I actually took this photo last October, I was reminded about this today because someone asked if they could use this photo for an article about the city of Seattle banning microwave popcorn in the courthouse.
Thank you for sharing your photo!This photograph appears in a NowPublic news story: City of Seattle may ban microwave popcorn.
Possibly the strangest schwag that I’ve ever received. Out of the blue I got this in the mail from Hewlett Packard, a bag of microwave popcorn. there was something included with it about if I went and watched some promo video they might give me a voucher for the movies but I decided to skip that part and just eat the popcorn.
posted by colinj-flickr at 12:27 pm
I am a professional computer nerd. That’s what I do. To most people I’m sure that it seems like folks working in the information technology world are pretty much all the same. We all speak a strange language. We have the latest gadgets before other folks. And we all think the same way. Oh, if only that were the case.
The reality is that that are many little clans and villages in the IT world and more often than not they do not see eye-to-eye. Get the wrong group of geeks in a room together and ask them to solve a problem and it’s like pouring hot water on a sack full of angry cats. Today I was reminded of two such subcultures that can often come to blows (figuratively speaking). We’ll call one sysadmins and the other engineers.
Sysadmins (system administrators) come from a computer operator and administrator background. While they worry about the hardware they are running it is secondary to the software that is run on the computers.
Engineers, on the other hand, come from a telecommunications (telephone and computer network) background. They tend to see the world in terms of the hardware that they use. This goes all of the way back to the mechanical switches that ran our first telephone systems.
Where they lock horns is how they look for solutions to problems. Sysadmins will look to software to solve a solution. Hardware can be replaced or upgraded as needed for a particular problem but it’s the software that does the real job. Engineers will look for hardware that solves the problem that they have (often with the software pre-installed and managed by a third party). While this might not seem to be a problem to folks who haven’t seen it in action it can cause some of the most caustic arguments I have ever seen.
posted by Colin J. at 5:05 pm
