Finally, the time has come for...
Rambling and somewhat pointless noding-induced reminiscences FROM OUTER SPACE!!!!!
Have you ever been browsing the
nodegel, just after being insulted by a girl, and avoiding learning a
new distributed objects technology, when you come across
something like
this, and been reminded of another time in your life?
A happier time, perhaps?
It was the summer of 2002, and I had just been evicted from the house I was living in at the time, and living rent-free with some friends, it was a good time in my life. Apart from the fact that none-of us met any women apart from those who worked in our offices, apart from the unemployed guys, who didn't meet anyone. We were working for Philips Semiconductors, IBM, and a local ISP, so you can understand the nature of the problem.
We return to our original programming
It was a crazy place, a place which was desperately trying to get out of being a solid, boring manufacturer of
premium pedestrian, and safe goods with reasonably mature markets to the
highest-tech subsidiary of a
high-tech international megatechnology conglomerate. To this end,
the company put on a
coffee-and-brainstorming morning, providing me with a welcome respite from my investigations into programming with pure
UML, but also the basis of this anecdote.
So, there we all were, we had taken our seats at circles of seats currently lacking tables (These rare delicacies would be provided later), listening to other members of the lab whom we had never seen before tell us things about the industry that made us realise that Phillips was in big trouble if they couldn't pull off the switch. Sadly, the only thing that I remember of these presentations is that mobile phone chipsets where going to go down to $15.
We brainstormed like we never had before. We thought outside the box, but not outside the bounds of sense and reason. We looked at what we had thought, and we saw that it was good. We wrote down our best ideas, even some of mine, on the forms that were handily provided. We knew that they would be safe in the hands of the man whose name appears on the fastext patent, the venerable keeper of the ancient and honourable suggestions box.