Berkeley Blog

Populist Programmer: Bill Atkinson

Last night at the Berkeley Cybersalon at the Hillside Club, Raines Cohen moderated and hosted a discussion with Bill Atkinson, creator of HyperCard, the program from Apple that let ordinary people put together data, images, and sounds via simple stacks. It was the 25th anniversary of HyperCard, and many in the audience were early users and promoters. One person, a stained glass maker, was still using HyperCard -- on a salvaged MacPlus -- to run his business.

Physically spry, Atkinson effervesced like an uncorked Champagne bottle about his newest program, which creates and actually sends custom postcards via the iPad. Atkinson proclaimed his original motivation for HyperCard: "I am a populist. I want everyone to be empowered."

This statement was vetted by an enthusiastic response from the crowd, which included writers. musicians, hardware builder and attorney Dan Kottke, IT consultants like Harold Mann, MacWeek editor Dan Ruby and MacWeek HyperCard columnist Steve Michel, a handful of former General Magic employees including Google VP Megan Smith, and community organizers like Raines who built a database of BMUG users with HyperCard. The general sentiment was that HyperCard turned the Macintosh into a creative tool for the activist as well as the artist. 

Barbara Tien, founder of Ponga, who drove your carless correspondent home, said she was glad that Atkinson, a true pioneer in computing, was getting the recognition he deserved. "I wish there were more events like this celebrating HyperCard's 25th anniversary."

For those who missed out on Atkinson's revelations, including his close, four-year friendship with Steve Jobs, check out Fora.tv, which will post a video of the event later this month.

 

 

Forgotten Nightmares; Food Trucks in Berkeley?

I have nothing against our Paleolithic predecessors or Paleolithic artists, but watching 90 minutes of 32,000-year-old cave drawings in Werner Herzog’s new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is more nightmare than dream. Herzog can turn anything into a movie. With a little original music and 3D glasses, like the kind you need to see Cave, Herzog could make a tour of my bathroom into a Cave of Forgotten (Wet) Dreams. He’d expose the century-old plumbing and imagine to what uses it had been put by its now forgotten inhabitants.

My litmus test for good art is not knowing who did it or where it came from. One of the triple-horse paintings in Cave wasn’t half bad – in fact it resembles some of the sketchings I did in my fifth-grade art class. But to spend at least 15 minutes going over and over this drawing because it was done by people we know nothing about a really long time ago is like shooting a single arrowhead discovered by a Boy Scout expedition in Montana over and over again.

There are lots of extraneous people in this film, like the perfume “master” who smells holes in this southern region of France, the Ardeche, to see if there might be a hidden cave around. This guy was neither charming nor informative, but maybe Herzog was trying to fill in the time before returning to the horse paintings. As in all of Herzog’s “documentaries,” the filmmaker takes mythopoetic license with the facts, such as suggesting that the footprint of an 8-year-old boy next to that of a wolf might have ended in the wolf eating the boy or they might have been friends (a la Disney). After nodding off at least three times during the film (Each time, the guy snoring behind me woke me up.), I would encourage all insomniacs to throw away their drugs and just watch this film anytime they want a good sleep.

Food Trucks Invade Gourmet Ghetto

Last week the City of Berkeley lifted its prohibition against food trucks and allowed them to park a few hours along the strip known as the Gourmet Ghetto. Thousands of people turned out and there was some grumbling from the restaurants along the way, which include Chez Panisse, Cesars, and Saul’s Deli.

To me, food trucks are like bloggers. They offer tasty morsels that are geared for specific tastes. They are also cheaper, and service is far faster than in a sit-down restaurants. And they stimulate the economy by allowing cooks who couldn’t afford to set up a restaurant a chance to sell their stuff. What's there not to like?

 

Bad Apples

No, I'm not talking about the latest model of Macintosh computers but the way apples have been converted into high-priced snack food through highly industrialized processes, as described in an article  by Jon Mooallem in today's NY Sunday Times magazine. To make apples palatable to the hurried and harried  middle-class American, several companies have developed a way of slicing and preserving apples for long-term consumption as a snack food. Like the once lowly but healthy potato, apples are transformed into potentially high-calorie vehicles for dipping into cesspools of chocolate sauce.

Maybe I'm a food Luddite, but I find  such technological culinary advances the bane of modern civilization. I just placed a microwave given to me by a former boyfriend on the curb outside, with a post-it that says FREE, because I found it easier to reheat soup and oatmeal in a little pot than stick in a microwave for a few minutes, constantly opening the door to stir and try to get some uniform distribution of heat. Yes, I know a wood fire might cook food even better, but burning trees is not a sustainable way of life.

For most of my life, apples have been getting worse and worse. When I was young, one ate apples only when they were in season, in the summer and early fall. When I lived in France one winter, I ate wizened yellow apples that had been stored in cold cellars and these were the sweetest, crispest apples I've ever tasted. Now, I never buy Delicious apples from Washington because they usually taste like sawdust and are never delicious even if they have some crunch. The best apple I had was a sour, worm-infested apple I picked from a tree during a long bicycle ride when I was starving and hadn't brought any food with me. To my stomach it was food, and to my tongue it was essence of apple, even though, in truth, it was a very bad apple.