Were You? iWoz.

Last Tuesday, Steve Wozniak was in town. As part of his iWoz book tour, "Woz" made two stops in Taiwan - one in Taipei on Monday, and one in Hsinchu on Tuesday.

In case you've never heard of Steve Wozniak, perhaps you're more acquainted with his partner in crime and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. In all honesty, I hadn't heard of Woz until recently when I read the Jobs autobiography called "iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business". But fair enough, I decided to go have a listen to his book promotion since I got my hands on a free ticket through a coworker. In some circles, he's an engineering legend, having almost single-handedly inventing the personal computer.

Woz was one of two guest speakers - the other being Taiwanese Mr. Chang, founder of Trend Micro, best know for its popular anti-virus software PC-Cillan. For the Taiwanese, Mr. Chang is probably a better known name than Woz.

A third character that evening was a Taiwanese female moderator who in my opinion had no reason being there.


The 2 hour event roughly went like so:

• Woz spoke at a podium about his life experience, his childhood, his love for building computers, etc. Probably very close to what he recalls in his book.
  
• Then they switched gears, and had all 3 people (Woz, Chang, and the moderator) on stage, with Woz and Chang answering questions thrown out by the moderator.
  
• The moderator was awful. Trying to segway between answers and her next question, she would constantly throw in irrelevant comments, make terrible jokes (or at least I think they were attempts at humour), and she had a hard time
  controlling an overly-verbose Wozniak.
  
• Woz is a well-spoken man, but as I mentioned above, he sometimes has a hard time keeping it shut. He just wants to tell story after story.
  
• At some points, it felt like Woz and Chang were telling stories to show what they'd accomplished in the past to one-up the other.
  
• Finally, they took some questions from the audience - including one from me asking what Woz's current role at Apple is. Well, this is before I realized he wasn't at Apple anyway. Ok, officially he is. He has a very low salary, and basically just chats with Steve Jobs and acts as a consultant. The salary is just to make him an official employee - as the longest-standing member at Apple.
  
• Overall, I didn't take much out of the event. I didn't learn much, and none of what was said was very enlightening. But I guess sometimes you just go to these things just because it's cool to meet someone famous and have your picture taken with them.
  

After the event ended, a table was set-up on stage where Woz would sign books.

With a copy of iWoz I bought the day before, I stood in line to get my book signed. Some guy brought his iBook to have it signed on the cover. I had brought my digital camera, but without a battery. So, after I got my book signed and shook Woz's hand, I stood in line with my ex-coworker CY, who had brought his camera. As I got to the front of the line for the second time, I told CY to get behind the table to pose with Woz. I took his picture, and then we traded places and had my picture taken. Then CY and I went to McDonald's and to chat a little. About 10 minutes after sitting down, CY says "Eh? Where's my book?" Turns out, with all the photo-taking, we/he completely forgot to take his book. By the time we got back to the scene of the crime, everyone was gone. Fortunately, CY had already read the book - and he wasn't too devastated about losing the signed copy.

But that's how the evening went. I met him, shook his hand, and got his picture.


* While keeping with the Apple them, both books, iCon and iWoz, start with the 'i' prefix. But in my opinion, both titles are horrible. "iCon", which talks about Jobs being an icon, can also be read as "I con", describing how he's screwed over a lot of people in his career. "iWoz" on the other hand seems to indicate Steve Wozniak as a thing of the past, "I was". I feel like both books could have been better named.