DrunkenBlog

My issue of MacTech is out, and um, I'm on the cover...

A few days ago I heard that my interview in MacTech Magazine is out. I know, this was awhile ago, and it was supposed to be the 'next' one, but apparently they got a little behind, as their June 2005 issue didn't hit until past the middle of July. Apparently they got behind on their issues or something.

They said they'd send me a dozen copies or the other day, and yesterday I heard they'd come in (By the time I got there, there were two packages from them; looks like they sent them via speedy delivery, which was really cool of them) so I ran over and proceeded to tear them open like it was Christmas morning.

I snapped a few shots so you'd know what you were looking for when you hit Barnes and Nobles, if you're not a subscriber to the magazine, as it's the only retail place I'm aware of that carries it...

Now, of course you're going to want to pick it up, but after skimming it I do have a few notes. The good, the bad, and the neither...

• You get to see two of the site's mascots in print, which is a first and something you can actually hold and pet. This is so cool. To my knowledge, the site has now been on TV, podcasts, a newspaper, and now a magazine. Perhaps its time to shut her down.

• You get to have an idea of what it's like to hang out and poke me about things like open source QuickTime, Growl, Doctor Who, intellectual property and KHTML (Sigh, the good thing about print is you can pet it; bad thing about print is its timeliness), among others. *Shrugs* We bounce around through so much, via the law of averages there has to be something that's of value in it.

• This thing is huge, to the point where I almost feel guilty. This isn't a big font, and we're talking 11 pages. The whole magazine is like 80 pages in total, ads included, and It's by far the largest thing in there. Anyone who enjoys me, or perhaps even tolerates me, will be tickled; I'm sure a select few will be nonplussed. Hopefully no subscriptions will be canceled over this.

• So, lets say you really want a copy, and have no Barnes and Nobles around you, or yours doesn't carry it. You can go and subscribe via their trial offer thing, and the Editor said if a readers subscribes, but for some reason doesn't get the issue with The Cow, email him [after removing the NOSPAM] and he'll take care of it. That's a pretty cool offer when you think about it.

• The odds of this happening again are fairly low, and I'm sure one day once the editor wakes up from his binge he'll completely wig out when people tell him he approved this, so it's almost sure to become a collectors item.

I'm somewhat joking a bit above, but this is just the kind of thing you will probably rarely see and it'll be interesting to see if they get any reaction from it. It's pretty much unlike anything you'd see in any magazine outside of Rolling Stone or something, let alone a hardcore niche technical magazine, and they deserve some props there.

I mean, we're talking:

1. MacTel Editorial
2. Getting started with PHP and MySQL
3. Insert ramblings of some guy named drunkenbatman
4. QuickTime Toolkit
5. Life with SQLite
6. AppleScript Essentials
7. Etc., etc., etc...

I'm told their reader base is over 30k, so I'm counting on at least 5,000 WTF?'s being uttered in cubicles and johns everywhere over the next month.

• Be aware that it goes a little bit over the top in terms of marketing itself, as you can probably tell by the title on the cover, which could be an allusion to something I talk about in the interview, or that I'm the second coming, which is exacerbated by my claiming to be a God within the first page. In my defense, that banter took place at the end of the interview after we'd talked about unrelated things. In their defense, they put 'drunkenbatman' on the cover, and they have to figure out how the hell to sell that.

• I learned that in some magazines the word 'shit' or others are acceptable (There are quite a few, as I was just informed by a reader) yet 'fucking' is not, but to be fair shit was used as a demonstrative pronoun while fucking was used as an adjective which may or may not be relevant. This has no bearing on anything, I'm just fascinated by swearing, frames of reference, and what is offensive and why and such.

• They used my real name, which is a bummer, because they specifically said they wouldn't and it was one of my conditions for doing it. 'drunkenbatman' is used on the cover (Had no idea it'd be on the cover, which is amusing), but once inside, there is my name in a great big font. Sigh.

• There are a bunch of other errors in it, which are going to confuse some people. I only skimmed, but already I could see one place where the interviewer's initials are by something I said (SAMBA).

• People are going to get even more confused by some of the text, which isn't really a fault per se, and somewhat amusing in and of itself if you're looking for it. I.E., the original chat was 16,000 words, and while they were able to get the space extended from 6k to 10k words, it got edited pretty hastily due to time constraints.

  I know I got my copy of the edited-down version the day I had to send it in, with only a small window to look at it, which really only left time to find really obvious things. So, its a little chopped up, and when I just start going on about something that seems completely unrelated, the question probably got chopped but the answer to it didn't, etc. Don't be too hard on them, this is harder than it looks.

  I don't think anyone has a real idea of how much work goes into one of my interviews, and the interviewer (Dean Shavit) had more text to deal with than I usually do, in a different format, and apparently I popped his cherry when it comes to interviews, and as you can tell in the interview I wasn't always gentle.

Little things aside, all is forgiven for putting 'drunkenbatman' on the cover, capitalized or not, which I had no clue they were going to do. That's going to raise a few eyebrows, and well, what computers are missing are the eyebrows.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    July 22, 2005, at 09:19 PM