Time for our weekly round-up of Mac sightings.
Spencer, the “world’s fastest hypnotist,” always talks about his Mac from the stage during his performances. He also has an Apple sticker on his equipment. Visit his Web site and you’ll see that he built his Web site with a Mac.
“Mr. Happy” Eddie Belfour of the Dallas Stars hockey team is a Mac man. There’s a photo on his Web site that shows him using an iBook. (Thanks to MacCentral reader, Robin Adams, for sending this our way.)
There’s a New York Times story about Mac OS X that Eric Welch, said you may wish to check out. But you’ll have to sign up for the (free) online subscription to do so.
Keith Soehn made a “Mac sighting” sighting on the Discovery Channel Canada Wednesday. Ivan Semeniuk, the host and producer of Discovery Connection and “Skylights” (the weekly astronomy column on @discovery.ca), was demoing some planetarium software on his PowerBook G3.
Monday evening, ABC World News had a story about the Japanese village of Yamada, in the Japanese Alps, which was “dying” until they became almost totally networked.
“Many scenes featured people from the village on the net and designing Web pages,” said Dagmar Nearpass. “Several older Macs were featured, and on the monitors, which were unrecognizable, the screen was definitely the Mac version of both Netscape and Explorer. Their venture has resulted in people actually wanting to move here, and children deciding to stay, rather than leave as soon as they are able. One scene featured students who looked as though they were maybe 10 surfing and being very computer savvy.”
On Tuesday evening, James Kiefer was watching “Unsolved Mysteries” and heard of a Mac-related mystery.
“One case they described was from 1992, when a man was selling his A/V equipped Power Mac 9500 and monitor for $30,000,” he said. “When delivering the Mac to the buyer (out of town) the seller was assaulted his companion was killed and the Mac stolen. They went into a fair amount of detail about the Mac describing it as being used in desktop publishing and video editing. I was notably impressed when during the reenactment they not only used a 9500, but in the scene showing the Mac being put in the buyer/robbers car they had an actual original PM9500 box. At the end of the segment they showed a photograph of the original system and asked people to call in if they had any information about it. Of course it looked indistinguishable from any other PM9500, I would love to know how many calls they got.”
(If you’ve sent us an item for our Famous People column, please be patient. It will appear, but we’ve been swamped with entries. If you know of a famous person using the Mac, send it to Yours Truly at dsellers@maccentral.com. If you want credit for your “Mac spotting,” be sure to include your full name.)