Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I think I'm scared of people.

I begin many months ago when I met Eddo Stern while he was out here giving a lecture for the FUSE: conversation conference. Prior to this meeting, I didn't know of his work and during his lecture/presentation something just clicked and it all made sense to me. Afterwards, I went up to talk with him and he was really distracted and kept talking with other people. I ignored this fact, but the when we met again the next day, he couldn't remember my name. Rebecca comforted my bruised (and pathetic, I might add) ego by suggesting that perhaps Eddo is the type of person who doesn't remember names and faces very well.

So I could live with that.

The rest of the week that he was around (we did a fancy dinner for the dude and a couple other things), I brushed off my inability to approach the guy to this factor: he just couldn't remember who I was, not that he didn't care to.

Fast forward to 01sj 2008. I've really been looking forward to seeing his portal piece since he explained it last fall. I believe the piece was commissioned for superlight, but it was passed off until the opening night for the festival because there was all kinds of miscommunication between the university, the city and the comission base. Whatever. So the night of the festival, I swing by to see the portal and Eddo is there finishing his beautiful taping job on the projector so it fits the portal's screen.

I walk up to him, already kicking down my ego so I know it's okay he won't remember me (I really don't think Kevin McCoy could remember me but he went with it anyway...) and when I walk up to him, he instantly recognizes me and gets that devilish glint in his eye. I say, "I didn't think you were going to remember me." He says, "Oh, no... you're that guy who steals other people's websites."

Beat.

I'm standing there thinking, "What in the world is this guy talking about and maybe he doesn't have a clue who I am anyways" when it dawns on me that maybe he's talking about how I ripped off line per line his entire website. You see, I'm a big fan of dirt code style, in the vein of Cory Archangel and Paul Slocum. But mostly I copied Eddo's website because it's simple, sleek, and because I'm a very lazy coder. But is that really what Eddo is talking about? How would he know about my website?

So we dance around this in the funniest way reasking each other questions in elusive ways until I finally get him to come out and say "you copy other people's sites, like mine..." and then we're on the same page. Then we just sat around and talked for a while.

Eddo -- if you're out there buddy -- I forgot to ask, how did you find my site? And I want to apologize for it being in a constant state of disrepair and inaccurate information. And I want to tell you the Portal looked amazing, I wish it could be a permanent fixture there. Bonus props to you and I'm sorry I doubted your memory. Cheers.