Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

And yes, for the record, I did wear my spandex t-shirt home from the quay. And yes, I did get blantantly and embarrasingly letched over on the way home...

We seem to have somehow started channelling the spirit of Sagan's vision of a world where everything, from political speeches to sermons to commercials, comes with its own set of accompanying error bars...

Not, of course, that I meant it. I wasn't particularly bothered by the implication that my colleague hadn't been paying attention while I was speaking — hell, I hadn't been paying attention to what I was saying either! — but, presented with such a plum opportunity for a withering remark, I just couldn't resist.

Needless to say, I felt bad about the whole thing and apologised afterwards. But still.

Which means that on the one hand, feedback is going to be slower in coming than I'd hoped; but on the other, it does my reputation for hyper-productivity no harm whatsoever...

What next? Questions about free will and determinism when I try to pick up a cheap CD?

So, today was the day of my conference presentation at the NEC User Group and despite all my nerves, it went well. Embarrassingly so, in fact.

Taking a lesson out of drspleen's book, I started off apologising for the fact that I hadn't given a presentation before and that I didn't think I had enough material for half an hour, to get everyone on side. I then gave my presentation proper, which I thought went reasonably well once I got into it - although I'm still a bit disappointed that no one jumped up and shouted, "Hallelujah" when I got into my spiel on the total greatness of Nagios. Somehow, I managed to finish dead on half past and knock all the audience questions on the head in time for Stephen to give a new version of his 4D VAR talk, which he'd previously presented at ECMWF.

I wasn't quite sure how it had all gone, I was pleased although it's always hard to tell how your thing, but quite a few people came upto me afterward and were really positive about it. One person said, "I didn't think a quite guy like you would be able to go on like that, but you started talking and it suddenly all came together didn't it? The ponytail, the gothic look, the whole Unix thing, it all worked..." Most worryingly of all, I had another conversation with the Master after God:

It was all I could do not to run away screaming. There's no way I want the MaG to start meddling with my career, attempting to make me into a manager in his own image.

In other news from the NUG, there was a pretty interesting talk by Mathis Rosenhauer, who'd done a lot of super cool work on grovelling through SUX kernel data structures using C - pretty impressive given the abominable lack of documentation on system internals. The only way I was able to work out how to walk the same sort of structures with crash was by reading the header files and going through the crash source code - I gave up on C when I realised how retro the process table interface was (Ha! Interface! Like, as if).

I'm looking forward to a normal, albeit three day, week next week.

After a few more minutes of browbeating, the other guy knuckled under, leaving me with a nagging sense of guilt about behaving like a total bastard. Never mind. As Machiavelli said, it's more important to be feared than loved.