Today I actually attended two events with Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Dan Lyons). Both were in San Francisco
There's a pattern to these presentations is that Lyons follows, which is that instead of reading from the book, he simply talks about how and why he started doing Fake Steve Jobs, and the craziness that ensued in trying to figure out who Fake Steve Jobs was.
The first presentation at Stacey's Books was fairly low key -- with only about 20 people in attendance, a local photographer from a Bay Area newspaper was taking photos. I had actually arrived only a few minutes before he began, which resulted in me handholding the camera to tape the video footage. He starts by leading off with a recap of his Menlo Park event last night, and Andy Hertzfeld was also in attendance at Menlo Park, and the opening of Option$ is actually inspired from Hertzfeld's book Revolution in the Valley. Hertzfeld had read the begining of the book and said "Yeah, I recognize that story".
The second presentation, at 7:30pm at a Books Inc. in Castro Street was also low key -- unlike Menlo Park last night, which was packed with people, with not a chair leftover, there were seats available, but late arrivals instead huddled in the back, as the only seats left were the ones in the front. I didn't really like the layout of the area -- FSJ and I were basically in foot kicking range of each other. This event also had many faces of the blogosphere in attendance -- Ryan Block of Engadget, Veronica Belmont of Mahalo, Leander Kahney of Wired's Cult of Mac, as well as the much touted appearance of Bike Helmet Girl.
FSJ starts with a hello to Bike Helmet Girl, and a story of how Bike Helmet Girl came to be. He gives the story of how he started the blog, and how it became a book deal, as well as the hunt for Fake Steve. A lot of the information he uses to write the blog comes from readers who send him e-mail, and he tells the story of how he initially started calling Jonathan Schwartz of Sun "Ponytail Boy", but changed it to "My Little Pony" when someone from Sun wrote to him said "No, no, no we have a name for him, we call him My Little Pony".
Midway through his talk about how he started the blog, he sees Veronica Belmont and Ryan Block appear, and he's ecstatic:
Engadget Editor Ryan Block asks him a question on how he manages to channel Steve:
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