…on Portland On Fire.

In writing my bio for Portland on Fire, I mentioned that I’d hidden my first name upside down in the “Read Me” file icon used on Macintosh during the late 1980’s: millions of people clicked on this icon to get help, and as far as I know, none of them noticed my name. The Wikipedia page for TeachText (the application I’d written which provides this icon) doesn’t mention this trivia (nor that I wrote it!).

After several years, TeachText was replaced by SimpleText, written by Tom Dowdy; Tom rightfully replaced my name with his; I’m just happy he kept the same style of icon. (I do rib Tom that TeachText was only 19K, where SimpleText was several times that in size.)

UPDATE: Sadly, I learned recently that Tom passed away. I’ll miss him: like many people I got to work with at Apple back then, he was smart and fun. I looked forward to seeing him every year at Apple’s developer conference, where we shared the distinction of being the only “Stump the Experts” experts who’d attended every session of that panel over the years.

The Portland International Film Festival is finally over, and though I’m exhausted from the arduous schedule I kept (I saw every film I could – 70 features and 4 collections of shorts), I had a great time — even better than last year, largely because of the wonderful collection of people I met during the festival.

One of the best perks of Silver Screen membership at the Northwest Film Center (which puts on PIFF) is the ability to attend the press screenings that begin a couple of weeks before the festival’s official start: seeing the two press screenings each day opened up a lot of slots during the official festival. A nice side effect was that there were a bunch of other die-hards who attended most of the press screenings too, and since we’d all seen the same things already, we tended to make the same choices of festival screenings as well.

I also met several people who introduced themselves as users of FestivalFanatic.com, the site I created to manage my own schedule. It was also nice to see strangers carrying printed schedules produced by Festival Fanatic (note to those folks: improving schedule printing is near the top of my to-do list!).

Incidentally, the schedule for San Jose’s Cinequest festival is up on FestivalFanatic.com now, for my Bay Area friends who’ll be attending.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d been working on a film festival scheduling site, FestivalFanatic.com. Though it went live then, it really hasn’t been useful without any festivals configured.

As of this morning, though, it now has the Portland International Film Festival schedule in it, and nearly everything I wanted in the first release is working — the notable exception being automatic scheduling, which I hope to finish in a day or two.

It’s been hard to find time to work on Festival Fanatic, though, because I’ve been attending press screenings for the past week and a half (two a day), plus there’s been two Portland Center Stage events and Ignite Portland. Starting tomorrow, it gets worse: there are still press screenings during the day, and the regular festival screenings in the evening. I’m really glad my push for 1.0 is done!

(A shout-out to my pals going to Cinequest, the San Jose film festival: I need to get their printed schedule to enter it. Volunteer to send me one in a comment, please!)

Gina and I went to Ignite Portland 2 tonight, a collection of 5-minute presentations where the slides advance automatically every 20 seconds.

That misses the essence, though: there were a huge variety of subjects, amazingly good (and passionate!) presenters, and a wonderful community feel (even with the Bagdad Theater packed with 700+ people).

You can watch the videos, and whet your appetite for next time (I’m ready already!).