STORY
Meeting Leo Laporte at the InGenius Bar
Story/Meeting Leo Laporte at the InGenius Bar
- During the MacMania cruises, Neil Bauman had a great idea: he established a designated, unstructured hour each sea day for attendees to hang out and talk with the speakers. In a clever play on Apple's retail tech support, Neil dubbed this session the "InGenius Bar".
The Encounter
- During MacMania 3 in November 2004, TWiT founder and TechTV broadcaster Leo Laporte showed up at one of the InGenius Bar sessions.
- The room was very quiet, with just me and one or two other people sitting there.
- I knew exactly who Leo was from watching him on TechTV, but he did not know who I was.
- Leo looked over at me and casually asked, "So, who are you?"
- I replied that I was mostly a Perl and Mac guy, and mentioned that I wrote the Perl books—the Camel book, Llama book, and so on.
- Leo's eyes immediately lit up with shock, and he exclaimed, "Oh, you're RANDAL SCHWARTZ!"
- It turned out he had been actively reading my Learning Perl book back in Petaluma, California.
Legacy & FLOSS Weekly
- That introduction sparked a long and close friendship between us.
- Later, I nudged Leo to invite me onto his early free and open-source software podcast, FLOSS Weekly, appearing as a guest on Episode 9.
- This led to multiple appearances on Leo's Canadian show (Call for Help) and eventually paved the way for me to take over as the host of FLOSS Weekly, which I proudly hosted for 13 years (from 2010 to 2020 as lead).
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.