Thursday April 28, 2005

Marion, thanks for the link. Great read about the role of PR.

My customers tell me "PR" stands for "Problem Report". You know, a trouble ticket. AKA service ticket. AKA help desk ticket. PR also stands for Public Relations. Oddly enough, you often need Public Relations after a Problem Report :)

Non-Sun-employee Dave has a good blog entry on using Sun Rays at home. Seems like his family has no problem moving from Windows XP to Gnome. He also has an interesting idea about packaging for home use.

Dave, your on to something ...

Update: I was asked to clarify that I will be speaking at the Orange County UUASC meeting in July, not the Los Angeles County equivalent.

I am the planned speaker at the July UUASC with the topic of "What's new with J2SE 5.0"? OK, I'll have to slip in some Mustang features too. They want to see code, so I'll use NetBeans 4.1 and a fork to show them my spaghetti code. Part of doing a gig like this is writing the dang Bio. I never like writing a bio because it's like tooting your own horn.

I was at a conference recently where the bio went on for about 5 of the 45 minute presentation. For example, you know you are in trouble when the Bio begins with "Once upon a time, there was a Mr. and Mrs. Awesome, who had baby Awesome ..." I'm all for giving credit where credit is due, but there should be some industry "peer pressure" time limit to a Bio.

Hey, if someone wants to write a bio for me, go for it. It would probably be hard since very little is written about software development on The Clingan Zone. My bad. But, hey, Solaris 10 is so FRICKIN' COOL I can't help it.

Example John Bio:

John Clingan, the heavily discounted product of Mr. and Mrs. Clingan, works for the Client Solutions Organization at Sun Microsystems. His accomplishments are still in the "Potential Energy" phase awaiting the transition to "Kinetic Energy" (hopefully by not falling). He is neither a Unix Rabbi nor a Eunuch Rabbi.

John probably drinks more java than writes Java. He definitely spends more on java.

John has also been a technical reviewer for some Java books that haven't really sold all that well.

John is Evil because his name is on a Java-related patent, although he is closer to Evil Alfred the Butler and his non-blogging-heathen patent-partner is the Evil Batman (John doesn't feel he has earned the title of Evil Robin in the patent credit department).

John spent 3 years preaching the virtues of JavaBeans at an after-work self-help program (extended university). John sure would like to go back and do that again as the experience simply ROCKED. In the end, John learned more than the students.

Finally (thank goodness), while John would starve in the payed-speaker circuit, he certainly enjoys speaking, listening, learning and networking at various Southern California user groups.

If my bio is too long, read faster :)