Saturday August 27, 2005
Saturday August 27, 2005 Vocations, Avocations and Posters with Funk
I was walking down the hall, on my way to the bathroom, and lo and behold, what did I see, but a larger than life poster of Ambreesh - smiling at me!
I enjoy working with Ambreesh Khanna - he's smart and charismatic and has a talent for evangelizing our technology and solving problems. He was an early supporter of the OpenSolaris project - he started exploring the possibilities with customers months before Jonathan publicly announced our plans in Shanghai back in 2004. Ambreesh works for Sun with Wall Street customers, which alas means that I don't get as much face time with him as those lucky New Yorkers. So I guess I'll need to go to the bathroom more often, huh? Great poster, Ambreesh!
Props to the people at Sun who created these inspired posters (posters with funk, I dare add) that highlight some of the individuals doing great work across Sun. This is definitely a step above "employee of the month" recognition programs (not that we ever did those). It's fun to see your friends' faces up in flashing lights (almost as fun as seeing this when I was on vacation, unplugged from my email and 3 thousand miles away from home.)
And as for the employee descriptions on the posters - no boring standard bio-fare used here, rather, the descriptions are a creative mix of their vocations and their avocations and even show how the two are intertwined. Mixing vocations and avocations is often a recipe for success but, far more importantly, always a recipe for fulfillment in my book. More thinking on that point from Paul Graham and Tim Bray.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-08-27 11:08:44.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Wednesday August 24, 2005 Humour Challenge - OpenSolaris and the New Yorker
Someone, somewhere
must be funnier than me. I try to be funny but sometimes, well,
it just doesn't work.The New Yorker has an fun cartoon caption contest. And I'd love love love (did I say love?) to see OpenSolaris mentioned in a cartoon in my beloved New Yorker. I know there are a few non-techies left in the world who haven't heard of OpenSolaris, and here's a way to make them wonder what it is... Well, if only someone were funny enough to come up with a caption that either ends up as a Top-3 finalist or ends up as a winner.
So c'mon - be curious - be creative and have some fun - and peek on over to the latest cartoon caption contest and see if genius sparks.
And, the current contest has a "devil" character in it - doesn't that bring to mind some kind of BSD and OpenSolaris humour?
If you subscribe to the New Yorker, you can also find the contest on the back page of the print magazine.
Please comment on my blog if you've submitted something and if you're game please share your idea, too! (Sigh, looking at the New Yorker, it looks like you need to be a U.S. Resident to participate over the age of 18.)
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-08-24 01:10:21.0) Permalink
Saturday August 06, 2005 
Vacation beckons. As much fun as I've had at OSCON 2005 and with all the OpenSolaris community building activities this summer, it's time for me to unplug for two weeks and do some of my favourite things: eat lobster at a much-loved restaurant in Ogunquit (checkout the webcam), hang out for a week in NH, go camping in the mountains, swim in an ice-cold Sierra lake, read-read-read and hopefully, for a few moments at least, do nothing.
What to say about OSCON? I visited and socialized and met with many great people. I did not get to attend nearly enough sessions (and am particularly disappointed to have missed Paul Graham's talk, and Jeremy Zawodny, and Nick Gall, and r0ml, and also Jonathan.) Be sure to read about the cool PHP and DTrace work that Wez and Bryan did - in the midst of a fun OpenSolaris party no less! Big thanks to Laura and Sara for organizing a great party - and to Teresa for getting me hooked up with the OpenSolaris CAB. Al, Casper, Rich, Roy and Simon worked their butts off on OpenSolaris governance during the conference - thanks, guys. They also met with a team of engineers who have been working to define and refine the OpenSolaris development process - which meant that David and JBeck and Mac and Jek3 were in Portland and were able to join my team and the CAB and some of the OpenSolaris engineers for a seafood dinner a la Jake on Wednesday night. Dinner for 18 is guaranteed to be lively - and it was.
I had a great lunch with the ever insightful Stephen O'Grady (who had more influence than he realizes; I don't think my reaction was mixed) and also had the distinct pleasure to spend some time with Nick Gall and Jim McHugh and folks on his team including Lisa and Chris (photo coming later) to talk real-world analogies for software. I ran into Jason Matusow and Stephe Walli - and although I missed his talk, I caught up with r0ml so that he could refresh my memory of the story of his name. Oh, and I got to spend a few minutes with Russ Nelson - no square hats involved! I demo'ed del.icio.us to Steve Lawrence (are you hooked yet, Steve?) and ended up on the same flight back with Liane Praza (an amazingly talented kernel engineer) which meant that the flight felt like it took all of 5 minutes - our conversation was so engaging. Oh - and Keith did not throw any furniture out of any windows. He did do a bang-up job presenting on OpenSolaris, though.
And if your ears were ringing during OSCON, Alan, it's because I picked up a round TUIT for you from chromatic at the perl booth. :-)
I would link to Simon's and Patrick's blogs on OSCON, but they haven't blogged it yet. Perhaps next week?
I'm still figuring out my thoughts about the Women in Open Source panel. Stereotyping can be uncomfortable for me. But boy oh boy was it well attended - by men and women alike. And if the numbers Bernard shared prove accurate - that the number of women in open source is far, far lower than the number of women in software - well, it's worth the conversation to figure out why. Big thanks to Danese for organizing and provoking thought on the topic. And it was a pleasure to spend time with Allison, Mitchell, Alolita, Zaheda and Bernard.
Now - it's vacation-time. Ciao!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: OSCON
(2005-08-06 04:10:59.0) Permalink Comments [2]
