On The Margins

Friday September 24, 2004

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] 325 Miles-A-Week For Sun

I'd like to introduce a colleauge on these pages. (I will be doing this more regularly as the occasion permits.)

Yes, it's the guy on the left. His name is Kazem Ardekanian. Kazem must be one of the most unassuming people I know at Sun.

I first met Kazem last year while we both worked on a project involving a distributed failure detection module built on a group communications infrastructure. He built and scripted a distributed test framework to find the behavioral limits of the group communications system.

My wife and I ran into Kazem while shopping in Palo Alto a couple of weekends ago. Kazem had ridden his bicycle from Fremont to Palo Alto as an "exercise" on this Saturday morning.

He rides his bicycle to work every day, from Fremont to Santa Clara. In case you don't know how much riding that is, it comes up to about 325 miles a week. According to Kazem, he goes through bicycles very quickly. I think this is his third commuting bike since he joined Sun (about 5 years ago).

Something very important about Kazem is that he is also a great cartoonist, and not just any cartoonist. Many of his cartoons are very specific to our work at the Java Enterprise Server Software Research and Development group. I particularly like the ones about P1 bugs turning into P4 bugs upon the realization of the architectural purity of a module, the naughty QA guys busting the golden builds and an engineer working on a tightrope of workarounds . . .

Hopefully, Kazem will find a way to publish some of his cartoons (which are copy-righted to him) for a larger audience to see, perhaps in a weblog of his own . . .

2004-09-24 14:45:02.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Culture ] Boom or Bust

Journalists are a curious bunch when it comes to booms and busts. Their whole careers move with booms and busts. When there is a boom, they are among the boomers, and when a bust, among the busters.

Of course, we have those rare occasions when a journalist actually stands out. I'm thinking of H.L. Mencken or Ambrose Bierce (yes, Ambrose Bierce of The Devil's Dictionary although many know him by Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo). In these cases, the journalist seems to be filling a space where the priests have vacated in certain societies. A place that demands its inhabitant to speak a truth that is actually experienced.

Well, where did I learn all that stuff . . . Let's see, I remember a certain curiosity for the kinked view of things and a certain teacher. I bought my first copy of The Devil's Dictionary when I lived in Berkeley back in the summer of 1980 although I had trouble grasping large sections making references to politicians in Washington. It all seemed a bit unreal. Later on things changed and became more apparent. Then, there was a certain teacher who introduced me to Mencken and his role in instituting a particular culture among some American journalists who continue to revere him: Tom Leonard is not only a great professor of the history of journalism, he is also a great guy. He was gentle, patient and good to all students who took his graduate courses in history of American journalism. In his class, no question was unworthy of exploration. He probably doesn't quite remember me any more. After all, I sat in his graduate seminar some 15 years ago. I was that strange fellow at the J-School who also had completed a recent Ph.D. in a branch of scientific computing and was working in the physics department to put himself through the journalism program. Given the blogs and the web, it is easy to do this sort of thing today with no eyebrows raised, but back then people were very conservative and thought of me as some sort of a case gone wild.

2004-09-24 14:03:54.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.