Imminent Death of BayLISA / July Board Meeting Invitation

Wed Jun 23 23:14:04 PDT 2004

Quoting Roy S. Rapoport (rsr at inorganic.org):
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 12:41:22PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

...
> 2. Assume everyone you talk to at Google will be smarter than you (this is
> probably a safe assumption anyway); 

You've struck a peeve.  And I am compelled, perhaps inadvisadely,
to vent (knowing full well that inadvisadely is not a word.  irregardless*):

I've found this same behaviour at Windows (a friend worked there
and I hung out some).  The Office folks were hugely impressed with
themselves.  They seemed really upset that my Zenith XT class laptop
that ran DR-DOS ("some MSDOS clone, is it?") and Wordperfect and Quattro
(want QuattroPro for BSD a lot).  "But how can you run a PC without
Microsoft software?"  (they didn't quite hear "quite reliably, thanks")

I find the view that they are smarter than you common among PhD's
and academics..  Perhaps it's an implicit "I spent 6 years in
academia surrounding myself with people who taught me the importance
of my education and studying with people who study about the field."

Ok, that said, a best friend is a perpetual PhD candidate at UCB.

But I tire quickly with those who are so terribly impressed with
themselves that they must impose the credentials on others.

Perhaps it was some childhood spent in cambridge.  Needless to say,
there were parts of Good Will Hunting I enjoyed tremendously (& it
wasn't the struggle to maintain the same wicked bad accent through a scene).

It was mirrored by a friend who went from high school to lighting
and doing some lighting design on Broadway who, at 22 and well sought
after, applied to NYU for a theater degree.  He was told that there was
"no way [he] could credit out of the basic classes" and that he'd have
to sit through freshman "this is a LAMP.  Let's all say it LLLAAMMMPPP.
And the BULB goes into it."

He sat in on a masters class on technical design and corrected them
"well, sure, in THEORY light falls of as a square of the distance,
but as soon as you have things on the stage or effects like fog,
your theory all falls to crap."

They were smarter than him.  So he went back to Broadway and film
and even hired of couple of them once they finished school.

> 4. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  If you'd like, I can
> show you my first two rejection letters.  I'm working on my third.

I had a friend, a cartoonist, who was published in several places but
had a wall plastered with New Yorker rejection slips.  Some sort of
fetish.

*yes, I know.  Look up "irony" too.