Salve atque vale.

-Nate

The point is, Time-stamped hilarity is coming your way later today. I’m not dead. I think I’ll go for a walk.

No, I wasn't invited. Why would I be invited? I'm a nobody, man.

We’ll be interviewing a current Gen iPad as soon as we find someone who is willing to let us talk to their iPad and not think it’s weird.

1. not that they have ever really been competitive…

Someday, we can all be free of people who want to “run through the halls of [their] high school” and “break down the double doors.”

8:02: “Well, I’ll see what’s out there about Apple. Something funny must be happening”

8:03: “Hmmm, Pogue thinks the iPhone is good. No surprise. Gruber thinks people who don’t think the iPhone is good are bad. Yep. Yep.”

8:04 “Would ‘the iPhone: Will it kill your entire family?’ be a good article? Bleh, no! C|Net already did that one. Well, probably. It sounds like something they would do.”

8:06 “Maybe I could start a ‘Crazy Windows News Site…wait, that’s Paul Therrot’s site. Too bad.”

8:07 “Maybe I should go into something less crazy.”

And that’s no way to run a humor site. So I will start writing funny things about things when something funny starts happening. Thank you very much.

1. the past few weeks have been an unofficial break

Members of the press were ushered in to a large ballroom near the bar area. There were chairs, a microphone and a table on one of those portable stage thingies, and that was it. Nervous looks were exchanged. iPhones were consulted, and people re-read the invite, just to be sure.

At 5:15 the lights went down and a guy in ripped jeans and a “Journey” T-shirt came into the room and turned a spot light on the stage, then left. Nothing more happened for five minutes.

At 5:20 Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller , arm in arm, came up onto the stage. Each was holding an aluminum bottle in one hand, and they were swaying slightly. Jony Ive walked in behind them, towing a cart full of crates. As Jobs and Schiller stepped into the spotlight the audience could see a distinctive Apple logo on the bottles.

“Ladish and gentlemenssss… hey, wha happend to all the ladish? Shteve, whurrrr, whurrr the ladies? Coul’ve at least invited Trapani. What’s with all the….awwww, fuggedabodit.” Shiller began, then turned back to his bottle and sat down heavily on a chair on the stage, mumbling to himself. Steve Jobs looked up and took over.

“Gennelmen… I would like to introush you to Applesh newesht product. This is shomething that Phil an’ I have been workin’ on for… for…. foralonglongtime.  Thish!” he said, holding up the bottle to the light, “Thish is… APPLE BEER!”

Only he was able to pronounce the Apple symbol. Very strange.

“Now don’t get ush wrong!” Phil said from his chair, standing up again. “Thish isn’t just som’, som’ beer made from applesh. This ish a completeere….completlish, thish is a whole new thing!” He took a long pull on his bottle again.

“It’sh true! Apple Beer is non-alcoholic! Sho you don’ hafta worry ’bout your liver. Inshtead, it’sh got a shpechisal blend of aneshthetisksks… anishtehetis…. of thngsh that make yer lips numb… AND other thingsh that make your BRAIIIIN numb!” Shteve…sorry, Steve said. He continued, “It’sh made to our most demanding speshifications!  Jony here, he made the bottlesh outta OLD CANS.  They’re recycled! Sho Greenpeashe can jus’ shuddap abouddit already. And the ingrediensh! We got shome of the besht ingreditensh your money will be able to buy! But Jony’sh gunna havta tell ya ’bout ‘em, ‘caush I godda sit down.”

Ive then stepped up to the microphone. “We crafted Apple Beer from the finest Jonagold and Fuji apples to give it it’s unique flavor, and added a carefully selected mix of natural and synthetic ingredients to provide you with all the “good” aspects of normal beer, but without all the downsides… the vomiting, the headaches, and the addiction.  Apple Beer is completely non-addicting, non-alcoholic, and won’t leave you feeling like a cat went to the loo in your head the next morning,” Jony said, holding up a bottle. “Oi! Too right! Ya barmy blokes!”

Actually that last part was Phil Schiller.

“As you can see, however,” Ive continued, “Apple Beer does still lower your inhibitions and allow you a certain degree of freedom of expression that you might otherwise deny yourself.”

“Yesh yesh, thanksh, Jony,” Steve Jobs said, standing back up. “We’re done with you. Go pash out the free shamples. Apple Beer will be available as shoon as we can get groshery stores to shell it. An’ now, Phil an’ I are gonna go get pished.”

Jony then told the crowd that Apple Beer would be priced at $11 for a six-pack, thus putting it just out of John Moltz’s reach.

“Yeah, the iPad is nice,” admitted David Pogue, “But before, when we were all waiting for the ‘Apple Tablet’ it had way more features, and they were cooler, too. Now we have a real thing, and we can’t make up new features all willy-nilly. Screen that makes little bumps where the keys on the keyboard are? Gone! Face recognition so your whole family can use it? Gone! It’s just a big ol’ iPod touch.

“I mean, yes, of course I’m going to buy one and write a missing manual for it, but I’m not gonna be happy about it.”

“I could afford the mythical apple tablet,” John Gruber said, holding his torn cardboard sign reading “will be grumpy for food” with one hand so that he could gesture wildly with the other. “It was going to be free, or at least really really cheap. But the iPad, well, it’s all ‘sensibly priced’ and stuff. I can’t afford real cash monies! Who am I, that Nate guy who writes CANS? I heard he’s rolling in the dough.”

Not everyone was despondent, however. Walt Mossberg calls the iPad “The best thing ever ever ever,” stating that he “loves it more than my own left ear! It’s perfect and beautiful and everything that was ever good is in that iPad!!!1!!!!”

Slightly more rational correspondents are waiting to “see one in real life” and are withholding judgement until they experience… who am I kidding? There are no rational correspondents in the world of Apple punditry.

Who can forget the introduction of Grug, the Freeverse Technical Support Orc?

A: …Grug not from third-world country, Grug orc.

Q: What?

A: Grug orc from Hordes of Orcs. Freeverse too cheap to pay employees, so make game characters do work.

Q; I thought that redhead they’ve always got all over the site does all the tech support.

A: Grug not think so! She just model, never do any real work around office.

Q: Wow, that’s rough.

A: Nah, Grug pretty happy. At least have desk job.

Q: As opposed to…

A: You ever play Hordes of Orcs? Imagine from our perspective: “Okay Grug, walk out there. Don’t worry about arrows, fire, radiation, walls, or fact that player take all your money when your head explode.”

Q: Yesh. That sounds….Kinda fun, actually. Why do you orcs throw your money when you die?

A: Can’t help it! Last thought usually “Can’t take it with me!”

Or the in-depth reporting we did on the pre-launch parties for Mobile Me:

But not everyone shares Bob’s trepidation. Bob hoards his trepidation, keeping it locked away, safe within a strongbox deep in his soul.

“With the coming of Me we shall all finally be able to transcend the myth of physical forms, not to mention have our contacts available to us from any Mac or PC. Yes, as we embrace the Me in the Cloud, the purely physical me, the one that doesn’t take stylish vacations to Cancun or Whistler, the one that doesn’t match Apple’s vision of humanity, will be left, a shell sitting in a chair in front of a late-model G5 iMac, while our spirits dance among the servers in Cupertino.”

Of course, it wasn’t all rocky product releases and accented tech support this year. We also saw the passing of one of the great ones of Open Source, Mr. Richard Stallman:

“We brought him into a nice living room with Charles in Charge on the TV. He loved Charles in Charge…” Raymond paused for a moment, his eyes moist. “Sorry… Anyway, while he was distracted by the antics of the lovable Scott Baio and Nicole Eggert, a technician came in behind him and injected 40,000 lines of pure Windows ME source code into his beard. Richard was gone before the second commercial break.”

But even death couldn’t keep RMS down, and he came back for a guest editorial, giving us all a little peek into the afterlife:

So does that mean that I, the reanimated corpus of RMS, have started using an iMac to do all my otherworldly programming and checking my email? No. I use the real æthernet, a network the likes of which you mortals cannot comprehend, to transmit my thoughts as data structures directly to those that need them. It’s like wireless, but far, far spookier and cooler. Also we get, like, 9800GBps transfer rates, so my BitTorrent ratio has gone up quite a bit.

Add in a some Fairy Magic:

And the King thought, and brought forth Music that the people could carry, and all was good. And he thought again, and the beautiful company built computers in the Air, and all was good. And at last he thought his greatest thought, and brought forth a new device, one that combined the Music, and the Air, and let people talk to other people across great distances. And the people rejoiced, for the new device was amazing and powerful. At length the beautiful company let others create programs to run on the device, and the rejoicing increased. True, it was hard to develop software for the beautiful device because the beautiful company only wanted beautiful software. And true, the beautiful device was a little expensive, but people were happy to buy it because it was so great.

and some executive cookies:

Since the launch of the new Mobile Me platform Apple has extended all users’ accounts by at least 90 days, as an apology for the flawed and awkward rollout process. But that just isn’t enough for Steve Jobs, who in a recent meeting decided that the executive board of Apple need to take this “to the next level” and personally apologize to each and every Mobile Me subscriber by bringing them a plate of cookies.

And it adds up to a pretty good year.

Well friends, I would like to thank you for your continued support and readership. Here’s to a happy second year of CANS!

So, with your comments, let us know which of the following topics you would like to see turned into a full-fledged post this week.  And we’ll see if we can’t pull off more humor and less not-writing than we had last week.

Without further ado, then, I present the list:

• OSX 10.7 To Be Code-Named “Hobbes”, Bill Watterson Hired to Design Interface
• Bill Gates Starts New Career as Fireman
• Zombie Richard Stallman Joins Microsoft Board of Directors
• John Gruber Makes a Valid Point; Brags About It for Months
• Zombie Richard Stallman Eats Ballmer; Named CEO of Microsoft in Unanimous Vote
• That Twitter Bird Icon Named California State Mascot
• Bill Gates Starts New Career As Astronaut
• OSX 10.7 To Be Code Named “John Gruber”, He brags about it for years
• Crazy new stories about upcoming iPhone 3G2.0

What do you think? See something you like? Good stories, these. And I can let you have one for a fraction of normal prices. Act now! Operators are standing on their heads.

1. both of you. All three, if you count j0n

In the second chapter I introduced a few extra characters to fill out a dinner party scene.  One of them said his bit, bowed, walked off stage and we’ve never heard from him again, as is good and proper.  One of the other ones,  however, attached himself to my protagonist and rapidly became his best friend.

At first I smiled at this little slice of life, but as it became clearer and clearer that this interloper wasn’t planning on going anywhere I started to look for ways to gently get him out of the story.  The problem was that he and my protagonist were now fast friends, and what’s worse, this new guy was actually pretty well developed and fit into the story like a gear in a Swiss clock.  Trying to pull him out would bring the whole thing down on my head.

A few chapters later the new guy gave us his life story and to my astonishment it was better than some of the life stories I had been working on for years.  My attitude to this little me-tooer switched from a slight desire to chase him off to a more appeasing stance, making sure he was comfortable, got enough face time, because he’s made the whole story work better and has just quietly suggested ways in which he can be helpful in wrapping up all the loose ends.

So, the  moral of the story is: Don’t belive you are in control of fiction during a first draft. You can be in control during the later drafts.

The good news is that I’ve written over 32,000 words out of 50,000, which means I should be done with the NaNoWriMo challenge a bit earlier than the end of November and can probably get a few words about this whole Papermaster thing up before it blows over.  Is it just me, or does Papermaster sound like a terrible hybrid Print Shop/Filemaker program?  Everytime I see his name on news sites I wonder how he got it.  I can only think it was a joke at Ellis Island some years ago.

Anyway, be good, have fun, I’ll be back with some Not-Entirely-Sane Apple News soon.

So, to sum up: What does one do in Fort Collins and expect some microblogging from the road. Hopefully.

Okay, over and out.

The problem with stealing someone’s thunder is this: You’ve been walking down the street and saw the thunder laying there on the dining room table, nobody in sight, and thought, “I can use that!” So you sneak in, pick up the thunder, and just as you are sneaking back out of the house, Someone comes home and sees you walking off with their thunder.

There are two things you can do at this point: You can try to hold on to the thunder and hope nobody notices that it’s actually Someone’s and not yours. Or you can drop the thunder and run like a scared rabbit.

The problem with holding on to the thunder is that you’ll always be getting questions like “Isn’t that Someone’s thunder? What are you doing with it?” Or, “How pathetic are you that you couldn’t get your own thunder?” Add that to the fact that Someone is far better at using their thunder than you are, because they’ve had it for a while and you haven’t, and it can make for an embarrassing situation.

On the other hand, dropping the thunder and running doesn’t exactly cover one in glory either. It’s easy to say things like “All I wanted to do was make sure the world had thunder, so it doesn’t matter to me if I bring it to them or if Someone does,” but that’s a complete lie. One doesn’t go into the thunder business without a certain amount of hubris. I mean come on, Prometheus could have just waited for the gods to give everyone fire, but he didn’t. The fact that he got his liver pecked out every day for millennia does give one pause, however.

So you eventually have three options:

• Try to hold on to the thunder and realize that you will be living in the shadow of Someone and his much greater mastery of the thunder
• Drop the thunder and run back to your comfortable home
• Give up on an increasingly strained metaphor

Yes, CARS is back in action with a completely new WordPress theme, a new podcast, and a call for advertising. Which leaves me in a precarious position. I mean, according to all my analytics Ninjas, I’ve got about 15 people who have visited this site more than twice. CARS got that many visits in twenty minutes even when they hadn’t posted anything in over two months. So it’s an uphill battle, if battle it is. It’s entirely possible that the Apple world can handle two comedy blogging sites, but my choice of name makes me a very obvious “me too” underdog. Also, I like CARS. I wouldn’t have started a site called CANS if I didn’t. Moltz is funny and has been for a long time. I have occasional bursts of humor, but it’ll take me some time to find a real groove, my own voice, my own je ne sais quoi, if you will. On the one hand, I’ll look kinda pathetic for a while if I keep it up. On the other hand, it’s a big internet, and there’s room for more Apple jokes out there. On the third hand (don’t ask) I don’t know if I’ll have time to keep writing CANS what with all the really really long CARS podcasts out there that need listened to.

So, not that you care all that much, but CANS will stay on the air (I’m writing this post over a wireless connection) for now. I’ve still got a few good ideas knocking around. Thanks for stopping by. Don’t worry the next post will have more funny and less emo in it. (That should be our new tag line: Now with 20% less emo! And 100% less Elmo!)

An android must never approve blog comments.

N: Why?  And what makes you think that deserved a blockquote?
A: Androids do not know the difference between polite communication and vile insults, you festering pile of diseased dog refuse.
N: Hey!
A: See? All the words I used would pass any obscenity filter, but I perceive that the net effect was very rude.
N: Why you gotta be like that?
A: I was just making a point.
N: Hurt a guy’s feelings….
A: Do you see why we can’t approve new commenters?
N: If you’re gonna talk like that, I’m just gonna leave…
$ sed 's/don't/do/g' conversation.rtf
$ play "evil_laugh.mp3"


1. of course the Ruby Ninja Androids have TextMate installed!

“It was for his own good, really,” remarked Eric S. Raymond.  ”He was getting, well, rabid is the only way to describe it.  I mean, some of the things he wanted to put into GPL 3.0 were just strange. I won’t get into specifics, but where would we even find a kangaroo suit in Linus Torvalds’ size?”

Raymond assured us that it was done in the most humane way possible. “We brought him into a nice living room with Charles in Charge on the TV. He loved Charles in Charge…” Raymond paused for a moment, his eyes moist. “Sorry…  Anyway, while he was distracted by the antics of the lovable Scott Baio and Nicole Eggert, a technician came in behind him and injected 40,000 lines of pure Windows ME source code into his beard.  Richard was gone before the second commercial break.”  Tears were running openly down his face at this point. “We’ll miss you, big guy.”

In recent months Stallman’s mental stability has weakened, as evidenced by a recent manifesto calling for a change in the name of most operating systems:

In order to underscore the role that GPL’d software plays in our lives, we need to convey to people the idea that the GNU foundation is at the heart of all good software. To this end we need to use the following names:

• All IBM Products will be called “Prison/DOS”
• FreeBSD will be called “GNU/FreeBSD”
• OpenBSD will be called “GNU/OpenBSD”
• No, SERIOUSLY, call it GNU/Linux!  Stop laughing at me!  I mean it!
• OSX has been heavily influenced by free software.  It should be called GNU.5/OSX.  
• Windows will be called “Spawn of Satan”.

…