And, based on my glimpse, I could reliably inform the public that it was a gyroscope for kids. I then had to backtrack after another web columnist for the San Jose Mercury News got the scoop that one of Rasselas' top engineers was allowed to bring his kids to the office and let them play with an experimental, but entirely non-interesting in terms of product-ization, set of gyroscopes. Another dive down the rabbit hole of the U.S. Patent Office's website led me to conclude that it was a new sort of combo toaster/microwave oven, but it turned out he'd already come out with something that used most of the patents he had won with that entry, and had decided long ago that it wasn't an entirely practical idea.
So I'd learned, a little bit, from my past experiences. Thankfully my credibility was still untarnished, even after all of that. The laws of the web are interesting that way.
And then came the unveiling.
Rasselas Hildenbrand took the stage, wheeling behind him something on a leash, with a tablecloth slung over it, trailing behind.
He approached the podium, and without saying a word, whipped the cover off.
After whipping the cover off, with the agility of a man a lot less big-looking, he leapt on to the board, which didn't fly, it didn't hover, it just sort of sat there. A bit like a skateboard, in fact.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
Hey kids. Thanks for tuning in.
Next week, as you know, it's WWDC for Macintosh developers (some geeky developer lovefest, we hear), and our boys in the software team are apparently giving a few of the sessions, for those student types out there.
So if you're one of those geeky types and you're out that way, be sure to stop by and say heya.
We'll still be publishing, but it just might be a little later (west coast stylee) than we usually do. Keep your eyes peeled, kids.
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