by , 8:00 AM EDT, August 13th, 2001

TechTV offers us a couple of Mac sightings today. The first one comes from Friday's broadcast of The Screen Savers. The show featured a segment on Lily Tomlin, the comedian and actress who first made a big splash as a stand up an on Martin & Rowan's Laugh-In in the 1960s. Currently she is touring in her one-woman show.

The Screen Savers took a trip to Lily Tomlin's house where she also has a production studio run by Allee Willis. Ms. Willis is a songwriter with titles such as the Beverly Hills Cop theme song and the Friends' theme song to her credit. The house and studio are all-Mac, a point which was made repeatedly. Ms. Tomlin's network is anchored by a G4, and all of the Macs in the house are running Mac OS 9, for those keeping score at home. The following comes from the companion article on The Screen Saver's Web site.

Her home is equipped with Apple G4 workstations and a single G4 as a server. Each G4 is equipped with multiple Gig hard drives, a boatload of RAM, and large 19- and 21-inch monitors. The server is a G4 connected to large, backup storage units, including multi Gig tape drives, DVD-RAM, and CD-RW.

Connecting all the machines is a network consisting of a hub in each lab connected to a Linksys router. The router is connected to two xDSL connections. The second connection is a backup in case the primary one fails, and from what I'm told, it does so occasionally.

There is, of course, an Apple AirPort for those who wish to work by or in the pool with a properly equipped laptop.

The hook for us was the central theme of the visit to Ms. Tomlin's house. The Screen Savers were allegedly visiting the site in order to make a house call and fix some computer problems. The only problem was that there were no problems with the computers, and did we mention they were all Macs? Again, this point was made a couple of times and was a nice subtle reminder that Macs just work.

The segment also featured an extended discussion with Ms. Tomlin and Ms. Willis about lilytomlin.com and other technology issues.

In another short, but pretty cool sighting, we found one of Apple billboards from MACWORLD New York in an interesting place. The episode was being filmed in New York (the same episode that featured Herbie Hancock in another segment) about local companies involved in the production of digital music. When the show's hosts announced they were in New York, to illustrate the concept they used a great pullback from one of the 7,297,603,492 I (Apple Logo) NY billboards that Apple had put up for MACWORLD Expo. It was quick, it was a great shot, and it was a pleasant surprise.

If you have a Mac sighting, let us know.