Sundry Ruminations: October 2004 Archives

This year's OOPSLA "Big Event" was held at the Vancouver Aquarium. I was here in 1998, when much of the facility was under renovation. At the reception, I had the opportunity, for the first time to go downstairs and gaze into the Beluga whale tank. These animals are a simple gorgeous sight to behold. I found myself laying on my back and gazing up into the water. I was a ineffably sublime experence.

Still, I found myself, somewhat to my horror, uttering the phrase "Transparent Aluminum", in an oblique reference to a plot element drawn from the fourth Star Trek movie. I'm not sure what was more frightening, that I dredged this up in the first place, or that every single person in the room knew exactly what I was talking about...

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Hey, this place has the coolest screen savers I've ever seen.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, at the Vancouver Aquarium

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Photographs (C) 2004 by Munawar Hafiz and Spiros Xanthos

If you needed any additional evidence that Microsoft is taking security more seriously at OOPSLA this year, you need look no further than the two Korean destroyers docked next to the conference center.

Rumor has it that should any of the sizable Microsoft contingent come under hostile fire, these vessels could be used to quicky evacutate said contingent to Seattle.

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Powerpoint is one of the most leathal weapons ever devised. You can be cut down in a hail of bullets before you ever know what hit you. Your slides can be siezed, and turned around so as to fire on your own troops.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Powerpoint is one of the most effect anti-meme agents in our arsenal.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

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I didn't know Microsoft had a Navy.
--Donald Bradley Roberts

We've asked about 30 people the question: "Who is the Prime Minister of Canada?" For fairness, we've been excluding Canadian nationals from our sample. So far, one Dutchman, a New Zealander, and two Yanks have come up the the correct answer. (I'll withhold it for now, I may ask you later), but if you are reading this, you no doubt have the technical means to quickly find the answer yourself. Does Google spell death for trivia questions?

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For the very first time, the majority of OOPSLA's attendees have come from outside the United States (51% to 49%). I would be tempting, but glib, to hypothesize that this is a consequence of what we Yanks call outsourcing. Hell, we’re even holding the conference itself “abroad”.

Don Roberts came up with the following quips on his way through Canadian Customs:

Customs Official: Are you bringing in the products of any endangered species?
DBR: I've got 3 gigabytes of Smalltalk code.

Customs Official: What is the purpose of your vistit to Canada?
DBR: To get a flu shot.
DBR: To seek political asylum.
DBR: To obtain inexpensive pharmaceutical drugs.

As to the last point, I’ve noticed that several of the younger guys around here were packing tissue paper, cut-rate editions of some of the same trade books we pay full price for in The States. I found myself reminded of the global economics of the pharmaceutical industry, where full retail drug prices in The States underwrite research, as well as cut rate prices elsewhere.

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I was reminded of this haunting little ditty by one of my very favorite Canadians, Neil Young, as I contemplated this all:

Global manufacturing,
hands across the sea
The hotel filled with dealers,
everything was free
Before the competition,
ahead of all the rest
The product was presented,
it clearly was the best
The power link was ruptured,
the hotel shook and rolled
The old Trans Am
just bounced around
and took another road
--Neil Percival Young, Trans Am

OOPSLA XIX Memewatch (Installment #1)

The internet never forgets. The prospect of a parrot who siits on you shoulder should cause us to seriously think about refactoring the Fourth Amendment.

Like others here, I've been tinkering with Google's Desktop indexing tool. It's powerful, even wonderful, but rubs your nose in just how hard it is becoming to make things go away.

This is a lesson that ought to have been made clear to me a few OOPSLA's ago when I was party to accidentally exposing the URL's a series of purportedly anonymous reviews to the all-seeing eyes of the Google bots. Once anything leaks out of the bottle, its next to impossible to get it back in.

Still, I've been realizing I use my harddrives as if they were worm drives. An embarassment of storage riches is but one prong in the advance of this age of abundance...

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Sure I could just Google it, but I like to listen to the way Grandpa tells it...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Notorious Gang-of-Four book author Ralph Johnson turned 100 today, were "100" reckoned in Radix 7.

It occured to me that "hundredth" birthdays, whatever the base, do an interesting job of dividing life into epochs: 4 (base 2), 9 (base 3), 16 (base 4), 25 (base 5), 36 (base 6), 64 (base 8), 81 (base 9), and, hence all the way up to that coveted Willard Scott show appearance... ...and maybe even 121...

A sort of Passages for New Math veterans...