Options author Dan Lyons was Friday's guest author at Stacey's Bookstore in San Francisco's financial district. Several audience members — seemingly unaware that Lyons had written a parody about Steve Jobs — grilled the Forbes editor turned humorist on Apple's lack of corporate philanthropy and the allegedly widening income gap between Jobs and everyone else. When Lyons sputtered that he really didn't know the answers, one attendee snorted, "Aren't you supposed to be a business reporter?" I followed one of Lyons's attackers out of the store to a local Peet's, where she once again spoke truth to power. "It's frightening what they put in the food these days," she informed the barista. "Is this Fair Trade coffee?"

Dan Lyons, the faux Apple CEO blogger, is introduced by the real Steve Wozniak. Check Woz's manic but funny patter about Kathy Griffin, Fake Steve, and Apple.

At yesterday's book signing at Keplers in Menlo Park, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak penned this inscription on the pages of Dan Lyons's Steve Jobs parody novel, Options: "I like this Steve J. better than the real one." Was he kidding? Maybe. But many a truth is said in jest.

Paul Boutin, Valleywag's very special correspondent, may act all tough in his fancy glasses and his Beemer. But let me tell you some things you don't know about Boutin: Those are girl glasses. And he rents that Beemer by the hour from Zipcar. Yeah, real fancy, Boutin. Worst of all, get this guy next to His Steveness, and he starts giggling like a Japanese schoolgirl.

Methinks NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker ought to worry a little more about getting more viewers for his little TV network than about squeezing more money out of Apple. NBC ranked fourth in the ratings last week, stomped by Dancing with the Stars and my Red Sox winning the World Series. [AP]

Ron Johnson, Apple's senior VP of retail, exercised options for 700,000 shares of AAPL at a strike price of $23.72 yesterday. He sold later in the day at around $185. That's a net of over $112 million. Not a bad payday, but he certainly earned it. Johnson has led Apple's retail strategy from day one — and the former Target executive is arguably more responsible for Apple's retail success than Steve Jobs.

Rising more than 3,500 percent, Apple has been the second-best performing stock over the past decade. The best? Chico's, a specialty retailer of women's clothes, led a top-ten list dominated by companies of the old economy. [MarketWatch]

Options, the parody Steve Jobs novel, has totally surprised those of us who expected a throwaway. It's 248 mostly hilarious pages, with a tight story line and a protagonist who evolves credibly. You can read my enthusiastic review in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, where it's the business book of the week. But more important is this teaser email from Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, where author Dan Lyons will appear Thursday evening.

More than two million copies of the latest Mac operating system, nicknamed Leopard, were sold over the weekend. That's about two percent of Microsoft's Windows Vista shipments to date. But at least Steve Jobs can gloat about accomplishing the significant sales feat in a mere three days. [Apple]

Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab director turned philanthropist turned businessman, has learned when not to be pedantic. For example, take his shifting stance on open source. He once believed that One Laptop Per Child, would have to run open-source software on its cheap machines for third-world schoolchildren. The charity once declined free copies of Mac OS X, because it was proprietary to Apple, and considered it a mark of honor that Microsoft was annoyed at being excluded from the laptop project. Now, according to Negroponte, "It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open." Except, of course, when it doesn't.

You'll recall NBC's noisy departure from Apple's iTunes store in August. First we heard the problem was that NBC had asked Apple to raise per-episode prices to $2.99. Then, we heard Apple advocated cutting prices to 99 cents a show, arguing that volume would make up for lost profits. Now, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker reveals he misplayed the negotiations even more than we could have imagined. He asked for a piece of Apple's iPod hardware sales.

"Apple has destroyed the music business... If we don't take control on the video side, they'll do the same [there]." NBC Universal Chief Jeff Zucker. Sure. If by "destroyed," you mean "saved from complete irrelevance." [JupiterResearch]

Over the weekend, a large number of so-called smart phones set their clocks back an hour a week too soon, observing the old end of Daylight Saving Time. And you thought you were 55 minutes early today! I used the extra hour last spring to hunt down instructions for the most popular computers and phones. Summary for BlackBerry users: Set your phone to Mountain Time for the next week. To save you more time today, I've preposted the first three comments to this item from software engineers.

Sorry, fanboys. Apple wants to shut down the secondary market for iPhones, so it has restored its launch-day limit on sales to two per person. Apple is also no longer accepting cash. No, you can't just change into your Star Trek uniform and come back 15 minutes later. [BusinessWeek]

"CUPERTINO - Apple announced today that it would no longer be accepting purchase requests for the iPhone. 'We feel the iPhone is too good for regular humans,' says the Apple spokesperson. 'To protect our brand image, we have decided to stop selling our product altogether to maintain a level of exclusivity unattainable by any other product currently on the market.' The spokesperson also announced they would continue advertising in order to maintain the feel of unattainability." — Commenter paul34, on Apple's new refusal to accept gift cards for iPhone purchases. [Engadget]

Martin Varsavsky, founder of the Spanish Wi-Fi sharing company Fon, has made a video of his impressions of meeting with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But who cares? You've heard it all before. The Apple campus is at One Infinite Loop. The decor is monochromatic. Jobs asks lots of questions, is "not the nicest guy," and wants you to know how wonderful Apple products are. What is interesting, however, is how this hapless wantrepreneur even got a meeting with Jobs in the first place.

Apple is opening a retail storefront in China next summer, just in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. We're glad Apple's sweatshop workers will finally be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor and buy themselves some overpriced gadgetry. With a year or so worth of wages. [IfoAppleStore]

TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley deems Apple's new operating system "worth the wait." Does he mean the product's four-month shipping delay, or the several hours it took him to install and then recover from this fiasco?

Not exactly. Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day, its ad agency, invited Haley to Los Angeles to participate in a professional remake of the ad. But let's ignore the fact that TBWA completely redid this supposedly up-from-the-grassroots effort. TBWA's chief creative officer, Lee Clow, is talking the loser-generated talk: "People's relationship with a brand is becoming a dialogue, not a monologue." But plucking a good idea from the public sphere to use for themselves is nothing new for the iPod maker. Acknowledging the original producer? Now that's new.

David Ulmer is the senior director of entertainment products at Motorola. Which must be a hard job, now that the cell-phone maker no longer makes phones that are entertaining. At the CTIA Wireless trade show, he bitched about Apple's iPhone: "We've yet to see Apple's SDK [software developers' kit], and I'm sure there will be some level of [Apple] control that goes along with it. I guarantee you that you will not see a Napster music service on the iPhone." That's what we call a feature, David. Bitches just jealous. [The Register]