And now for something completely different... While I was up late last night fighting a bout of insomnia, I was flipping through the channels when, lo and behold, the image of Steve Jobs appeared before my bleary eyes. C-SPAN was showing Steve's speech during some sort of broadcasters' meeting that took place at the end of March, where he discussed Pixar's upcoming feature film, "A Bug's Life," and talked about Pixar's plans for the future. (For those of you who are so focused on the Apple soap opera that you tune out the rest of the world, Pixar is Steve Jobs' animation company, best known for its blockbuster smash "Toy Story;" Pixar is also the primary reason that Steve is still only Apple's "interim" CEO instead of the permanent head honcho.)

Overall, it was an interesting presentation, and I was happy to hear Steve's encapsulation of the plot of "A Bug's Life," and even happier to see a clip from the upcoming film. I'm not sure it'll do as well as "Toy Story," but it certainly looks like it'll be a blast nonetheless. Apparently Pixar spends three hours rendering each frame of these movies. At 24 frames a second, and perhaps ninety minutes per movie, that adds up to about 44 years' worth of solid computing (broken up across multiple computers, obviously-- Steve presumably didn't start work on "Toy Story" in the early 50's). According to Steve, Pixar actually spends four years on each movie, though they're going to be releasing one movie a year. Interesting stuff.

Because Steve had, for the moment, completely defined himself solely as the head of Pixar, it was surprisingly easy to forget about his other little job as interim CEO of Apple. Occasionally during the Q&A session at the end of the presentation I was reminded of that fact, however, as several audience members asked questions about Apple that had nothing to do with Pixar. Steve held his ground, and made it clear that he wasn't there to talk about Apple. And in response to a question about whether Pixar would be using Apple computers for their "render farms," he stated in no uncertain terms that Pixar is hardware agnostic-- they'll use whatever gets the job done, which, for the moment, appears to be several thousand Sun processors. All in all, I was very impressed to see that Steve Jobs appears to be doing an admirable job of running both Apple and Pixar, and of keeping those two roles separate and distinct. Not an easy task, by any means-- we suspect the man sleeps even less than we do.