This was my first earthquake experience - and (for some reason) I was attracted to the sight of plumes of (what looked like) smoke, rising from all the buildings out our windows. In fact those were dust clouds, created from shaking the red bricked old buildings in our neighborhood.

Little did I know that the last thing in the world one does during an earthquake is go stand by a wall of windows and glass. Someone yelled at me to get down, which I did - recalling images of "ducking for cover" to hide from the Commies atomic attack - which never appeared in the late 50's.

Our CFO was lost in a cloud of that dust smoke, and I could feel the building teetering from side to side - which was held together by huge steel cables - that were wrapped around the building, like some huge roast beef or brown paper package. The red bricked walls all leaked mortar dust and when it all settled, I realized I was finally a true Californian.

We were lucky. Others were not.

We soon found out that less than 100 yards away a building had collapsed, killing 6 people. 2 of those people had just been in my office, discussing releasing the first ever CD ROM bundled with a magazine with me. It was the brainstorm of a MacUser editor named John Andersen - who now has a scholarship program named in his honor.

Across town BigDave's TV set was flying from one side of his apartment to the other and flames were engulfing homes in the Marina district. He had to manually push his car out of the neighborhood - before he could turn it on - as there were so many gas leaks.

One of our programmers helped people get out of their cars on the Cypress Expressway in Oakland, which had collapsed. He stayed there for over 24 hours, until he dropped of exhaustion himself.

Most of the company came up to our house on Potrero Hill - and called their loved ones and family. We had crystal and valuables still on the shelves, as the bedrock of Potrero Hill had withstood the 7.9 Richter scale quake.

My ex and I immediately got a plane a couple of weeks later and flew to Europe. There we got pregnant with our first child - Aryeh and enjoyed life - as it was clear how close we came to losing it.

While in London we shot a sequence for Max Whitby's "Hyperland" documentary on cyber-technology and culture - only to find out later I was left on the cutting room floor in the final edit. My sequences were lit differently than everyone else's - and "Oh well" - I never made it into the film. If only the earthquake hadn't struck. Max would have shot me in SF, John Andersen would still be alive and I'd STILL be waiting to experience a REAL earthquake. That said - it was all kind of fun, in a weird sort of way.

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There is a process I go through when developing new ideas - that I picked up subconsciously from my friend Miles Gilburne. About twice a year Miles shows up in my life, when he comes through town. I'd like to think that he's here to keep me in the inner loop of his megalomaniac vision of the world - which we first bonded on in the summer of 1987. I was at the Claremont hotel in Berkeley winning one of many awards we achieved from the SPA (Software Publishers Association.) Miles comes up to my room, we 'bond' and by 2 in the morning, MacroMind had venture capital funding.

Miles' and I have a shared dream - of a digital economy, where content, communication and commerce all freely flow through the fiber infrastructure - that (at the time in 1987) was still only a dream. We now have the infrastructure in place and Miles helped create AOL TW - but our dream is still pretty elusive. Nowadays, I think Miles just sits on the sidelines and watches Ted Turner yell at Gerry Levin and other new types of fun activities. But this is all tangential to what I want to say about 'pitch rehearsing'.

Miles has this rhetorical style, where he'll go over a new idea, a venture, a project, a 'pitch' - like a well crafted speech, poem or soliloquy. He dances and dodges through complex ideas, premises and assumptions, using his hands and body language to express the balance between yin and yang, market forces and inevitable trends that - when properly manipulated - can achieve results favorable to his 'scam'.

Whatever that may be.

He uses language and these 'pitches' to rehearse himself - running over the concepts, principles and 'goals' - making sure he hasn't left anything out. He rehearses and pitches me these scams - over and over again - every time we meet - as I'm sure he does with many others. What happens is that I challenge, agree or ignore whatever my gut reaction tells me to - and this all goes into Miles' giant 'cognitive database' of reality. This technique enables him to tweak, refine and iterate his scams - constantly fine tuning them into operational plans.

He often quizzes me on the state of the 'developer' community. Or what it takes to build a dynamic web site or streaming media server. He uses me to keep tabs on the hackers, the underground, the world where his 'boardroom' eyes can never penetrate. What Miles figured out early on - was that even his limited technical knowledge and insights were miles ahead (no pun intended) of the white male schmucks who were leading corporate Amerika. He deduced that if he could convince these schmucks that he was a technical expert, he'd be able to advise and lead them through the labyrinths of technology development, leading to new products, services and functionality. And BTW I'm sure he does it with many others besides me.

Miles exists at the inter-section of the corporate mentality of market manipulation and the hacker mentality of 'anything can be done' - with enough money and resources. I watched Miles do this with John Doerr at MacroMind board meetings. I saw him do this at Kalieda Labs scamming both Apple and IBM simultaneously. And I'm sure this is what he did at AOL - which eventually led him to dreaming up the forming of AOL TW.

It's this 'pitch rehearsing' technique (and his megalomaniac dreaming) that I picked up - from Miles. For every tip, hint and insight I pass him - I glom onto another dream, scam or insight he has. We trade insights, vision and megalomania - like others trade baseball cards or comic books. Miles and I bond at the hip, yet he almost completely ignores us - checking in twice a year. It's that sort of weird, fate based intuition that keeps me going - keeps me dreaming of a...............

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The time year was 1972. My best friend Raul and I - had gotten our hands on one of the original 'portable' video camera setups - know as a 'Porta-Pack'. This deck (weighing about 25 pounds) had 5" reel-to-reel videotapes on it - and actually enabled videographers (which was a completely new concept at the time) to VIDEOTAPE something - with a clunky, very funky B&W camera - about the size of a small vacuum cleaner.

We had schlepped all this gear down to the 1st National Bank in downtown Chicago and we were shooting the unveiling of the Chagall mosaic - an incredible public wall, which over 200 types of colored glass, rock and stones - that Chagall had created by commission for the new 1st National Bank building.

The choir that I sang in - the Chicago Children's Choir - was the entertainment, which partially enabled us to get a good view - and nobody less than Chagall himself was there, sitting next to the almost dead Mayor Richard J. Daley. We ended up getting some great footage (even though our B&W video didn't do justice to the colored mosaic wall) and we learned a lot about editing and producing documentaries.

My biggest memory in editing was that you had to manually rewind the video reels, guestimating where they will be in the sequence - when they had achieved full speed, and were ready to be 'edited' in. This crude shoot or miss technique stuck with me - throughout my early videogame, laser light show, videodisc days - always reminding me on how far digital technology had taken us from 'those analog' days. We always assumed that thumbnail images representing video clips would be the preferred metaphor to be used in editing video. Little did we know that a company name Montage was patenting that technique and would hold up for ransom any and all companies daring to use such a proprietary technique.

Imagine a thumbnail representation of a video sequence! Now that's proprietary technology for you. God bless the patent lawyers.

NOT.

The images I have left in my brain are zooming into Chagall's face as he watched the crowd and the choir sang in the background. Chagall's years of work, life and struggle were seen in the wrinkles of time - that amazingly looked allot like the same wrinkled face of Mayor Daley. However as the camera panned down these two men's bodies - it revealed their two feet, Chagall tapping to the beat of the music (I think it was a Gospel song) while Daley's toes couldn't keep a beat - to save his life.

There it was - art versus government, life versus power, truth versus evil - in all it's sublime obviousness.

Of course we lost those tapes and all evidence of that documentary and Raul and I later went onto pitching the Museum of Science and Industry to build a geodesic dome with slide shows and smell-generators inside - but that's for another chapter.

But one final sidenote. The place where we got the video equipment and used the editing facilities - was called Videopolis - and was housed in the complex that later became the Metro (the home of Chicago House music - in the 80's.)

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Mimi has learned a new trick. She squelches, yelps and groans - trying out a new found technique of pushing air through her larynx, making sounds and 'words' - just like her mommy and daddy. She sits in her saucer, attempting to coordinate the movement of her arms with her hand opening and closing - like some dumb, misprogrammed robot arm. You can literally watch her brain synapses forming, creating more and more of a little girl. Daddy's little girl.