The Popular Science of the 21st century, Oreilly’s Make magazine and blog are must reads for geeks. After perusing the site, I generally feel inspired and really really slow (though I’m still not sure why I should be wanting to give a roach an exoskeleton no matter how cool it is).

So I’m geekily excited to see that Philip Torrone at Make has linked to my post on “hacking” into the U10 interface.

I just got back to my desk, so I thought I would write a quick summary of the Tom Cruise event.

It wasn’t a bomber, it was a fighter. Specifically it was a P-51 Mustang. No wonder Katie was flying in the other plane!

Once he got there he apologized for keeping us waiting, and clearly seemed to feel somewhat bad about it since he repeated his apology several times scattered throughout the talk. As you might guess, the event was well choreographed, and there were no hard questions. He was there as a favor for Terry Semel (Semel said before Tom Cruise got there that he was not being paid to be there) and to promote his new movie, Mission Impossible 3. You have to admit though that it must have been a lot more about the first reason than the second. Talking to about a thousand Yahoo!’s is probably not his most efficient promotional work ever.

The really fascinating thing was the conversation between Tom and Terry (just got a mental image of Terry Semel as a mouse). They’ve clearly worked together a lot during Semel’s time as head of Warner Movies. The praise went both ways, but then they started talking about their vacations together. Terry told a really funny story about a trip that their two families took several years ago during a break in the filming of Eyes Wide Shut. Apparently Stanley Kubrick who was a genius, but a controlling genius, didn’t want Cruise to go on a vacation during the two year shoot.

Kubrick’s fears ran the gamut from having his star come back with a sun tan, to being attacked while at sea a la the plot of the movie Dead Calm. For those not familiar with Dead Calm, a couple out on a cruise comes to the aid of a ship in distress. They help the person on the other boat who then kills them. After finally relenting, Kubrick let them go on their cruise. A few days into it Terry noticed smoke on the horizon while they were eating breakfast (apparently Cruise is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs) which turned out to be a ship on fire. Terry went on to describe his feelings as Cruise took a smaller boat to check on the passengers of the other boat, and the even stronger feelings as Cruise came back towards the boat with the folks from the other boat.

Some other notable moments were where Cruise made a bit of fun of himself by saying that his excitement about his upcoming child with Katie Holmes (who looks about ready to pop) made him almost want to jump up on the chair (which he then did to the applause and laughter of everybody). Mostly though he promoted his new movie and showed some good clips, and talked about shared stories with Terry Semel. I feel like I learned a bit more in the end about our CEO than I did Tom Cruise, but that is OK, I’m honestly more interested in Semel since he has such a bigger impact on my daily life.

Both Tom and Terry hinted at some exclusive marketing around Mission Impossible 3, but given that this wasn’t really a confidential event clearly weren’t going to get into specifics. It wouldn’t surprise me though. Yahoo! really can offer some impressive advertising possibilities, and movie studios haven’t been shy about using them.

My boredom is now your boredom.

Oops… Tom Cruise didn’t land just then (a half hour ago). he landed just now. Katie landed then. She took a different plane. Why? He flew a World War 2 era bomber. In this weather. Terry Semel is up on stage talking about his flight yesterday which took twice as long as normal. Apparently the bomber is so much smaller that SJC airport is even having trouble finding him on their instruments.

Terry is telling some personal stories about his interactions with Tom Cruise and showing us clips of his work. I hadn’t realized that Cruise had helped out Yahoo! adding a bit of celebrity to our showings at CES.

So right after I hit publish, someone came up to give an announcement that Tom Cruise just… um… LANDED. Scientology isn’t the only thing evangelized at the meetings. I guess Travolta has been busy convincing Tom to fly himself places. Tom is flying his own plane up here and just landed. They claim he will be here in 15 minutes.

About five seconds after the announcement, everyone here mentally calculated how long it takes them to get to work from the airport. 15 Min. is just a bit optimistic. Following the announcement, people are filing out. The common quote on the way out: “BRB… I need my laptop.” As people try to hold their seat with just about any possession they have, others are trying to find better seats. As an optimistic show confidence in their fellow employees, many of the caffeine deprived have left their laptops as seat holders.

As for me, I’m just sitting here. Once I finish this post it will be back to Flash for me. Though I am ratcheting down my computers power consumption. This could be a while.

Doors opened at 10 AM for the Tom Cruise event at Yahoo!. I got to work around 9:45, picked the short line to get into the Urls cafeteria (multi-step pun… 1. think “Eat at Joe’s,” 2. now substitute “Eat at Earl’s,” 3. change the spelling and drop the “Eat at,” 4. chuckle). There was a bit of nervous chatter in the line over just how many seats fit in the cafeteria, and how many of the folks would get in. Some folks even lined up some time last night or in the wee hours of the morning to get in to the event.

The engineers started trying to calculate the number of seats, the PMs are calculating the negative productivity impact of the line, and I just kept trying to wake up. As things progressed, the lines swelled… from the middle. Funny thing with an event at a company you work at. You tend to recognize people in line. This is one of the few lines I’ve been in where I had to physically walk backwards a bit.

Once the lines started moving, everyone got in very quickly. Well provided you didn’t leave your badge on the coffee table (at this point Ray is reading this and dashing to the coffee table to check). I did indeed remember my badge today, though it isn’t out of the realm of possibility for me to forget. Unfortunately for others they were not so lucky and were bounced by Y! security.

This event is closed off to all but Y! badge holders. No friends, families or smuggled reporters, unless you count the see of laptops I see that are probably blogging this too. I’m looking at you Jeremy. Well, not really, but I assume you are in here somewhere.

So here we all sit (10:52 now). The presentation was supposed to start at 10:30. I’m sure he is just being fashionably late, so I’m very happy I have my laptop. I think I will wrap this up for now until he gets here. For now I am going to enjoy how one person standing up to stretch or take a picture gets people thinking that someone has spotted… him.

My partner Ray is a privacy expert and does a lot of advocacy for consumer privacy rights. He is also does a lot of thinking, talking and writing on the subject. His latest column for eSecurity Planet really captures the dawning reality of how ethically off-kilter Google is when it comes to privacy and got me thinking.

Often it seems the media just gets it completely backwards on privacy. In the one instance of Google demonstrably doing the right thing (though I think it was different business reasons temporally aligned with privacy), Google resisted the government’s request for search data. The media and the market took Google out to the woodshed for that one. In every other case though they have had very few consequences for their privacy blunders.

On privacy, Yahoo! has often been treated strangely by the media. There was a much-publicized incident about a year ago when Yahoo! refused to hand over the email of a dead Marine to his parents. Throughout the process Yahoo! was vilified as being hard-hearted, and sometimes even unpatriotic. Against the public consensus, I was really proud of Yahoo! that day. Yahoo! has a privacy-friendly policy and despite the dramatic nature of the circumstances we held to it. This is what you should want a company doing for you.

My take on the situation is that Yahoo! shouldn’t be in the business of deciding who to give YOUR email to. The correct process was for the parents to go through the probate court and get the proof that satisfied Yahoo!’s policies. They did just that and got their son’s email. Upon taking legal possession of their son’s estate, Yahoo! should comply with the request for the email. And they did. Hurrah, the system works and we get to keep our privacy.