Leo Up Late

I'm trying to contain my excitement, but I'm getting to pilot a new show tonight. We'll tape Leo Up Late (only the working title) tonight after The Screen Savers at about 9:30p Eastern. It won't be on the air, but you can still help out. It's going to be an hour and it will be much more like the old Screen Savers: all calls. Well mostly calls. We will have one guest, Steve Gibson, but he'll be there to answer calls with me, and that's only for a couple of segments. Morgan and Kevin will be on the show too, monitoring the calls and chat room, and they'll both pitch in a segment each on something they're really interested in. Morgan's going to show me a new phone. Kevin has some cool new Winamp visualizations. But the focus will really be on answering questions, and in a more leisurely manner, so I can be more thorough. I don't expect to get more than six calls on in the hour. I'll also answer some emails and faxes, too, though. It's going to be much less produced than TSS. I'm thinking of something like a call-in radio show, but on TV. There's some discussion about what level the questions should be, but I think that ultimately they'll cover the spectrum from intermediate to advanced. We'll pick calls that are of the broadest general interest, regardless of how high-end they are. We have some callers lined up already, and I'm not sure how many more we'll need, but if you'd like to help out, call during and after The Screen Savers tonight and let Morgan know you're interested in being on the pilot. I'm not getting my hopes up. I did a pilot a couple of months ago for a very high-end show featuring the leading lights of tech (Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Phil Zimmerman, Steve Wozniak, etc.) talking in-depth about their creations, but that was nixed as "too boring." Pilots these days have to get past the ownership in Seattle as well as local management, and that's pretty tough. Marty just completed his pilot for a late night tech humor show that's more outrageous and fun, and I expect that will get the green light because it's "entertainment," and that's the buzzword these days. I pray that The Powers That Be realize that TechTV needs to air at least one show a week that focuses directly on stuffs geeks want to talk about. They have to realize that we find the hardcore tech stuff most "entertaining." I'm going to give it my best shot and we'll see what happens. P.S. Actually we need email and faxes, too. Phone: 1-888-989-7879 Email: leo@techtv.com Fax: 415 437-569 And we'll be monitoring the chat room, as well, for people who want to be in there. The only problem is you won't really know what's going on on the show, but your questions and comments are more than welcome and may well be used on the pilot.

Spacey 'n' Me

I'm not usually star stuck, but it sure was great meeting one of my favorite actors. And he was so nice, too. Invited us all out for a drink after the show. I should have gone. Might have finally found out if he was really Keyser Soze.

Big Screen in the Big Apple

I'm back East in New Haven spending the Thanksgiving weekend with my wife's sister and her family. We had a lovely snowfall on Wednesday and the kids have been having a blast with their cousins. Tomorrow we'll take the train to New York City so that I can tape my World News Now segments on Sunday night and do Live! with Regis and Kelly on Wednesday. We're going to see The Lion King and we'll go ice skating at Rockefeller Center and do all the usual touristy Christmas in New York things. I'll try to do some video blogging while we're there. I've brought the Piano Avanti DLP projection TV with me. It's a dictionary sized projector that can handle DVI, RGB, HDTV, S-Video, and Component signals in native 780p. It's not the brightest projector in the world at 400 lumens, but with a 700:1 contrast ratio it looks darn good in a relatively dark room. I was able to get a good looking movie screen sized picture projected on white walls and sheets. We've screened Lord of the Rings, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Zoolander, and had a great time. I'll be showing it on WNN and Regis, but I wish I could keep it. At $3200 it's pricey, but I prefer it to a similarly expensive big screen TV, especially since you can pop it in a drawer when you're through. Wouldn't be very good for daytime TV viewing, though. Last week's pilot went very well. Thanks to those of you who called, emailed, and faxed. It was great to have all that material for the show. Morgan and Kevin were stars, and Steve Gibson was his usual fun and informative self. We put about 90 minutes on tape which Ken Marquis is now editing into a 12 minute highlight reel. I think everyone involved felt pretty good about what we got - even Paul Block liked it. It's a good representation of what I'd like to do, anyway. I forwarded a number of messages of support from you all to our new VP Programming. That should help. Now we'll just have to wait and see. I'd love to get started in early January. The Screen Savers officially goes back to an hour December 30, so that would be a good time to put another show into production, at least for me. We fly home Thursday and I'll be back on The Screen Savers Thursday evening. I'll be taking more time off for Christmas, December 16 through January 1. Maybe when I come back I'll have two shows to do. Wouldn't that be nice?

TechTV Chat

I'm still trying to figure out how to use TechTV chat with Mac OS X. There's something about OS X Java that chat doesn't like. As usual, the world caters to Windows users instead of adhering to standards which would ensure things work for everyone. Grumble, grumble. "Dual Athlon" Dave Plotts has taken the lead on figuring out how to get cross-platform Jabber clients working with the TechTV chat. You can read the results of his research on the Leoville message boards. He says several TechTV chat hosts are using JabberFox successfully with OS X. I had all sorts of problems with it on Friday night. The binary wouldn't download, and when I built it from the source code (which requires the Cocoa developer tools) it wouldn't log in. According to Dave's most recent posts, you have to either log-in first with the Java client, or have TechTV's Interact folks do some voodoo for you. THEN, and only then, the Jabber client will work. I'll try again on tonight's show with both JabberFox and Fire. It would be so great to be able to use a real chat client to communicate with viewers during the show.

I'm Doing Call For Help Today

A last minute programming note. I'll be filling in for Chris Pirillo today on Call for Help. Live at noon Pacific/3p Eastern. Tune in and call in, or Tivo if you have a day job.