[vox] [fwd] September '09 interview with Torvalds

[Marc Elliot Hall]

On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 02:18:47PM -0700, Brian Lavender wrote:
> I saw Jono Bacon at OpenSource World. He has a column in the Ubuntu User
> magazine. Seems to me that Linus should be interviewing Jono. ;-) I saw
> Randal Schwartz and OScon and I walked up to him and said "Hey Randal,
> how is it going?" He gave me a blank stare and a "Do I know you?" I
> replied I just knew who he was and met him a long while ago.

Randal is a sharp guy, and funny if you like geeky humor. He also gives
excellent presentations if you ever have a chance to attend a conference
or seminar where he is scheduled to deliver training. 

Many years ago, when the dot-com bubble was still in an expansion phase,
my employer sent me to a Web development conference in Pasadena. The era
was *so* much different. For example, when one presenter was gauging the 
experience level of his audience at the beginning of his seminar, he
asked questions like who had ever written a static web page, who had 
configured or installed a web server, etc. When he asked if anyone in
the room had installed Sendmail, I was the only one to raise a hand. He 
then asked, "Do you want a job?" 

And he wasn't kidding. His support staff had leapt into action to get
my contact info right there in the seminar before I waved them off. 

Among the other featured presenters were such luminaries as Molly 
Holszschlag (an early advocate of designing to standards and separating 
content from presentation), Lincoln Stein (developer of the cgi.pm Perl 
libraries), and Randal Schwartz. 

At the last minute, Lincoln Stein had to cancel his trip to California,
so the conference organizers asked Randal Schwartz to fill in. As the 
room filled, Randal introduced himself, explained that he was 
substituting for Lincoln, and said that the session would be about 
beginning Apache administration. He got about three minutes in when the
class got his attention and explained that the session was *supposed* to
be about cgi programming. Apologizing quickly, Randal then shifted to 
configuring Apache to use modperl. The class again interrupted his flow
and explained that this was supposed to be specifically about cgi.pm. 
For each of these topics, Randal was prepared to wing it, without notes,
slides, a syllabus, or any other aids. Further, even though two out of 
three topics were cut short after only a few minutes, I learned something 
of significance about each of them. And the cgi.pm presentation was 
excellent. 

But I'm not surprised that he gave you a blank stare. He probably meets
upward of 250 people a month in various seminars or when delivering his
offbeat brand of stand-up; so unless you've had repeated exposure, he's 
not likely to remember you. 

-- 
Marc Elliot Hall
www.hallmarc.net

> On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 10:18:28AM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > 
> > Seen on PenLUG's list.  (I haven't listened to it yet.)
> > 
> > ----- Forwarded message from Alison Chaiken -----
> > 
> > Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 10:09:46 -0700
> > From: Alison Chaiken
> > Subject: [PenLUG] September '09 interview with Torvalds
> > 
> > Recent interview with Linus by Jono Bacon and Randal Schwartz of FLOSS Weekly:
> > http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/FLOSS-088.mp3
> > 
> > -- 
> > Alison Chaiken
> > <snipped Alison's phone number -bjk>
> > 
> >     http://www.exerciseforthereader.org/
> > Play a little bit out of tune and you don't have to worry about
> > copyright.   -- Debashish Bhattacharya