15 Minutes of Fame

 

Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. I thought it is about time I started keeping track of my time.

 

+01:00 Total 07:27 December 2004 - On the 21st of the month the US Patent Office granted me my first patent! Number 6,834,308 is my baby.  Ok, Vance got to go first on this one so it's cited as "Ikezoye, et al", but if you scroll down the page to "inventors" then you'll see that I'm one. You can view it at the USPTO site.

+00:10 Total 06:27 March 2004 - Stephanie Ravizza called all aflutter. You guessed it, Bay Area Backroads was on again (and again) and she saw us. I think that counts.

+00:45 Total 06:17 February 2004 - Regular reads will know that we visited The Antique's Roadshow in San Francisco. None of the junk we brought was good enough to get us featured. However, this time we were careful to hang around in the arena after our stuff was appraised. We stood behind a pile of head shots from the 1950's. This guy had a pile of personally autographed publicity photos from famous stars. His father had collected them while he hung out in Hollywood cafe society. He knew a lot of these famous people and it was implied that his father might have dallied a bit. Oh My!! Anyway, as the camera pans up and about, there we are, standing, studiously watching the table and reacting in surprise when the announce the total value of the collection. We were fuzzy, but there we are. You can view the segment on YouTube.

+00:15 Total 05:32 August 2003 - That Bay Area Backroads segment is in reruns. I was sitting in my normal spot at the Blue Rock Shoot in Saratoga. I'm there almost every day. Various other denizens of the locale come in or walk by every day. One of the regulars is an older gentleman in a brown coat, brown slacks, gloves, and a stocking cap. Every day he power walks by. Today he stopped and caught my attention. "Excuse me," he said, "are you that guy from Bay Area Backroads?"  That hasn't happened before! I admitted it was me and we exchanged a few words. "That's a great show, we really enjoy it." I think he might have thought me a regular on the show.

+00:02 Total 05:17 April 2003 - Audible Magic got some good press on PBS. They did a segment on online music piracy through P2P networks. You can read it and see it on their site. The camera crew came out and shot about 3 hours of footage in and around our offices. In the end, it became about 25 seconds on TV. At one point the camera pans around the R&D area and there I am. Just before they cut to a shot of James with his headphones on, you see me talking to Nancy. 

+02:00 Total 05:15 July 2001 - Bay Area Backroads. We were at a San Jose Giants game. Sitting in almost the first row. Bob and Carolyn were there, so was Paul. A TV camera man and a woman with a microphone walked by in front of us. I threw my arms around my buddies and started swaying and singing "take me out the the ball game" with a big shit eating grin on my face. I got a smirk from the woman who said, "Nice try." They moved past us and up the stairs at the end. Oh well.

We laughed and I took some ribbing from my friends. All was forgotten when the camera crew reappears. The camera man shoulders his device and points it at us. The woman points a microphone in my direction and says, "ok, let's have it." Indeed! All five of us lit up for a rousing rendition. After that the woman comes close and asks a few questions about why we come to the games. I put on my best HP "excited to be here" face and starting slinging hash. I remember at one point I held my hands out expansively and said, "it's like you can reach right out and touch the players." Right.

Well, we made the episode. More than we expected. While the camera pans the field and the host is making small talk about the San Jose Giants, you can hear us singing in the background. Eventually the camera catches all of us singing as we do the human wave. I get some excellent face time, mono e mono with the camera. Seeing the episode several people have remarked, "she doesn't really know the words, does she?" You can see that after "take me out to the ball game" she's faking it.

+00:15 Total 03:15 June 2001 - The San Jose Mercury News has a fantastic food section. I read it religiously and often make great recipes from there. Some of the best have ended up on this web site. One day a month ago I read a little notice that they were looking for BBQ recipes. I went home and whipped up a little ditty about Jim's Fast Dino Bones. I haven't made these in years, but it used to be one of my favorites. I remembered the times and ingredients as best I could. I made the recipe chatty, I gave it what I thought was a catchy title, and I even added an option for getting them to the table faster. It worked. In June I found myself mentioned in the Merc News. I don't know how to count mentions in print, so I'll just give it 15 seconds. That seems fair.

+03:00 Total 03:00 October 1995 - This isn't really fame, but maybe it counts until my fame counter gets closer to 15, then I'll deprecate this one. Until then... It was Interex, the HP3000 User Group. I was managing one of the OS R&D lab sections, about 50 people worked for me. David Green needed a bunch of footage to put on the hotel's in-house TV station. In those days HP was cutting investment in the HP3000 - cutting? let's say slashing. On TV, I waxed philosophically about how much fun we were all having supporting our customers (true) and even though we had tons of people at the show, there were still tons of people back in Cupertino working on the next version (I think we left one person behind to answer the phones.).