For this panel, approximately 70% of the population of Hall A filtered out after X-Files went backstage, allowing us to snatch some seats up front.

As always, the trailer for the movie was shown, as well as some scenes from the movie. While they had originally intended to do Harold and Kumar in Amsterdam, there were too many Euro-trip comedy movies that were being released, and so they wanted to do something more topical, and so they changed the setting to Guantanamo Bay. All the post 9-11 Homeland security stuff gave them tons of material to work with.

Harold and Kumar will premiere at the International Asian American Film Festival in San Francisco. John Cho can't talk too much about Star Trek, since J.J. Abrams really wants things to surprise the audience.

The movie looks great, and the most important thing for the writers was that they wanted to portray Harold and Kumar as real people, like the ones that they grew up around, but also they wanted to make a movie that was just as good as the first movie.

Each panel in Hall A is split between two presentations, giving each presentation about a half hour to show the trailers/bonus material, and then time for a question and answer session. Howard Berger of the Prince Caspian Special Effects department was there to answer questions.

This panel began with the showing of the trailer, which included some incomplete CG shots -- the CG critters were smoothly rendered without the application of fur or hair, and the centaurs were just wireframes.

Questions in the session included "Do you hope to make them all?" (Yes) and which is your favorite character (Mr. Tumnus). Most of the post-production work is being done in New Zealand by WETA, and they're still working on finishing the movie.

For Wall-E, Andrew Stanton of Pixar "came all the way from Emeryville" (across the bridge, basically for all those who are not familiar with Bay Area geography) to show us the extended trailer of Wall-E, as well as three clips from the movie: Wall-E shows Eve his truck, Wall-E leaves Earth, and Wall-E on Eve's ship.

Talking about Wall-E, Stanton said that the inspiration for Wall-E came from Luxo Jr, the animated lamp in the first Pixar short, and also from him playing with binoculars at an Oakland A's game, in which he realized that you could attach emotion to the movement of the binoculars --happy, sad, happy, sad. Someone asked whether Johnny Five of Short Circuit had any influence on Wall-E's design, and the answer was that he saw the movie once. When designing Wall-E, Stanton said he didn't want a humanoid robot for Wall-E, he wanted a machine. The design of Wall-E was dictated by Wall-E's function; the box for his body is because he needs to compact the garbage, the treads are so that he can move over obstacles, and the eyes mainly came from the binoculars.

When asked what kind of story Wall-E is, Stanton replied "It's a love story", and hearing the crowd reacting with groans, he added "it's a good one!".

Wall-E is not intended to be a True-3D film -- the first one that will be is Toy Story 3.

Stanton said that he was totally geeked out working with Ben Burtt, who did most of the sound effects for Lucasfilm, who is now at Pixar, making sounds for Wall-E. Look for Pizza Planet in the first 20 minutes of the film, and John Ratzenberger has a speaking role in this film as well.

I picked up my badge on Thursday after my sessions at GDC, but on this rainy Saturday morning, WonderCon 2008 attendees (even those who had pre-registered) stood in a line that stretched down in front of Moscone South, and curved around the corner down Fifth Street. It was only ten-thirty, and the dealer's room (am I the only who still calls it that?) had only been open for a half-hour. I took a quick sweep around the show floor. WonderCon was already getting crowded, and I took off to find Hall A, where all the huge panels were going to take place. I searched the front, and finding nothing, took up a position behind the camera platform. Before the panel started, they aired a bunch of Star Wars fan films

The first panel of the day was 10,000 B.C., and they handed out 10,000 B.C. and Get Smart pins as we walked into the hall. The 10,000 B.C. trailer led off the panel, which was attended by director Roland Emmerich, and movie stars Camilla Belle and Steven Strait.

Someone from the audience asked Roland Emmerich why he likes to do movies with the whole "Chariots of the Gods" theme, and he says he like the idea of lost civilizations, how the evidence and the theories form an odd hybrid.

Also asked was whether or not the actors had a tough time working with the CG, and a pretty standard reply was given with all the drawbacks of working against a green screen.

I'm pretty tired from spending nearly the entire week at Moscone so I'm not writing up everything right away, but here are some highlights that you can look forward to reading about later:

• The long line that stretched down Fifth Street for registration.
  
• Camping out in Hall A for most of Saturday.
  
• Watching Steve Carrell chase away the photographers from the stage.
  
• Seeing the horde of people fill Hall A and camp just for X-Files.
  
• Feeling dejavu when Hall A filled up again for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
  

This was my first time seeing Cirque Du Soleil in person (I had previously seen Cirque Du Soleil's Journey of Man in an IMAX theater), so I wasn't quite sure what to expect; Journey of Man had little unintelligible dialogue, and I hadn't enjoyed it a great deal. Cirque Du Soleil was something that I'd been wanting to see live for a while; videorecordings don't do the performance justice -- there's a certain amount of splendor and impressiveness in seeing the actual performer bend themselves into forms you thought impossible, or seeing a stunt that is executed just 50 feet in front of you. There's dancing, there's acrobatics, and there are clowns, and while I found the second half to be far less impressive than the first half, I had a wonderful time -- I was mesmerized by everything.

Kooza is in San Jose until March 16. Discounts are available through Goldstar.

There's a couple of photography moments I try not to miss every year; one of them is the Mavericks Surf Contest. Mavericks is a contest that happens once a year, and because the sport depends on the weather conditions, it is held at a moment's notice; within 24 hours world class surfers from around the world arrive in Half Moon Bay to ride the waves. Last year, the conditions never got good enough for the contest to be held, but with the rains we've been having in the Bay Area, I knew it was going to be held soon.

The Mavericks Surf contest happens tomorrow, starting at 8am.

This year's waves look to be awesome. It's too bad I won't be here to attend, but Mavericks is webcasting it on MySpace and having a party at AT&T park. Since the surfing takes place about half a mile from the shore, without high powered optics or a spot on a boat, you probably won't be able to see much.

Last night, kwc and I caught a free preview showing of Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a story that takes place following the Cain story arc with flashbacks as appropriate filling in the gaps between the attack on the Colonies and Galactica.

Unlike a normal movie showing, because this was sponsored by Microsoft, we were subjected to ads from before, during and after the movie. After the movie, we saw ads from Sci-Fi Channel, including some scenes from the upcoming season (starts in 2008?), as well as more extended version footage from the Battlestar Galactica: Razor DVD.

We were subjected to this Microsoft Zune ad twice during the showing:

While I would be perfectly okay with never seeing this ad ever again, I think the ad exemplifies the difference between Microsoft Marketing and Apple Marketing. While Microsoft is more involved with the abstraction of what a music experience is like (in the Zune's case, it's a weird kind of acid trip with dancing pink bunnies), Apple is more concerned with keeping the product on the screen or showing off the features of the device.

The good folks over at Penny-Arcade launched Child's Play 2007 yesterday, their annual charity drive to raise money for children in hospitals. Each year, Child's Play has managed to shatter the previous year's record. Select a hospital, select a toy, and do good.

Today I actually attended two events with Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Dan Lyons). Both were in San Francisco

There's a pattern to these presentations is that Lyons follows, which is that instead of reading from the book, he simply talks about how and why he started doing Fake Steve Jobs, and the craziness that ensued in trying to figure out who Fake Steve Jobs was.

The first presentation at Stacey's Books was fairly low key -- with only about 20 people in attendance, a local photographer from a Bay Area newspaper was taking photos. I had actually arrived only a few minutes before he began, which resulted in me handholding the camera to tape the video footage. He starts by leading off with a recap of his Menlo Park event last night, and Andy Hertzfeld was also in attendance at Menlo Park, and the opening of Option$ is actually inspired from Hertzfeld's book Revolution in the Valley. Hertzfeld had read the begining of the book and said "Yeah, I recognize that story".

The second presentation, at 7:30pm at a Books Inc. in Castro Street was also low key -- unlike Menlo Park last night, which was packed with people, with not a chair leftover, there were seats available, but late arrivals instead huddled in the back, as the only seats left were the ones in the front. I didn't really like the layout of the area -- FSJ and I were basically in foot kicking range of each other. This event also had many faces of the blogosphere in attendance -- Ryan Block of Engadget, Veronica Belmont of Mahalo, Leander Kahney of Wired's Cult of Mac, as well as the much touted appearance of Bike Helmet Girl.

FSJ starts with a hello to Bike Helmet Girl, and a story of how Bike Helmet Girl came to be. He gives the story of how he started the blog, and how it became a book deal, as well as the hunt for Fake Steve. A lot of the information he uses to write the blog comes from readers who send him e-mail, and he tells the story of how he initially started calling Jonathan Schwartz of Sun "Ponytail Boy", but changed it to "My Little Pony" when someone from Sun wrote to him said "No, no, no we have a name for him, we call him My Little Pony".

Midway through his talk about how he started the blog, he sees Veronica Belmont and Ryan Block appear, and he's ecstatic:

Engadget Editor Ryan Block asks him a question on how he manages to channel Steve:

The Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Daniel Lyon) is on a book tour promoting his book Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, A Parody, and he made a stop at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park. What makes this book reading different from others is that they managed to get the real Steve Wozniak to show up, and give the introduction to Fake Steve Jobs. I'm in the front row, sitting next to the editor of Valleywag, Owen Thomas, who is liveblogging the event. A couple rows back from me is Brian Lam of Gizmodo. A couple of other names and websites were tossed into the air before the event started and I'm assuming a lot of the crowd here probably reads alot like a who's who of the blogosphere. I don't really recognize them, I'm just here to listen to Fake Steve Jobs, and hopefully take some pictures and video.

Wozniak gives a really geeky introduction to Fake Steve Jobs. I mean really, really geeky -- he's talking about hotel rooms and breaking down the room numbers down into base pairs, and then does a bit of numerology breaking down Daniel Lyon's name into 4 and 12 with 12 breaking down into 1 and 2, and all of those are powers of two. At the end of Woz's intro, he gives a FSJ a real Apple turtleneck which he purchased from the Apple Company Store. FSJ is reluctant to wear the turtleneck, as he is afraid the Apple lawyers might say he's hitting too close to the mark.

FSJ is totally geeked out by this intro from Woz, and wants a picture of him and Woz together. There are plenty of cameras in this room, and things pause for a minute as they get that picture. FSJ ranks this event pretty highly -- just under the birth of his kids.

Fake Steve Jobs launches into how it all started, as really an exercise in learning how blogs worked, and he didn't want to do a normal blog, and he was inspired by British magazine Private Eye, which had a "secret diaries" feature. He was a big Apple fan, a switcher from Windows to Mac OS X. Stuff would happen in the news, and they wouldn't cover it in Forbes, and so he started wondering "I wonder what Steve Jobs thinks?" and styling the blog like that. He did it for 6 weeks, deleted it and then someone said "dude, what happened?". So he put it back up. He put a book proposal together at Christmastime, and then scrapped it later to start to put a storyline together involving the SEC and the iPhone. Trying to keep his identity as FSJ from his Forbes co-workers was pretty tough, especially when the bonus for discovering the identity was a free iPod. However, his Forbes co-workers were clueless, even when they figured out that FSJ was in Boston, they never realized it was him (who was living in Boston) at the time. It ends with the outing of FSJ, and Forbes adopting FSJ onto their website (and now includes the super annoying ads that run across the screen).

FSJ then begins the question and answer section, and relates the story of how he tried to outrun the Valleywag outing, and how the New York Times managed to uncover his identity.

His favorite blog entry is the one on the day the iPhone shipped, called "The Day the World Changed", because he got to satirize a lot of it, and he really finds the whole camping thing ridiculous. Woz pipes up at this point and relates a story how he printed up a bunch of numbers for people and handed out tickets so people wouldn't lose their place, and how he got to ride around Valleyfair Mall in the middle of the night on his Segway while camping for the iPhone.

Someone asks FSJ if he was also Fake Larry Ellison, and his answer is no. What happened was that he needed to finish the book, and so he rented a place in Maine to finish it, and set up one of his friends who had always wanted to blog as a user for his blog as the Fake Larry Ellison. He also offers Woz a place on his blog as a guest blogger as well. During this time, he was outed, so he had to come back from Maine and drive back to Boston to deal with it.

FSJ says that he's never been contacted by Apple for any reason.

Regarding journalists, he is one, so he's sort of self-loathing in the way that he portrays them and how CEOs respond to them.

Owen Thomas of Valleywag asks "How do you know when you're being you, and when you're being FSJ?"

He thinks of it as being sort of like Triumph, the Comic Dog. He did some posts recently on Scoble and EMC, and he's pretty sure that Real Steve Jobs probably doesn't think about Scoble or EMC at all. The real person who does Triumph, "Rob Smigol in real life is this really quiet, nerdy soft-spoken gentle guy, not very funny. Stick a dog puppet on his hand, and he goes mental." "I'm really not like Fake Steve, but it comes out."

He's only had one person help him out on the blog. He lets go of characters as he gets bored of them.

Someone comments that his Nancy Pelosi is spot on, and wonders if he's ever met her, and the answer is a loud "Ha" followed by an explanation that he totally made that up.

FSJ loves the interaction between the commenters and the entries -- and he intentionally makes mistakes just to see the commenters' reactions to them. His real job is covering Linux, so he gets comments sometimes, and pulls off a mocking voice as to how Linux people generally respond to his columns.

Did FSJ invent frigtard? No, he thought he did, but apparently someone had beat him to it.

He's supposed to meet bike-helmet girl on this trip, and will probably meet her in San Francisco at the reading at Books Inc. in the Castro District tomorrow.

Last question: Did he actually get a raise at Forbes? No, he didn't, but he has some kind of deal worked out in relation to the traffic that he gets on Forbes.

Flickr: Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Daniel Lyons) and Steve Wozniak.