ljplicease | sleeping meeting

The meeting at NetCon World Headquarters was sort of a sleeper. There was a lot of energy the part of some, mostly sales. The hole experience reminded me a bit of a high school pep rally, in that there were lots of excited people and I didn't want to be there. People (mostly engineers) kept asking (somewhat rhetorically) why the company had bothered to fly engineers out there when a teleconference would have done the job. I made the observation that the Annapolis folks tended to congregate, so in essence NetCon had flown us all the way to Santa Clara so that we could maintain our clique. It's funny how this whole thing keeps coming back to high school.

Afterword we had a BBQ in the company's parking lot, and I got to talk to Bee Man, with whom I am working on to develop my Perl API. It's so refreshing talking to him, compared with some other developers that I won't mention (Paul III and Bad Code). Even though he wrote a lot of the old API code our conversations go something like this:

“I'm don't like how this aspect of the API interface was implemented so I want to do it this way instead.”

“Okay.”

People usually get defensive when you want to rewrite their code, but he acknowledges that he isn't a Perl hacker and appreciates those qualities in me.

They had carnival games at the BBQ, and at first there was no way I was going to participate in that but out of boredom I went through and played each of the games, wherein the operators would give out raffle tickets regardless of performance. I was quite proud of myself for getting the ball to roll into that little valley without coming back and I got two of the three softballs into the milk jug. Yay for me. The raffle tickets were for some Wiis and Xbox 360 Kinects. I have objections to Microsoft in general, and I already own a wii AND I didn't even have enough room to pack one of those if I did win, so I decided ahead of time that if I did win I would donate the items to the Annapolis game room. I didn't win anything so it wasn't worth worrying about.