I'll be around Santa Clara / San Jose, CA this Tuesday. I don't know what my schedule looks like yet, but if you want to get together for coffee Tuesday afternoon please feel free to get in touch. If you don't hear back from me right away, it's probably because I didn't get your message in time.
John @ FreshBlog likes to talk about "microspheres" of participation rather than Chris Anderson's Long Tail. I think many of the more interesting blogs sit at the intersection of two or more topical spheres. Many bicycle blogs, for example, seem to have a co-interest with environmental issues. Then there's Kiril, who's CarFree and a political conservative. Kool Aid sits squarely in an intersection of cycling and marketing.
Because of my varied interests, I participate in several communities -- cycling, Christian Church stuff, city planning and activism, search technology, and some subsets high-tech geekdom. One of the nerdy subsets I inhabit is that of (very vaguely) operating system design.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I interviewed for a job at Google. I got as far as a discussion with the hiring manager. Michael Davidson is in charge of the team at Google that modifies the Linux kernel to meet Google's unique requirements for their search engine servers. It turns out Mr. Davidson used to work with one of my colleagues at SCO. Davidson is known most recently, incidentally, for the infamous "Michael Davidson email" in which he told SCO supervisors that their fishing trip for copyright infringements in the Linux kernel was a waste of time.
The other week I was in Seattle for another interview. I'm not allowed to say who I interviewed with or why (it's not a CIA or anything like that), but one of the managers did the initial Xenix port to a computer built by a small company in Illinois that I went to work for shortly after he left. We knew all of the same people and worked on a lot of the same kinds of projects.
OS Design isn't a tiny world, but it's small enough that I run across the same people at shows and job interviews. It's important, then, that I don't do something to make people lose their trust in me. If word gets out that I inflate my credentials or create sloppy code then I'm done in this industry.
I should probably go somewhere with this idea and perhaps tie that in with Schwinn's struggles to win back dealer support or the laughingstock that Pacific made of GT's name or even the betrayal felt by many bicycle enthusiasts when Cannondale made their insane foray into motorcycles, but I need to take a dump now. But before I go, big props to Floyd Landis for winning Paris-Nice. Woo hoo!
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Gee, thanks for the mention again...
ReplyDeleteWish I was cloer to San Jose, I'd love to have coffee with you. Too bad there isn't much tech industry down here in the San Diego area.