Much love to iPhone Savior for this one. Apparently after Monkey Boy signed that guy’s MacBook Pro, some artist got the idea to create a sticker with his head on it. Oh, and he’s also got one of me. He makes them by hand and they cost ten bucks apiece. Such a deal!
Monday, January 25, 2010
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Beastmaster vs. Monkey Boy
Who knew that the dynamic duo weren’t always in perfect sync?
Bets, people. Who would win this steel cage match?
Update: Dear readers point out that the above link is for WSJ subscribers. News to me that we pay for this. (Note to Katie: Fix that.) For the story, see here. Love to James and Phess for the link.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Ballmer Bot? Dear God
Now Microsoft is demonstrating a “Ballmer Bot.” And it can (get this) throw an egg. Basta! As the Swiss would say. Enough with the faux self-deprecating stuff. You guys can’t pull it off.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Trifecta: Beastmaster, Monkey Boy & Goatberg
Check out the the Beastmaster and Monkey Boy at AllThingsD.
Highlight: Goatberg does a great imitation of Brat-Pack-era Sammy Davis Jr. laughing just a little too hard at the Beastmaster’s “funnies.”
The team started to count Goatberg’s self-references but gave up. We have deadlines to meet people!
Interesting commentary from Goatberg-in-training on the AllThingsD site after the inevitable demo:
“Windows 7, like other Microsoft OS’s before it, seems to have borrowed a thing or two from Mac OS X. This time it’s Apple’s Dock, which Microsoft appears to have borrowed. Multi-touch and a Dock. In Windows. Steve Jobs must be so proud.”
Proud isn’t the word I’d choose.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Monkey Boy and the egg
My physicist friend Ingyar tells me that the Monkey Boy and Egg Incident is more than a random event. It is a great demonstration of string theory.
Ingyar (something of an egghead himself if you get my meaning) maintains that in this worldview, all parts of the universe are made up of eensy strings, each of which resonates with its fellow strings at the most fundamental level. “Ballmer looks like an egg. Ergo, at some point the egg and Ballmer will find each other in a deeply resonant way.” As they apparently almost did in Hungary. Only a podium kept this natural occurrence from flowing to its fated shell-on-noggin conclusion.
If you look at it that way, the ovum-tossing terrorist is really helping Ballmer find his inner egg.
Ingyar, I honor the place where your 11 dimensions and the crack of eggshell on cranium unite.
And for those who whined that posting about this event breached good manners, two words: Bite me.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Ballmer egged in Budapest!
See the video clip on this link. Especially check out the look on Monkey Boy’s face after he runs behind a desk and ducks for cover. Poor bastard looks scared shitless. (Still photo above.) If anyone can rip this video and put in YouTube let me know so I can embed it here. I’ve been watching it over and over and over again. Also if anyone speaks Czech and can translate the article or at least tell us what the egg-throwing dude is saying, I’d be much obliged. I asked Iulia and Natasha in Krasnodar but they were like, Styopa, pazhalsta, we speak Russian, okay? Czechs are swine.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Windows fucks up New Year’s Eve fireworks. In Seattle. Perfect.
See here. The dudes running the big fireworks show in Seattle had set up a computer to run the display and keep it timed with the music. But somehow the poor dumb piece of shit PC got messed up or crashed or needed to be rebooted or something and the whole show got ruined. Yup. In Seattle. Our spies say Ballmer was at the show and people around him started laughing and pointing at him and doing the monkey dance and chanting, “Vista sucks! Vista sucks!” Afterward Ballmer went back to the Borg campus and trashed an entire set of office furniture, although Frank Shaw of Waggener Edstrom says that this absolutely did not happen. Go Steve!
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
My lunch with Fester
So the big Ballmer meeting just went down and I’m still shaking — with rage, not fear. Pure rage. I mean, literally, my hands are all frigged up and I can’t even type. I have Ja’Red typing this for me.
Here’s how it went down. He arrived with some handlers who all looked like junior versions of the Beastmaster — same glasses, same doofy haircuts and bad clothes. Instead of having a fancy lunch brought in I took them down to the Apple cafeteria so my serfs could see me leading the enemy king around on a leash. Stepped into a deli and Ballmer goes up and tilts his head back and starts scanning the menu on the wall, going, “Unh, unh, lessee …” and one of our guys in line shouts out, “PASTRAMI, PASTRAMI, PASTRAMI, PASTRAMI!!!!” Big laugh from the Appleites. MicroTards pretended to laugh along but they were looking uncomfortable — like some gang dudes who just realized they’d strayed into the wrong territory wearing the wrong colors. In other words, So far so good.
After lunch — I drank a half bottle of water and felt my soul dying as I watched Monkey Boy chow down on some kind of meat product — we go back to the Jobs Pod and Ballmer tells his guys to sit and they all do, just like a pack of little beagles, side by side on a couch in the waiting room. Monkey Boy and I sit down in my conference room and Ballmer starts going on about how exciting it is to see Apple doing so well and gaining market share and designing such beautiful machines, and how one of his kids brought home a MacBook Pro and was loving it but unfortunately it suffered a little accident involving a Ford Explorer, boohoo.
So I tell him flat out to quit blowing sunshine up my ass and get to the point because I know he isn’t here for a chit chat. Trust me, when the Borg sets up a meeting, it’s because they’ve found something of yours that they want and they think they’ve found a way to steal it from you. If you’re small and/or stupid they’ll pretend they’re super interested in what you’re doing and tell you how cool you are and promise to form a partnership with you and make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.
If you’re Steve Jobs, they usually just come to the point because there’s no sense in pretending that either of us ever intends to play nice. Nevertheless the Monkey Man still keeps beating around the bush, saying what a great relationship Microsoft and Apple have had for so many years now, and he quotes that Beatles line about how we have memories longer than the road that stretches on ahead and how that was so beautiful when I said that at D and he got all teary backstage. He says Microsoft just loves selling Office on the Apple platform and really wants to continue being Apple’s biggest app vendor, and I’m like, Of course you like it, because you get early access to our OS technology that you can copy and put into yours. He says there’s no need to be all angry and confrontational, and besides the OS group at Microsoft is completely separate from the apps group, they don’t share information, blah blah, and by the way since I brought up the subject of OS technology being “borrowed” he can’t help but mention that some things in Leopard look a lot like stuff in Vista.
Which brings me to my point, he says, but unfortunately it doesn’t really bring him to his point because he starts going about intellectual property and how our two companies could both benefit from sharing our patent portfolios and cross-licensing our technology, and Apple has lots of great stuff and so does Microsoft and maybe we could find a way to work together in a new way that could be a model for the industry and this kind of bridge-building and interoperability is really what customers are crying out for and Microsoft has been reaching out to the Linux community and now that Apple is getting so much traction and market share it’s important that Microsoft work well with our stuff and make sure that everything work together in the best interest of customers, blah blah mwah mwah.
I’m like, Fester, trust me, there’s nothing you guys have that we want. I’m sorry but it’s just the truth. We roll our own and we like it that way.
He’s like, Yeah, well, see, that’s kinda what I want to talk about, and see, I didn’t want to just send our lawyers to have this conversation without at least talking to you about it personally, CEO to CEO, you know? But see we’ve gone through our huge patent portfolio and it looks like there’s about a hundred major patents of ours that you guys are infringing upon and some of them are for really big fundamental stuff that you can’t just work around. And, well, we feel that you’ll agree with us that respecting intellectual property is one of the most important things for a big company like Apple.
For a moment I just sit there. I’m kind of stunned, frankly. Then I go, Well, okay, so let’s look through this portfolio and see what you’ve got. Fester says he doesn’t have that material with him, he just wants to have a talk, and I say, Okay, fine, have your lawyers show the stuff to our lawyers and we’ll talk again. But he says, Oh, well, see, we can’t actually show you the patents. They’re totally secret and proprietary. I’m sure you understand.
I’m like, So you want me to pay you a licensing fee for patents that you won’t even show me, and you think that’s something I’ll understand? He says they don’t necessarily want a licensing fee, but more like a cross-licensing agreement, sort of a bridge-building collaboration cooperation type thing where we share technology with each other and we could reassure customers that we really have their best interest at heart.
I go, So basically you want us to give you all of our cool OS technology and other technology in exchange for some stuff that you won’t even show us or even tell us what it is? Stuff that may or may not even exist? Let me tell you something. Here at Apple we have a standard response for this kind of request. It’s called siooma. Have you heard of it?
He says he hasn’t heard that word before, is it some kind of Hindu word from Tibet or something? So I explain to him that it means “Suck It Out Of My Ass.” Then I go on to explain to him that seriously, all joking aside, he should go sit in a room and slam chairs against a wall, or whatever else he does for fun, but if he thinks I’m going to make a deal with him then he must be out of his fucking mind.
He gets real calm. He waits a long time. Then he says, in a very soft voice, Jobso, I’m not out of my mind. I’m the CEO of a company called Microsoft. Have you heard of it? I’ve got a $270 billion market cap. I’ve got more money in my back pocket than your entire company takes in in a year. So take some free advice, hippie. Don’t fight me on this. Okay?
He smiles and gets up and leaves. And here I am, still seething.
Beastmaster, Monkey Boy, and all the rest of you in Redmond, listen close and hear what I’m about to say: We will fight you on the desktop. We will fight you on the Internet. We will fight you in the browser space, and in desktop productivity apps. We will fight you in music players and smart phones. We will never surrender. We will never make peace. We will never stop fighting. Never, ever, ever.
Siooma, motherfuckers.
The big Ballmer meeting is later today
They first suggested I should fly up there. I was like, You’re kidding, right? So they’re putting Uncle Fester in his special travel box and shipping him down here to meet with me. No idea what he wants to talk about but apparently they believe it’s important. I told them up front, “If you’re calling to see if I’ll take over Microsoft, for the umpteenth time, forget about it. No way.” They swear it’s not that. My guess is they want to license some technology from OS X to save their butts. Full report later today.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
This scares me
Maybe because I’m supposed to meet with Ballmer this week. The guy always finds a way to harsh my Zen. Totally destroys my peaceful vibe.