This gallery contains 5 photos.
As I drove down a street a mile from the center of town, located only seven miles from Boston, MA, I noticed a clutch of twelve birds, which turned out to be some kind of partridge. The gallery of close … Continue reading
The only true Apple compatible product consumer show opens this week, March 27 to March 29. It’s held at the Moscone Center North in San Francisco, CA.
The Robert Hess Memorial Macworld Events List is online with special events that happen each day. Check the list for non-show related events this week also. This list is now in its 18th year and not a week goes by in which I don’t miss Rob’s great humor and articles. He was a such a gem of a person.
I don’t mean to be a pest, but if you use The List, a small contribution would be very welcome. I did spend quite a bit of time digging up events and creating this unique and comprehensive list just for you! Contribute links are now all over the page – sorry if that offends you.
http://www.ilenesmachine.com/partylist.shtml
Unfortunately, I can’t make it this year and few of my user group friends are attending also. Seems a common decision for some companies and users is to go every other year and this is the skip year. I like the March dates and hope to see many people at the show next year!
My favorite photo from one of the past Macworld shows.
Homeless in SF
When I posted the draft slideshow I made of my father’s life in Boinx Software’s FotoMagico, someone remarked that I was lucky I had all those photos. Well, luck actually had nothing to do with it! (By the way, I had to delete and upload the video again after correcting a couple of dates and typos.)
I found out after my son was born that my great grandfather was a professional photographer. My Dad always took awesome pictures when we went on vacation, but I don’t think it ever sank in that he was taught how by his grandfather. When I started scanning my Dad’s thousands of slides, stereo slides and movies that I had been given, I started digging deeper. My sisters and mother had no interest and thought I was just living in the past. Their loss…
Well, it turns out my little sister started researching the genealogy of the family in the 1990s, due to her own husband’s long history in the US. My son’s father’s family also goes back to the Pilgrim days. Alas, our family came here in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Names were changed, the census recorded incorrect names, and places of birth weren’t even recorded, so our history is much harder to track. My sister wanted photos to post with her lineage that she put on Ancestry.com, so finally I could share some of my scans.
We aren’t a very close family and my parents were not happy that I insisted that all our living relatives back to their first cousins were invited to my son’s Bar Mitzvah in 1997. I’ve never regretted bringing all those people together. At that time, I had neither the time nor the interest in locating family photos. That changed with the new millenium.
The Hoffman Family
The Milton Family (Mother’s)
I was told that there were no surviving photos taken by my great grandfather, Louis Hoffman. When my Dad died, knowing how my Mother likes to toss things, I scoured her house for photos. I found a few photographs of my Dad in his first years of life in placards with Hoffman Studios on them! I found his Dad’s scrapbook and his scrapbook. In my Dad’s scrapbook was all his rejection letters to medical school, newspaper articles and report cards. Who saves stuff like that?? (grin) To me that was a goldmine. I even found some 1940s mild porn slides, which was pretty funny. When I dig them out again, I really must remember to scan them! Only the family photos have been scanned so far.
In 2010, two years after my Dad’s death, my Mom decided to visit her brother in Massachusetts. She lives in Florida and had not been back for at least ten years. My sister and I organized a luncheon with a few of those same relatives that had come to my son’s Bar Mitzvah. Some had not seen each other since that event either, which is odd because they all live within 15 miles of each other. My Dad’s first cousin Harret (see below) graciously hosted the luncheon at her house.
My little sister and I visited a few of them separately and went through their photos. We borrowed some to scan and return. Sadly, three of those relatives died last June. Even more sad is that no one in our family ever bothered to contact us to tell us. My sister found out when she was updating our family tree in Ancestry.com in January 2014. UGH.
Ok, back to my point. The bottom line is that the reason I have the photos I used in my Dad’s memorial video is because my sister and I visited seven relatives we barely knew, walked off with their precious archives for a few days, and I scanned much of what we found. We videoed and taped stories too, but those video and audio archives will take a lot longer to put into any kind of meaningful form.
Oh, in case you are wondering, few of my Mom’s relatives survived until our interest in our lineage started. We have no one to interview and no one to contact to even locate photographs. It’s really a shame we didn’t start doing this earlier in our lives.
Harriet Sitting in her Grandfather’s Photo Chair (date unknown)
Harriet Sitting in her Grandfather’s Photo Chair holding her Grandparents photos. That’s my son smiling next to her. Sept. 10, 2010
So let’s see, Marcus (1984), my son, is standing next to his Grandfather’s first cousin Harriet (1925) sitting in his great great grandfather’s chair.
Harriet is alive and well and holding his Great great great grandparents picture (Grisha and Pauline Hoffman or Goffman). I think that’s it.
Click the photos for a larger view.
The Macintosh Thirtieth Anniversary Event was a great success if I can believe everything I read. This tidbit from former Apple employee #2536, Bryan Stearns, posted in the chat room for the TUAW TalkCast, seems to sum it all up.
“At the end of the event last night, Jerry Manock (industrial designer of Apple II & Mac), Caroline Rose (wrote Inside Mac), and Patty Kenyon (our software librarian & Mom) read this letter:” The Mac Birthday Letter.
A wonderful letter to wonderful people.
Cult of Mac has a page of photos taken by Leander Kahney at the event.
The celebration continues with an Apple Alumni Reunion!
A 1992 entry into the QuickTime Film Fest.
I believe these are all Apple employees. The video is twice its original size.
An Apple Alumni Reunion celebrating the first ten years of Apple is planned for March this year. Anyone who worked at Apple, Claris, or an Apple Authorized Rep Firm (aka Dealer) from 1976/7 to 1986/7 is invited to attend this six-hour event. (Applicable years are different on two pages.) A Google Group has been set up so that former employees can converse with each other. If you qualify, you can apply for membership to the group from the Join the Conversation link on the Apple Alumni Reunion site.
When: March 30, 2014, 1 pm to 7 pm PT
(This is the day after Macworld|iWorld ends.)
Where: Fourth Street Summit Center
88 South 4th Street, 7th Floor
San Jose, California 95192
Dress: Apple casual.
Cost: $95.00 for tickets that cover costs, food and soft drinks for this all volunteer event. You can purchase tickets on Eventbrite.
If you use a Macintosh, you know that its 30th anniversary is today, January 24th. In celebration, a number of original Apple employees have come together to organize the Macintosh Thirtieth Anniversary Event to be held at the Flint Center tomorrow night, the original location where the Macintosh was introduced.
What I find curious about the computer that never should have succeeded is how many movies have been made to chronicle it’s development and revolution. They range from movies about the company, Apple Computer, Inc. to it’s most celebrated figure head Steve Jobs, to the people who gave it its life. Below I have attempted to list all the movies that exist that cover the Macintosh.
The most amazing movie concerning the Macintosh was created by Apple itself. Created in 1988, Pencil Test is the most engaging story you will see about the Macintosh! Enjoy!
Now, here are the movies I found that chronicle the history of it all!
Steve Jobs Consciously Genius (Documentary) Unreleased/ In production.
Based on autobiography by Walter Isaacson. There’s very little information available about this upcoming documentary.
You can read more about the author on Wikipedia.
Jobs (2013)
“Jobs, a biographical film about Steve Jobs, from 1974 to 2001.” Askton Kutcher plays Steve Jobs, Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, and a whole bunch of other famous actors who play a whole bunch of other Apple employees. This movie received a 5.9 rating on IMDb and a 27% on the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes.
Steve Jobs: iGenius (Original Title: Steve Jobs: Visionary Genius) (2012)
A one hour documentary on Mr. Steve Jobs that received a 5.1 rating from IMDb, linked above.
There are no reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and I have not seen this movie.
Steve Jobs: One Last Thing (2011)
A PBS documentary that is “an intimate portrait of the life of Mr. Jobs, through interviews with colleagues and others who knew Jobs.” “The man who always gave us, ‘One More Thing.’ ” You can see the whole movie on YouTube.
This documentary received a 6.8 rating on IMDb.
Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview (Published in 2011, but created in 1995.)
A 70 minute interview with Steve Jobs by Bob Cringely (Mark Stephens) while he was running NeXT. Pieces of this were used in Triumph of the Nerds.
This “movie” received a 7.9 rating at IMDb and 100% on the Tomatometer.
MacHeads The Movie (2009)
This one is my favorites, but I’m biased because I’m in the movie! The up close and personal views of the Macintosh fan community, which features interviews with Apple former employees and many of us Mac devotees. IMDb gives this one a 5.0 rating, but that’s
because those who aren’t in the movie are jealous. The original site for the movie doesn’t seem particularly functional anymore.
Welcome to Macintosh (2008)
The documentary for the rest of us. “The type of film that’s aimed at a small segment of the population.” … “only the most diehard of fans will want to sit through the entire thing.” Review by FilmThreat. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are among the missing in this film, but a number of other original employees are interviewed. IMDb gives this documentary a 6.1 rating.
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
Movie based on the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It chronicles the birth of the personal computer. It stars Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs, Joey Slotnick as Steve Wozniak, and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. (Trivia: At Macworld 1999 Noah Wyle opened the conference keynote instead of Jobs.) This film receives a 7.2 rating from IMDb and an 89% from the Tomatometer.
Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996)
Based on the 1992 book by Mark Stephens aka Robert X. Cringely, this three-hour PBS documentary can be found in pieces on YouTube. It covers the history of the personal computer from WWII to 1995, so it’s not just about Apple, but you get the whole shebang. It includes footage from Gary Kildall who created CP/M and Douglas Adams, plus a whole host of familiar faces from Apple and Microsoft. While I started to watch this, it began with such poorly researched facts, that I bagged it after 2 minutes. Feel free to watch the first of six parts on YouTube or watch it on PBS.
And last, but not least, the pièce du résistance:
Own-a-Mac – The Movie (1987)
A Macintosh SE sales movie created or commisioned by Apple Computer, Inc. This 18 min. movie has to be one of the worst commercials I’ve ever seen and I’d never seen it before! It pretty much predicted the popularity of cats on the future web! (CAT = Contacts, Activities, Time.)
“All Macintosh applications have a consistent interface.” Oh for those days of consistency!
(All movie cover images courtesy of IMDb.)
ilenes machine 
Hess Memorial Macworld Events – Thursday Listings
Update: As of 10 PM ET, the Hess List web server is back up, so you can hit the link below to see the Macworld-iWorld 2014 events. Digital Fortress has assured me that an alarm of some kind will go off if the server has future trouble and will be reset immediately. Thank you for your patience and understanding!
It seems the server at Digital Fortress has once again decided not to serve out my Robert Hess Memorial Macworld Events Page. This happens periodically and the company always has lame excuses as to why. For your convenience, here are the listings for Thursday night, March 27th. Please check back to the regular URL at intervals, because the page will come back up; the company always makes that promise. If I ever recoup the monies I pay for web hosting from this list, I will move The Events List to a more reliable host, but as I’ve only received one contribution this year, don’t hold your breath.
Normal URL = http://www.ilenesmachine.com/partylist.shtml
Very sorry for the inconvenience! Here are tonight’s listings!
Thurs.3/27 5:30 PM ?:30 PM
6 About to Break Cocktail Party
Moscone North
Ticket may be required. SF New Tech & Macworld/iWorld hosts.
Thurs.3/27 6:00 PM 9:00 PM
Silicon Valley iOS Developers‘ Meetup
Not Listed yet
Details missing
Thurs.3/27 6:00 PM ?:00 PM
Drinks at SF St. Regis with Paul Kafasis, of Rogue Amoeba
Just a fun time
(Tweeted by Gruber) (Update: It seems that Paul was there, but John wasn’t.)
Thurs.3/27 7:00 PM10:00 PM
Appency 5th Annual Macworld Press Dinner
Undisclosed
Invited Press only.
Thurs.3/27 7:30 PM10:00 PM
iFixit Meetup at Techshop
910 Howard St.
Chat with iFixit crew over dinner and drinks. RSVP desired.
Thurs.3/27 8:00 PM?:00 PM
CultCast LIVE Party
The Box SF, 1069 Howard St.
Invitation Required. Cult of Mac team with DiskAid and MacUpdate. Live performance from DJ EGADZ. Open bar.