Wednesday 10 November 2010

Igor - have you watered the brains today, Igor?

In his keynote at ApacheCon 2010, Dana Blankenhorn noticed 'middle aged men dressed like college students' and then went on to liken us to the Knights of the Round Table.

I won't dispute the Camelot analogy - but I do want to take issue with  'middle aged men'. Middled aged is probably justifiable on average but it ignores the fact that there were a reasonable percentage of both old and young - and - no kidding - some of us are even female.

The youth were brought in by a wonderful organisation that I knew little about till earlier year - the Apache TAC . The TAC enables great programmers early in their career who are  unlikely to be able to get employers to sponsor their travel and even more unlikely to be able to pay for themselves get a chance to come along and participate. This is great for them but it's also very necessary for the future of the ASF a good dose of wild youth counters the tendency of these organisations to turn crumbly and nostalgic.

After the conference a few of us (including Igor of the blog title)  had to hang out in Atlanta for the weekend and ended up in Blind Willies, Atlanta's finest blues bar. We, Igor and I, danced till the early hours to the music of House Rocker Johnson. So in future I would like to suggest another question on the TAC form:
  • Are you prepared to dance like nobody is watching?
Anyone who can't commit (without a reasonable excuse) should be consigned to the 'encroaching middle age bucket' and discarded.

By the way - for those of you who are almost certainly too young to recognise it - the title quote is a reference to 'The Monster Mash' from the 1969 Bonzo Dog album 'Tadpoles'.  I like the idea that younger delegates might inject a bit of life into the proceedings and don't intend to extend the analogy any further than that :-)

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