Had a great signing for Writes of Spring tonight at a Barnes & Noble. That link is to buy from B&N, but if you live in the Twin Cities and feel like picking up a copy, please consider popping into Once Upon a Crime Mystery Bookstore, the Raven-Award-winning independent bookstore behind the anthology.

Even though there were about seventeen of us contributors, we managed to pull in an audience that outnumbered us. It's always a shame when the audience is so small the writers could beat them up. Judging by the number of books I signed for people, we also sold a fair number of copies.

As soon as I arrived in the store, I had checked the shelves for Shattered Light, the Star Trek: Myriad Universes anthology I'm in. There was one copy on the shelf, so I grabbed it and plopped it down on the table in front of me when I sat down. I figured there might be one person in the audience like myself who reads both mysteries and Trek, and maybe I'd bag a sale.

We all said a few words about our stories in Writes of Spring, then got down to signing books for people. As the crowd began to thin out, a guy came up to the table and spotted Shattered Light. He tapped the cover. "This is your story in here?" I told him that it was. I was thinking, Cool, I'm going to sell a copy of Shattered Light at a mystery event! He leaned in a bit. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

Now that was different than what I expected. "Sure," I said, wondering where this was going. Was he going to ask where I got my ideas? How I got a chance to pitch for the book? How to get blood stains out of a carpet? Instead: "On Margaret Wander Bonanno's site she has a story about her book Probe . . ."

"Yes, she does," I said. Most fans of Margaret know how her novel Probe, a sequel to Star Trek IV, got hijacked from her after she ran afoul of arbitrary licensing approval problems with Paramount, leading to it being ghostwritten.

"How was your experience working on your novel?" Ah, well, a fair enough question. I said my experience was fine, and that I was working with a different team than Margaret had, both at Simon & Schuster and at Paramount. He was glad to hear it, and thanked me for talking with him. Off he went, without purchasing Shattered Light. My hope for a sale had turned into a discussion mostly about another writer's experience from twenty years ago!

Now I need to make it clear--especially in case this guy happens across this blog--it's totally fine that he didn't buy my book, and it was fun talking with him. For all I know, he could already own it. What's funny to me is the difference between what I imagined was going to happen and what did happen. That's what made this a fine example of the weird scheisse that happens to me at signings. Like the time at Shore Leave I got seated next to a Girl Scout selling cookies. Who do you think moved the most product?

Hint: Not this guy. Scheisse.

The kid (aka Ella, my fourteen-year-old) has been on a M*A*S*H kick lately. She discovered the show last year on a DTV broadcast station while staying at my mom's place in the country and then was very pleased to find it running on TVLand on our cable system. She's about the age I was midway through the show's original run.

She's loving the show, and I've been enjoying seeing it again after all these years. I was a dedicated viewer when it was first run. I went as geekily far as to get a martini glass to drink from while watching; since I was a kid, I drank soda from the glass. Did I mention I was geeky?

We came across the DVDs on sale at B&N this week, so we picked up season one and have been watching them in order. Starting right at the beginning has been incredibly interesting. I'd completely forgotten that the character of Spearchucker Jones had carried over from the film; they let the character go after eleven episodes. I'd also forgotten about the character of nurse Margie Cutler, played by the future Mrs. Kotter, Marcia Strassman, who appeared in six episodes.

But what's really amazed me is the character of Radar. First-season Radar is much like the character in the film (the only main character to be played by the same actor), and noticably different from the character he became. First-season Radar accepts a drink from Hawkeye in the Swamp; in later years, Radar would get drunk drinking too many Grape Nehis. First-season Radar appears in a faux documentary in just his boxers, striking poses; in later years such "nudidity" would have been unthinkable. 

I'm loving this Radar, and it's unfortunate that they decided to play up the naive country boy angle as the series continued. That put actor Gary Burghoff in the awkward position of a man approaching forty trying to act like a gosh-gee-whiz teenager; later on when they did let him show his age, it was almost too late, and seemed forced. No wonder Burghoff grew weary of his role.

For now, however, I'm basking in the nostalgia as well as the fun of watching Ella watch the show. It's always nice when the kid likes something I like.

The other day I was listening to the great internet radio station A Fistful of Soundtracks. When I fired it up they were playing a cut from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, composed by James Horner. From that they cut to "Rock & Roll High School" by the Ramones. I thought that was pretty cool, so I tweeted about it, calling it "cool musical whiplash."

After a little while, I got retweeted by @JimmyJAquino . . . the dude who runs A Fistful of Soundtracks! He even commented, "Maybe 'Whiplash' should be the new name of one of my Fistful of Soundtracks blocks."

All that is already conclusive evidence of how cool the interwebs are, but there's more. Jimmy then tweeted me again, saying, "Hey, you did some Star Trek fiction for Pocket Books." He must have followed the link on my Twitter page to my website. So I replied about that. Fun. Geeking out on the interwebs. But wait, there's still more.

A few days later he tweeted that he had ordered Shattered Light so that he could read my novella. He also sent a link to a blog he'd written about the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. So I read the blog and posted a comment. And I had generated a sale of my book by listening to internet radio. 

That is a fun chain of events, all made possible by the interwebs. And here's another Twitter-related story. I follow the fabulous comic, actor, and impressionist @KevinPollak on the Twitter. I've been a fan of his and his Jim Kirk impression for years, and have also immensely enjoyed his internet talk show, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show. But now he's started a podcast called Talkin Walkin, in which he speaks only as Christopher Walken. It's hi-freakin'-larious.

Anyhoo, I listened to the first Talkin Walkin and tweeted that, without going into details, Kevin Pollak owed me a pair of pants. Well, damn, if I didn't get retweeted by Pollak, with his added comment, "Too kind. True, but too kind."

The interwebs are cool.

The 2011 ten-part crossover Infestation from IDW Publishing is basically a zombie story. I loves the zombies, as The Walking Dead knows, but I generally find crossovers to be a forced conceit. Nevertheless, I'm often drawn in by their epic geekiness, and what drew me into this one was my long-standing love of Star Trek.

IDW's original series CVO (Covert Vampire Operations) serves as the wraparound, bookending two-issue entries from four disparate franchises: Transformers, Star Trek, G.I. Joe, and Ghostbusters. Fortunately, they didn't just grind all these different meats into one loaf (Eew!), and end up with the Ghostbusters running through the corridors of the Enterprise. Instead, the magic/sci-fi nature of the CVO universe made a good launching pad for the creation of a zombie/vampire/extradimensional Overmind portal thingie, which sends alternate versions of the bad guys into the multiverse, dealing with each franchise on its own terms.

First up was Transformers. I gotta admit right off that I never "got" Transformers. They're trucks, they're robots, they carry operatic grudges . . . it just doesn't grab me. So reading about zombified robots (uhh . . . what now?) fighting in Las Vegas isn't my cuppa. I read it, but it just confirmed that I don't get it. Perhaps it was nice and shiny for robot fans.

Next up was Trek. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a few security guards take a shuttlecraft to the Calibus colony only to discover it's infested with zombies. The blend of horror elements and Trek worked fairly well. They continued the thread started in Transformers that the infection is a cybernetic/human hybrid, and, fortunately for our heroes, they meet some uninfected robots who can assist them. Unfortunately, these robots look a little like oversized Mac SE/30s with arms and legs, a choice that perhaps was supposed to be amusing, but is just silly and disruptive to the serious tone of the zombie story. The retro cover options featuring Original Series uniforms were the coolest, but the story itself is set following Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Moving on to G.I. Joe: I'm old enough that the G.I. Joes I had were basically regular, well, Joes, not superagents, and it was before the franchise developed its archenemies in Cobra, so I'm a little in the dark on the backstory here, but it was a pretty good tale, perhaps the best of the franchise stories. And it was set in an underwater lab that added another layer of excitement as cybernetic zombies began taking over the place. A captured Joe ends up having to fight with the Cobra agents against the common enemy; it's an old bit, but was used effectively.

Up next was Ghostbusters. The writing veered between nailing the beloved characters from the movies (well . . . at least the first movie) and trying too hard to nail the beloved characters from the movies. When they brought back the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, it really felt like forcing together a bunch of references instead of writing a fresh story. Which is too bad, because zombies are a great fit in the supernatural Ghostbuster universe.

The second CVO title brought it all home, literally. After the diversions across the multiverse, the evil force of the zombie Overmind is back where the whole thing started, with the soldiers of Covert Vampire Operations. This comic has some interesting stuff going on, with its blend of science and magic, and it seems to have a fairly arcane backstory. The artwork is particularly good and creepy. The story gets wrapped up while introducing some important changes to the CVO storyline.

If I rated the pairs of comics in order from the best to my least favorite, I think I would say CVO, G.I. Joe, Star Trek, Transformers, Ghostbusters. As a miniseries . . . I don't know. The crossover is forced, and you could drop out any of the franchises without losing anything from the overall story. 

Meanwhile, Infestation 2 is in the works, this time involving CVO, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dungeons & Dragons, Groom Lake and Bat Boy (yeah, that's what I said), G.I. Joe, and 30 Days of Night. Instead of zombies, it has Lovecraftian monsters, and apparently there will be actual crossover of characters. I think I'd rather just read a Lovecraft comic.

I recently got around to reading a couple of big comic book series, 2010's eight-part Dust to Dust, an authorized prequel to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from Boom! Studios, and 2011's ten-part crossover Infestation from IDW Publishing.

I liked Dust to Dust well enough. It certainly looks good, taking its visual cues from Blade Runner. At first I was disappointed by the story, which is about an agent assigned to track down and "retire" some runaway androids. Hmmm, sounds familiar. As you get further into it, however, it distinguishes itself a bit.

First off, the agent, calling himself "Charlie Victor" is openly an android. There's a scientist who becomes involved, Samantha Wu, who's trying to find a cure for the "Dust," the radioactive waste that has killed almost all animals and is causing plenty of health trouble for humans as well. Exposure to the Dust gave another human, Malcolm Reed, the ability to sense emotions; conversely this makes him able to recognize the void of emotion displayed by androids. The androids themselves are former soldiers from World War Terminus, focused on avenging themselves upon humanity.

Although it inevitably covers some of the same ground, questioning what it is to be human and android, the set up allows for a lot of backstory on the characters and, through them, more details of how the world became of Androids/Bladerunner came to be. There are a number of plot twists, and the action is well drawn. Any fan of the novel or film will probably find it entertaining enough, but it's not going to blow your mind.

Still, it whets the appetite for the long-awaited Blade Runner sequel which apparently Ridley Scott will dive into after the Alien prequel Prometheus.

Next post: Zombies!

I've been announcing my impending entry into the brave new world of self-publishing e-books for some time now but, as with everything, it was taking much longer to get organized than I had originally hoped. So last weekend when a couple of friends independently ask me for my feedback on publishing with Smashwords, I decided, "Eff it, I'm going to self-publish this weekend or cough up blood trying." Okay, maybe that's a little melodramatic, but I made a vow and stuck to it. Last weekend I uploaded my short story "The Mailbox" to Smashwords.

"But, wait," you cry, "how come this is the first I'm hearing about it? Why haven'y you blogged, tweeted, or facebooked about this if it's been up for a week already?!?"

A fair question, sailor. Well, the first thing I noticed is that the mobi file (the format used by the Kindle) created by Smashwords had a glitch in it, a blank line like an extra return in the middle of a paragraph. I tweaked and retweaked my specially formatted Word document, uploading it over and over, but no matter what I did that blank line kept appearing in the same spot. The epub version (used by Apple and others) and the pdf, generated from the same Word doc, looked fine. I emailed Smashwords support about the glitch and am waiting for a response.

Next I was going to assign an ISBN to my story. You have to have an ISBN to be sold by Apple, Sony, and Kobo. But I got an error message when I tried to assign the ISBN. Turns out Smashwords has run out of them. They've ordered another batch, and should get them soon. Okay, another small annoyance, but I'll just have to take care of that issue when they get the new lot of numbers in the system.

Next I noticed another speed bump. Although Smashwords creates a Kindle file that readers can buy directly from Smashwords, due to some technical gobbledygook with Amazon, the files aren't listed there. Ka-what? Amazon is practically taking over bookselling but my story won't be for sale there? Never fear, however, you just have to deal with them directly. So today I clicked over to Kindle Direct Publishing to upload "The Mailbox." I figured it would be easy, because I've already got the text and cover file I created for Smashwords.

Turns out I was counting my unhatched chickens before the horse, as they say. I uploaded the file and, being new to the Kindle Direct process, realized too late that I'd already published it before previewing the results of the file conversion. I finally figured out how to preview it and discovered all my paragraph indents had disappeared for no apparent reason. Yay. So I unpublished the Amazon version and now have to figure out what went wrong there. At least that damn blank line in the Smashwords Kindle file wasn't there.

This might sound like I'm bashing Smashwords, but that's not my intention. These are just some bumps in the road. Keep in mind that the Smashwords service is free and gets you a free ISBN and uploads your story to several retailers; it's a great deal. I'm going to stick with them and handle Amazon separately. I'll get the bugs worked out and let you all know what happens. Meanwhile, I'm considering this blog my soft launch of "The Mailbox." Click on over to Smashwords and check it out, it's only 99 cents. 

Two things you need to know about me: 1) I love computer games, and B) I don't have any time to play computer games.

The result of these two incompatible facts is I have tons of games. That I've essentially never played. I rarely reach the end of a game, because I don't invest enough time to play all the way through. So I never get rid of games, because I haven't finished them. And I keep buying games, because I love them. It's a form of madness.

And it gets worse. As computers and operating systems evolve, backward compatibility lasts only so long. Eventually you have a game you haven't finished that you can't run anymore. Unless you maintain an older computer. So now I have an iBook that I need to keep going because it's old enough that it can boot in OS 9. And I recently picked up an old G5 pre-Intel tower that runs OS X 10.4, so that has access to a bunch of software my new Intel iMac with 10.6 can't run. I'm reluctant to upgrade beyond 10.6, because I know I'll lose a ton of games. 

But, of course, it's not like I'm really playing those games anyway. Did I mention it's a form of madness?

And it gets worse. The interesting thing about Intel Macs is that because they're running on the same chip as Windows, it becomes possible to run Windows software on your Mac. Do you see where this is going? Yes, I'm now buying Windows games that I don't have any more time to play than the tons of Mac games I already own. Weird thing is that the Mac versions wouldn't run on the Intel Mac,  but I can run the Windows game. I'm running the Windows version of Command & Conquer from 1995--seventeen years old!--on my iMac.

I've just ordered Star Trek Online, which was never released for the Mac, and look forward to giving it a try, since play is free now. Of course, I'll barely play it. I've also recently ordered an old game, Deep Space Nine: The Fallen for Windows. It was released for the Mac, but it's very rare and, if you do find it, it's usually priced far higher than what I would want to pay for a game over ten years old that, realistically, I'll rarely play. But I was able to pick up the Windows version for $8. Fun side note: Star Trek writer Dave Mack contributed dialogue to The Fallen.

I do, every once in a blue moon, show some restraint. Sort of. To a point. About a month ago I noticed the Mac version of Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn along with the expansion pack Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhal on the shelf at my neighborhood Half Price Books, at $10 a piece. Oooo, I wanted those games. But I forced myself to not buy them. I knew I wouldn't get around to playing them, and why not save the $20? The following week they were still there. No, I stood strong. The week after that they still taunted me. I walked past, but my resolve was weakening. I decided to look up some reviews, hoping they'd say the game was a major disappointment so that I'd not buy them. Instead, the reviews were jubilant. The game has sold over 2 million copies. I was back to coveting them.

Last week I could stand it no more. I grabbed them off the shelf and took them to the counter. The guy rang them up, then got the discs from behind the desk and dropped them into the case. I saw disks one, two, and four go by. No three.

"You're missing a disk," I said. "I guess I'll be returning those."

"Sorry about that," he said. "I don't know why we took this with a missing disk. You still want the other one?"

"No, it's an expansion, you need the original game to be able to play it." The guy started crediting them both back to my card. "Quickest. Return. Ever," I said. 

I guess that's what I get for giving in!

So our neighborhood got a new sandwich shop chain, the somewhat cleverly/annoyingly named Which Wich. They advertise having over fifty customizable sandwiches (I refuse to say "wich" like they do), and it's true, take a peek at their menu. Their shtick is that they have the menu printed on the bag your sandwich will go in. You're supposed to grab a sandwich-specific bag from a rack on the wall--say, vegetarian--and then, using the provided Sharpies (Sharpies and paper bags...huff much?), choose which variety of vegetarian sandwich you want, perhaps caprese, and then also check off all the other customizable options: white or wheat, toasted or not, various condiments, veggies, etc. They've even got an employee stationed by the bags to guide newbies through the process. You turn this bag over to the cashier, she rings it up, hangs it in front of the sandwich makers, who work their wichcraft (sorry, couldn't resist) and put the sandwich in the very bag you Sharpied up...it's a souvenir with a sandwich inside!

Or not so much. We first approached via their website. The site's a little counterintuitive: at first glance it's all about the bags. Dudes, I'm on your website, I don't have a freakin' bag. Then we discovered that our location doesn't take orders online anyway. Okay, we print out three fax order sheets--which also clearly say you can bring them into the store instead of faxing. (Besides, faxing? What is this, the twentieth century?) Half of the page has on outline in the shape of the bag, replicating the in-store experience. I'm starting to get the hang of it. The kid just wants a cheese sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and mayo. She checks off those ingredients on hers, but that leaves a big blank at the top that says "Which wich do you want?"

I remain annoyed by "wich" but that's probably just me. "Maybe we should write in vegetarian?" I suggest.

"Why, it's not like they'd put some random meat on there," the kid says.

But I do so anyway, just to fill in the blank spot. It was bugging me, like not filling in an oval on the SATs. So then we fill out the other half of the page, which has beverages, chips, and cookies. Off I go. I head straight to the counter, past the suckers in line at the wall o' bags. I hand over our orders. The cashier looks blankly at them for a second, and it seems clear she's never seen one of these. To be fair, they did just open. She starts trying to reformat her bag training onto the pseudobag. Then she holds up my daughter's order.

"What kind of vegetarian sandwich?" she says. "Caprese?"

"No, just the ingredients that she listed."

"It says she wants vegetarian. We have caprese, hummus, black bean patty--"

I politely interrupt. "No, she just wants those ingredients listed."

"But for vegetarian choices we have caprese, hummus, black bean patty--"

"She just wants the ingredients she listed. Forget that it says 'vegetarian.' Can't we just get a sandwich with those ingredients?"

She calls someone over to confer. That person goes over to the wall o' sandwich bags and brings me back a bag with "vegetarian" stamped at the top and hands it to me along with a Sharpie. She doesn't seem to perceive that this just gets us back to where we were. It's becoming all Sisyphean up in this place.

Meanwhile, a new guy comes over. I've now got three people puzzling out my cheese sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and mayo. But, silly kids, they've armed me with a Sharpie. As the new guy holds out the offending order slip, probably about to start repeating the vegetarian choices for me again, I reach across the counter and cross out "vegetarian." 

"Let's forget that," I say. "Just make a sandwich with only the ingredients she checked off."

The new guy looks at me and says--wait for it--"No meat?"

I shit you not. That's what he said to me. "No, no meat," I say. "That's why I wrote 'vegetarian.' "

But wait, there's more. Now that we've got the sandwiches settled with the cashier, the new guy has folded all the orders in half, so only the bag outline is showing, and has hung them up for the sandwich makers. The cashier looks at me and says, "Any chips or beverages?"

"Uh, yeah . . . they were written on the order forms." Cue SFX.

Well, we got that sorted and I got the food. I should say that the sandwiches were fine, and I'm sure our next ordering experience won't be blogworthy--although I think I'll just fill out the orders on the bags. Lastly, for those of you wondering, it turns out we should have just written "plain" at the top of that cheese sandwich order.

I haven't blogged in months, but I'm feeling a little re-energized by finally getting on Twitter (follow me at @SMichaelPearson) a few days ago. I've had a pretty good run already from a geek standpoint.

On my first day I got a shout out from Robert Meyer Burnett, director of Free Enterprise, a supergeek film starring William Shatner as himself, more or less. I'm sure most of my readers, who number in the high single digits, are familiar with the film. I've chatted with Rob via Facebook over the years and he's enjoyed my Star Trek fiction, so it was great fun to have him show up in my first hours on Twitter.

One of the first people I followed was Wil Wheaton, formerly of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also known as Sheldon's archnemesis on Big Bang Theory. My daughter, Ella, and I had recently seen him on Chris Hardwick's Nerdist Year in Review. Wheaton posted a photo of himself, Hardwick, and Jonah Ray (one of Hardwick's cohosts on the Nerdist podcast) hanging out and I sent the photo to Ella. She promptly made it her Facebook cover photo. I did a screengrab of that and tweeted at Wheaton and Hardwick (Ray wasn't really visible in the cropped image) that I hoped they didn't mind that my wondergeek daughter stole their photo. Wheaton retweeted it to his nearly two million followers. A bunch of people commented on it, favorited it, and followed me. That was cool.

Now I just have to try and keep up on it. As well as blogging. And Facebook. And updating my website. Oh, yeah, and writing.

It's been nearly a week now since the passing of Steve Jobs. I was surprised by how much it affected me emotionally. Sure, I'm a dedicated Mac user, but it's not like I knew the guy. When an actor dies, someone you've watched on screen for years, perhaps decades, it's more understandable, because there's a greater illusion of knowing the person. Watching that person in favorite roles does build an emotional attachment, never mind that it's on a fictional foundation. Steve Jobs was a guy who had great ideas for cool gadgets that I like. I didn't make a point of watching his public appearances or reading about him. I just love his machines. How did that turn into personal attachment?

Thirty year flashback. I'm in high school, a dedicated sci-fi nerd and raving Star Trek fan. For the first time the school offered a computer programming elective. We didn't even have the computers in our little school, we had an arrangement with another little school four miles away to share their computer lab. I don't remember how many times a week I had the class, but we'd get a ride over there and learn BASIC programming on an Apple--this was pre Macintosh--probably an Apple IIe. In color! It was like the future. I loved it. I think I still have the 5.25-inch floppy disk with my programs, tucked away at the bottom of a drawer. I remember one of the programs: just a bunch of colors moving across the game in geometric patterns. It seemed amazing.

In college I didn't have the money to buy a computer, and I was taking English classes, not computer classes. The first computer I owned was some sort of Commodore that I got for free. I played around on it a little, since I knew BASIC, but it had no floppy drive, and I didn't invest in one. The next computer I owned was a dedicated word processor, a glorified electronic typewriter that plugged into a monitor and a disk drive. That was all I could afford in 1987 with my first professional sale. But in 1991 or so, I bought a used Mac SE/30 from a coworker to replace the word processor thing. And started getting my Mac geek back on. In glorious black and white.

From there I went to a Performa 6200 Power PC, then got an iBook G3, then an iMac G5. Now've I've got an iMac Intel Core Duo. And there are various iPods and an iPad in the house as well. At my day job for the last nine years I've worked on Windows machines. I prefer the Mac for a variety of reasons. One is simply style. Yes, the eye candy. Hardcore anti-Mac people often make fun of that, but when you spend as much time on the computer as a freelance editor and writer does, you want it to be fun. I overheard a Windows person on the bus one morning saying Windows was the best because it forces you to learn something. Which, from my perspective, is a lot like saying it's best to have a car that breaks down all the time so that you learn how to fix it. I swear, that will be the only bit of Mac snobbery I allow in this post! That one was for Steve.

So now I write on the computer, edit on the computer, do my checkbook and taxes, keep in touch with friends, play games, watch movies, video call with the kid on her iPad when she's out of town . . . I'm a person of the twenty-first century, and for good or ill that means I'm on the computer a lot. A ton. A lot of tons. And to me that computer lifestyle is infused with the Mac OS. Windows is just work. Mac is life. And that, of course, is what Steve Jobs was going for. That's why when he came back to Apple he started the assault on the boring beige boxes that all computers were. He was the driving force behind so much innovation, yes, in style, but also ease of use. Which, contrary to the person on my bus, is not a bad thing.

Not that I'm a blind-faith fanatic. I'm perfectly willing and able to acknowledge and point out Apple's missteps. I think Steve's battle with Flash was ill-timed, for one thing. The Cube was too far ahead of its time . . . to get it that small, the components were too expensive. It looked amazing, but who could buy it? But I remember thinking, "Look . . . if you took that cube and made it a flatter rectangle, it would fit on the back of a monitor. The monitor would be the computer!" I felt pretty good about myself when that was actually what happened.

At some point across the years (or, I suppose, incrementally), without me fully realizing it, Steve Jobs, the man behind the machine, became important to me. But even when I felt concern for his health, and knew he must have been in a bad way to step down from Apple, it seemed like more generic sympathy, that you feel for anyone. But it turned out to be more. Like most people, I didn't expect the end to come so soon. And I certainly didn't expect I would be repeatedly getting misty eyed as I read the various reminiscences there have been posted on line over the last several days. Stephen Fry's was quite good. Stephen Colbert's was funny but with a poignant end that really got me (I did the same thing myself before I saw it; check it out so you'll know what I mean). 

I don't know if Apple will ever be quite the same. They've got a good set up now, and could have a good run just making the existing products better. Apple TV, although much improved, still needs work. The computer and pods and pads and phone can just keep getting faster and cooler and more interconnected. But they also need to be able to come up with the game changers, the crazy things that Steve would take to his people and say, "Can we do this?" I don't even know what those are. I just hope there's someone at Apple, or soon to come to Apple, that does. And then it will be insanely great.