Continuing with the keynote theme (or "harping," as some of you may put it), we thought we'd field a request from the studio audience. Faithful viewer Juan Antonio wrote in asking that we describe the "intricacies of the digital camera fiasco at the keynote presentation," complete with all the "nitty gritty details." And a valid request that is; those of you who watched the event via webcast or even via direct satellite downlink probably missed a lot of the dramatic tension charging the air in those few dangerous moments. For a breathless minute or two, the smell of madness and blood hung in the air like a knife on a spiderweb, and that sort of thing just doesn't come across when the drama of a live event is filtered through pixels and scanlines before reaching your brain.

For those of you wondering "what fiasco?", clearly it's time to refill the Ritalin prescription. During Steve's demo of Mac OS X 10.1, he attempted to show how the new version of the operating system makes working with digital cameras so much easier; the idea is that when you plug a camera into a USB port, Mac OS X automatically launches a special application that sucks all your photos off the device and files them handily in your Pictures folder. That's what was supposed to happen; what did happen was a whole 'nother story, and it's not one you'd tell your kids before they go to sleep unless you're the sort of sadistic bastard that likes to hear children waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

Here's the crux: Steve couldn't turn the camera on. That's it; the evil seed from which so much melodrama sprouted. If this were a classic Greek tragedy, that would have been Steve's tragic flaw: not his ego, not his temper, but his inability to power up a consumer electronic gadget. For you see, Mac OS X couldn't do its thing unless the camera were actually on, and so an otherwise flawless demo was suddenly derailed by something as basic as a set of depleted batteries. Oh, the humanity!

What we're guessing didn't show up over the video feed was the look of burning hatred mixed with utter despair etched horrifyingly in Steve's normally easygoing visage. Similarly, you may not have picked up on the beads of terror-soaked sweat forming on his forehead as the man futilely jabbed at the camera in frustration much the way we imagine a member of the bomb squad fiddles with wiring as the timer hits the two-second mark. And we bet it just looked like Steve tossed the camera to a helpful person in the audience for assistance, right? Well, if you were there live, you would have borne witness to a desperate and murderous man hurling the nearest object with any heft at an innocent bystander who suddenly found himself the target of the blind rage of a CEO at the end of his tether.

At least, we think so. We're pretty much just assuming all this, because to be honest, we had such lousy seats for the keynote, we couldn't possibly have made any of that out. Still, it's what we choose to believe as the most likely scenario, just as we assume that the camera itself was sabotaged by minions of Bill Gates in a daring attempt to send Steve hurtling off the edge of sanity. After all, if none of this actually happened, then it really was a dull keynote, wasn't it?