BayLisa the real problem.

Thu Jun 17 13:57:38 PDT 2004

<Tongue_In_Cheek_Mode>
The real problem is this : 

We are systems administrators in the bay area.

Being in the south bay means laziness by nature. Lack of public
transportation, excess of strip malls and suburbs. That's the lifestyle,
"do we do something interesting with our life, or do we watch television
and order out?" 

Being in San Francisco means snobbyness about the south bay, and an
inherent laziness if it means having to go further south than geneva st,
let alone further south than palo alto.

I'm by far guilty of this. I've turned down $20k-$30k in side consulting
gigs in the past 2 years just because I had no interest in driving to
San Jose..

Now, the important part of this, is we're all systems administrators.
It's our jobs to create ways to be lazy. Scripts are good.  Activity in
groups is great, if it doesn't require non-automatable effort.

What can we automate in the BayLISA group?  Can we rotate the locations
of the meetings, to get greater coverage?  Would split-meetings work
(having video conferencing between two or three sites). Can we write
snmp-agents to collect the value experience (commradery, anecdote
sharing, information discovery, networking, shared food) and input it
back into ourselves?

A name change is a silly idea.. It's like how Lucent though they were
going to take over the world by putting up a sign in bethlehem,
pennsylvania saying "Look out Silicon Valley, Here comes the Lehigh
Valley" during the boom, and changing their logo to the "flaming
asshole" (or the coffe stain, depending on what group you worked in). 

As soon as the name change idea came up, the first thing that popped
into my mind was a sound clip I used to play whenever a moron manager of
mine at a company I refuse to admit I worked for, came up with another
piece of his programming wisdom (like using a filesystem as a database
because databases were unreliable).. It's from a south park episode,
with a marketing drone going "The end-all greatest marketing scheme of
all times".

What drives geeks : 

- Toys
- food
- BEER
- challenges
- sex
- Bandwidth
- Bragging rights
- Flame Wars

</Tongue_In_Cheek_Mode>