Blog of Auzigog – Jeremy Blanchard

I have been a nerd my entire life. I started designing websites in grade school and I have only been sucked further and further down the rabbit hole since. I have been part of the online nerdy community for quite a while, but it’s not too often that I get to interact with my geeky brethren in person. This past weekend was my first excursion into that community and I must say that I had a blast.

My boss, Jon Steinhart, has a party at his house every summer and invites all of his friends, coworkers, etc. Little did I know, Jon has built up quite a list of contacts in the tech world in his time.

I brought my friend Kris with me to share in the nerdiness. We got to the party early and helped Jon fuse some fireworks for the big show later that night. People showed up slowly and after the fireworks were done, Kris and I took a walk around Jon’s property and vineyard. By the time we got back to the house, there were around 60 people there!

Jon loves to talk about our project and he kept pulling me into conversations as he was telling people about it. That lead to me meeting some very interesting (AKA nerdy) people.

QuarkXPress guy

The first guy I met was actually the father of a girl who is going to the University of Oregon next year. After talking to them for a while, I discovered he used to be a developer on QuarkXPress, a page layout program. It turns out he was the programmer who put a well-known easter egg (hidden/fun feature) into the program. The easter egg involves pressing ALT+CTRL+SHIT+K and a little alien comes out and blows up your box for you (sound effects included!). It has been well documented. Adobe’s page layout program even paid tribute to this with their own alien spaceship easter egg.

In later versions of the program, a bigger alien comes out and blows up your box and the littler guy. After talking to this guy for a while, I found at that his son had drawn both aliens. He said his son was even in a QuarkXPress class in high school and he tried telling his classmates that he was the artist, but no one believed him!

Ronabop: Original Developer of PHP

The QuarkXPress guy had carpooled with Ronald Chmara. After talking for a while, Rob told me he was one of the thirteen original developers of PHP. PHP is the programming language I use every day and the same one that generates a majority of the websites you view on the internet. To get an idea of what kind of a guy he was, let me just say that he was wearing a kilt and told me at one that he usually dons a trench coat. Better yet, here are some photos. He was a cool guy and after his fourth cup of wine, we had some good discussions about the programming language.

The Apple Guy

There was a guy there who said he worked at Apple on iWeb, their WYSIWG website creation tool. He was, of course, sporting a brand new iPhone. He was practically a walking advertisement for it and was throwing out packaged statements like “you can also view your online photo albums. You know, for when you want to show off pictures of the kids.” I must say though, the iPhone looked pretty cool.

Saul Wold: Senior Staff Engineer for Sun Microsystems

Saul Wold is someone I’ve actually known for a while. We met in a chat room during a Woot!-off and he introduced me to Jon in the first place. Saul works for Sun Microsystems and previously worked on the Java Virtual Machine. Java is the programming language that most universities use to teach computer science to students (including myself).

People I didn’t meet

There were a few people I didn’t meet, but that were there. Most notably, Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, was there. I also saw young, hip tech guy from Mozilla.

All-in-all, I had a great time! I have no doubt that I’ll know just as many semi-famous nerds when I’m having summer parties years from now.

Computers, Life, Programming