arbitrary user

So Frogfoot has a stand at Futurex and we quickly realised that there are 10 different types of attendees.

1. The “I know more than you” or the “My product is better than your product” visitor

These guys are fun. They stand a few meters away from your stand and then, once they’ve formulated their attack, they step forward and launch into a tirade about why what you’re doing is wrong or how what they’re doing in their garage is better. Some of them are the “Leading xyz gizmo provider and we’re launching next week” kind of winners.

2. The “You have breasts” visitor

I don’t have breasts… (shut it!) but we do have a girl who works for us. She does have breasts and there are many lonely men walking around at these kinds of things who obviously don’t get too see too many girls in the wild. They generally will talk to the girl until someone else makes it very obvious that they are no longer welcome.

3. The “I know nothing about techmologee, please teach me” visitor

People. If you don’t know how a computer works it is obviously not the best time for me to be explaining the intricacies of 802.11g. Also, you, lady who couldn’t operate a track pad, need to stop blaming our internet connection for yor inability to remember your yahoo mail password. I *promise* it has nothing to do with the hotspot.

4. The “Defend your product!” visitor

Similar to visitor #1 these guys chose to be as evasive as possible while constantly telling you how crap your idea is and how it won’t work. You usually get the idea that these are the guys who tried something similar a few years back that failed dismally but they remain evasive about who they are and what they do because they believe it adds an aura of mystique… mystique of course is something we all love… not.

5. The raving lunatic visitor

These guys are cool… well they were cool until the nutcase that lives downstairs from me appeared on the horizon. I quickly darted away and hid until he had moved on from our stand. Upon returning I learnt that he had mentioned how lame this trade show was. “Fishing Shows… that’s where the action is at…. They give out free caps and everything”. Thanks buddy. We care. Now go back to spreading your conspiracy theories and accusing me of “that clunking sound” at 4am.

6. The serial hoarder visitor

This is the visitor who goes from stand to stand not saying a thing, but collects every single brochure, pen, balloon and knick-knack available, quietly stuffing them into his trade show bag and moving on to molest the next stand.

7. The “I can’t grasp basic business concepts” visitor

These are people who can’t seem to understand why they would want to “do this hotspot thing”… even after you explain that they will make money.

8. The “Synergy” visitor

If you follow Dilbert you should equate the word “Synergy” with loathing and fear. Synergy is what marketing types refer to “symbiotic” relationships. The Synergists will try and explain why your company and their company should “work together”. They will find synergy even if they sell paint stripper and you sell internet.

9. The “I represent foreign money” visitor.

These are the types of people who try to convince you that you should contact them because they represent some people who have money. This could be complete rubbish or it could be our next meal ticket…

10. The Perfect Visitor

This is the great visitor. The guy or girl who realise how great our product is and see the value of it without too much explanation. They ask all the right questions and some even sign up right then and there.

ath

j.

I’m just going to say this; I know that most of you who read this will already know it, but it’s still worth saying.

Mark Shuttleworth did not program Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution, and like all Linux distributions, it is a collection of a hundreds of software applications, written by a whole stack of open source developers, that all work together to make an operating system. All Mark did was have the vision to start a new distribution, and a stack of cash to make it happen. Yes, he’s a cool guy, but no, he didn’t program it.

I have this image in my head, which is the image I’m imagining some people have in their heads, of this geeky programmer dude frantically writing new features and bug fixes and and and… oh, and in my head, when he was done he used his casio keyboard to record the startup sound. This is not how Linux works.

It just dawned on me that perhaps the saddest thing about the success of Ubuntu is that some people don’t even know what Linux is, but they know the story of the dood who went to space and programmed Ubuntu.

ps. I am an Open Source evangelist and run Ubuntu pretty much everywhere.

Right, I’ve decided to start doing more stuff. Getting out. Taking photos etc… as part of that mission I’ve decided to start documenting the banality of my life. This is the equivalent of a scale when you’re trying to lose weight. Except you share the results with everyone which can be a bit scary if you spent the weekend in bed watching Dilbert. I also have a crap memory, so please correct any misreprentations I might have put you in.

• Friday evening I arbed around the house until Lourens came over and got the craving for macdonalds. I tagged along and didn’t partake.
• Saturday morning I went to cocoa wah wah with Terri for breakfast then went home and watched cricket while falling asleep on the sofa.
• Saturday afternoon I  went to Cape To Cuba for Thea’s birthday party and met a whole stack of interesting people. Photos to follow.
• Sunday morning I went to Canal Walk with Lourens and then afterwards went to work and updated my Ubuntu.
• Sunday afternoon I met up with Bobby to give him his keys to my parents house.
• Sunday evening I had drinks with Neil and Skye.
• Monday morning I got up, cleaned up my parents house and fetched them from the airport, had apple crumble with vanilla custard and answered questions about the breakup…
• Monday afternoon was a braai in Stellenbosh with some very interesting guys. The most interesting of whom seems to have a thing for Dolly Parton lookalikes. Eww.

I think that’s a pretty respectable weekend.

J.

I recently joined the ranks of the unwashed, well, single people. It’s similar I think.

Anyways, my dad’s friend Bobby, (who is my dad’s age, they grew up together etc), asked me how I was doing?, who I was dating? etc, ie, nobody.  He proceeded to give me advice. I didn’t ask for any advice, he just gave it. His advice ended with a statement in earnest; “Just wet the tip”.  I could not have been more uncomfortable had you stuck a syringe in my ass. What kind of advice is that?  I know what he’s getting at, and I don’t like it. I’m not about to go “out there” and “get what I can get”. I don’t want to. I chose to chuckle nervously and say something stupid like “I’d rather not”, but he reiterated his “wisdom”.

This unfortunately comes from the same generation of men who believe that you can never *really* enjoy your job. You just have to find one that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself and wait for the gold watch at 50. I disagree. I disagree so wholeheartedly that it i justifies a blog post.

I still, perhaps foolishly, believe that I will meet someone who I can make as happy as they make me and that I’ll be able to stay on that winning streak until I’m old and decrepit. And I wont need to run around playing fast and loose in order to find them. There, I said it, I’m a relational optimist.

As for now, I’m still quite busy getting my life back online. It’s a process. I’ll see you when I’ve finished booting up.

j.

The next in the series of awesome get-together-and-talk-all-things-geek geekdinners is on Thursday the 27th of September at Summerville in Camps Bay.

Amongst other great talks, my friend Derek will hopefully get to share a bit about his experiences running an online business… A subject that usually wouldn’t be all that interesting except for the fact that Derek is/was a big time old-school marketing director type person for airlines, hotels and large travel consortiums spending multi-million budgets on traditional media marketing… Only to get better results out of his kitchen and some well thought out online advertising.

The wiki is still where it’s always been. Sign up there.

ath.

j.

“Maybe this is where it starts, this great journey to courage. Maybe it starts right here, today, among the blossoms of bliss. Maybe, all the courage you will ever need to face all the despair and hardships in life, is nurtured and grown in these days of solitude and peace. Like a baby grows and develops inside a womb until it is ready to come out and scream at the world and the unseen. That simple act is an act of great courage. And no baby decides to stay in its mothers womb. That is how we all began, with an act of great courage.”

- Parcleve

There is an anecdote that does its rounds in the motivational speaker circuit about how you can boil a frog in water without it ever struggling as long as you increase the temperature of the water slowly enough. The analogy is that as humans we need to be more aware of our surroundings and be careful not to be lulled into a downward spiral of disaster.

Perhaps ironically, the anecdote is completely untrue and has been proven, repeatedly, to be the substance of myth… The ironic part being that we as highly evolved humans tend to be a lot more inclined to being lulled into disaster while our environment falls apart around us. This can be held true in matters of the ecological environment and love.

Frogs on the other hand tend to jump out of the water as soon as they get hot.

Funny what a frog can teach you!

(References abound, but one of the more eloquent ones is at http://www.uga.edu/srel/ecoview11-18-02.htm)

Seriously, you do.

I had the fortune of dealing with a granny yesterday on the phone. She was supposed to have called me a week ago with a quote  but she never did. When I asked her why, her reply was that “One of my ladies had called her and gotten the price from her”… Um, no. I don’t have any “ladies” that would have called her… She’s just plain lying! But you can’t call someone’s granny a liar so you just nod and say “Okay, I’ll ask around and find out who called you, but in the mean time can I get those prices…”.

Damn grannies.

ath.

A while back I decided to experiment with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) AMD64 version. I have an AMD64 CPU obviously. It worked ok but there were numerous things that just sucked a bit, like having to run a 32 bit version of firefox to get flash to work, and my ATI drivers that were only available in the 32bit variety. (Notice the proprietary suckiness)

Anyways, I was having some wireless issues at iWeek and decided to upgrade to Gutsy (tribe 5).

The upgrade was pretty painless since I store /home on it’s own partition. Actually, it was very painless since I essentially have everything I used to have, settings wise, on this “new” machine. I got one gnome-panel moan about an app (cpu temperature monitor) that was in the panel but no longer existed on the machine.

Getting my wireless to work properly was a little bit of a bitch. For some reason ubuntu still hasn’t reaslised that the bcm43xx module *does not work* with HP Pavilion laptops. This means that the basic procedure to get it working again is:

* Blacklist dodgy driver

* Install ndiswrapper  & gtkhelper if you’re feeling lazy

* Install your old windows driver via the gtk ndiswrapper interface.

* Make ndiswrapper startup when the interface comes up (ndiswrapper -m)

* Reboot.

Everything seems to be working fine. Gutsy isn’t really all that amazing compared to feisty but it’s running nicely and I keep on noticing nice little additions that make me happy.

I tried the screens & graphics thing but I don’t have an external monitor to test with and I couldn’t get my built-in lcd to 1280×800 using that interface… I will track down whomever is responsible for that and see it’s a know bug.

Either way Gutsy is looking good. I know this is a cheesy comment to make, but I love the way open source works… nibble by nibble we get things better and better.

Nibble by nibble, as you probably know, is the prescribed way to eat an elephant!

Having said all that. I want a macbook, mostly because I want something small that I can flip closed and put it to sleep and then flip it open and have it awake. Suspending and hibernating continue to be elusive on my laptop. I must do some more googling.

(Since I was recently asked if we have Malaria in Cape Town I think it is prudent to clarify that we don’t eat elephants)