And now, an email from my husband
My husband used to be a prolific and excellent blogger. He then went back to school and his brain was all used up at the end of the day. However, he now works for money and so is full of vitality and annoyance at coworkers. As always, I have encouraged him to resume his storytelling, which he may do on a separate channel. In the meantime, this is the email he sent me today:
SUBJECT: MY LUNCHTIME MEETING
Is this everybody? Maybe I should wait a few more minutes.
Okay, I guess nobody else is coming. I'll start in about five minutes.
Thank you for coming today. I know you'd all like to be at lunch, but I appreciate your being at my meeting. Note that although this is listed as a "brown bag talk," and many of you brought food with you, we're videotaping this session and so eating will be impossible. Also, I'm going to be speaking very, very quietly and in a thick accent, so your unwrapping a sandwich or drinking through a straw will make it impossible for anyone to hear me.
Oh, some of you are leaving. None of you left early during Alan's presentation.
I want to talk to you about UGAF, or "Incomprehensible Acronym Service." Why's it UGAF instead of IAS? Oh, because we used to call it "Incomprehensible Acronym Manager," you see.
Why are we using UGAF instead of something more common, like LANK or SWANK? Three reasons: scalability and AMYL compliance. Let me talk for three or four minutes about SWANK; you all know what that is, I'm sure. When I was at IBM, I led the team that added AMYL compliance to SWANK. This seems to undercut my reason for not using it, a fact I will acknowledge but not explain.
Ramesh, what are you typing on your laptop? Oh, the Wikipedia article on LANK? That's not going to help you. Instead you should read the paper I wrote; it's sitting somewhere in a protected folder in my home directory. Your typing is drowning out my presentation, though, so don't bother looking for it.
Can the cameraman hear me? Am I speaking loudly enough? No? I will speak a little more softly, then.
Oh, Ramesh is leaving now. This will distract me for about thirty seconds, so I will keep repeating the same words over and over again.
Did you get copies of my PowerPoint slides beforehand? No? Okay, then I'll assume you're familiar with them. I want to go over the fifteen concrete examples of SMTs that I built with UGAF, to give you an idea about building your own. This SMT automatically loads data from the PRM servers and then forwards it to the new gamma LKRequestManager.
What's that? Yes, this is production data, and these are the live services.
That's a good question. No, this example is completely rigged, because this is not actually production data, and these are heavily modified variants of the live services that I have running on my desktop machine. I'd like to hold further questions for now, because I only have until the end of the hour to bore you.
John's having trouble hearing me. Would it be better if I faced the audience instead of staring at my screen the entire time? Yes? I'm not going to do that.
The font is pretty small, but blown up on the big screen, it's small AND fuzzy. Andy can't read this line, so I'm going to read the entire page to him. John, is there a problem? Oh, you got paged and you have to leave. That's fine. I'm not hurt at all.
In conclusion, if you spend about two months reorganizing your systems around my new SMT framework, you'll make my boss think that I haven't just spent a year and a half wasting time by building middleware that nobody wants. Any questions?
No, Christian, it doesn't have SHIN compatibility at the moment. Are there are a lot of teams who rely on SHIN?
All of you?
Well, we're looking to support it by spring 2009, so there's no reason you guys can't get started now. Any other questions?
Oh, thank you for the applause. I mean, there are only seven of you, so it's not that loud, but I really, really appreciate it.
SUBJECT: MY LUNCHTIME MEETING
Is this everybody? Maybe I should wait a few more minutes.
Okay, I guess nobody else is coming. I'll start in about five minutes.
Thank you for coming today. I know you'd all like to be at lunch, but I appreciate your being at my meeting. Note that although this is listed as a "brown bag talk," and many of you brought food with you, we're videotaping this session and so eating will be impossible. Also, I'm going to be speaking very, very quietly and in a thick accent, so your unwrapping a sandwich or drinking through a straw will make it impossible for anyone to hear me.
Oh, some of you are leaving. None of you left early during Alan's presentation.
I want to talk to you about UGAF, or "Incomprehensible Acronym Service." Why's it UGAF instead of IAS? Oh, because we used to call it "Incomprehensible Acronym Manager," you see.
Why are we using UGAF instead of something more common, like LANK or SWANK? Three reasons: scalability and AMYL compliance. Let me talk for three or four minutes about SWANK; you all know what that is, I'm sure. When I was at IBM, I led the team that added AMYL compliance to SWANK. This seems to undercut my reason for not using it, a fact I will acknowledge but not explain.
Ramesh, what are you typing on your laptop? Oh, the Wikipedia article on LANK? That's not going to help you. Instead you should read the paper I wrote; it's sitting somewhere in a protected folder in my home directory. Your typing is drowning out my presentation, though, so don't bother looking for it.
Can the cameraman hear me? Am I speaking loudly enough? No? I will speak a little more softly, then.
Oh, Ramesh is leaving now. This will distract me for about thirty seconds, so I will keep repeating the same words over and over again.
Did you get copies of my PowerPoint slides beforehand? No? Okay, then I'll assume you're familiar with them. I want to go over the fifteen concrete examples of SMTs that I built with UGAF, to give you an idea about building your own. This SMT automatically loads data from the PRM servers and then forwards it to the new gamma LKRequestManager.
What's that? Yes, this is production data, and these are the live services.
That's a good question. No, this example is completely rigged, because this is not actually production data, and these are heavily modified variants of the live services that I have running on my desktop machine. I'd like to hold further questions for now, because I only have until the end of the hour to bore you.
John's having trouble hearing me. Would it be better if I faced the audience instead of staring at my screen the entire time? Yes? I'm not going to do that.
The font is pretty small, but blown up on the big screen, it's small AND fuzzy. Andy can't read this line, so I'm going to read the entire page to him. John, is there a problem? Oh, you got paged and you have to leave. That's fine. I'm not hurt at all.
In conclusion, if you spend about two months reorganizing your systems around my new SMT framework, you'll make my boss think that I haven't just spent a year and a half wasting time by building middleware that nobody wants. Any questions?
No, Christian, it doesn't have SHIN compatibility at the moment. Are there are a lot of teams who rely on SHIN?
All of you?
Well, we're looking to support it by spring 2009, so there's no reason you guys can't get started now. Any other questions?
Oh, thank you for the applause. I mean, there are only seven of you, so it's not that loud, but I really, really appreciate it.