Revenge of the Nerds Meets Son of Sting



'Tis nearly the end of Apple's World-Wide Developer Conference. This year it was held in San Francisco at the brand-spanking new Moscone Worst, er "West," which made for a week of hellish commuting to and from San Francisco, lots of climbing up and down Moscone Worst's three massive floors trying to get to the different session rooms on time, and a lot of really bad food.

The information though, which is rightfully the star of the show, was really outstanding. Panther is going to be an amazing upgrade to OS X even if the "brushed metal look" is overused. The Safari WebKit framework, which lets developers embed Safari-style web browsers right in their apps for free, simply rocks! And XCode with its new object-binding capabilities and Controller class that saves developers mucho efforto writing glue code for their Models and Views is just awesome stuff!

So tomorrow is the end of this geek extravaganza and as usual, tonight Apple is hosting its traditional huge party for the developers on its corporate campus in Cupertino, CA. The entertainment is a new rock band named Fiction Plane, which features Sting's son on bass guitar. It's really funny though, the lead singer sounds just like Sting! Same pitch, tenor, and vocal stylings. This must be a phenomenon of bands formed by the children of famous rock stars because it's not the first time I've noticed it.

My friend Rick (Cheap Trick) Nielsen's son has his own band, Harmony Riley, and their lead singer often sounds remarkably like Cheap Trick's lead singer, Robin Zander. It kind of breaks the typical image of rebellious youth doing all they can to differentiate themselves from their parents, but hey, on the other hand it's nice to see offspring (not the band) who like and respect their parents enough to give them the sincerest form of flattery.

And as for Fiction Plane and son of Sting? They were pretty good...and thankfully didn't do a cover of "Roxanne!"

Posted: Thu - June 26, 2003 at 09:38 PM          

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