My comments on the subject are in-line. What is a little cute is that my ten year old son is sitting near me speaking endlessly about his deck of Pokemon trading cards and games about which I care less than Wall Street wants to buy Fannie Mae stock. I don't have the choice of skipping this meeting...
Curt Lundgren wrote: > IMHO, I like the idea of an "ESL rating" or some such, and we'll all > understand and agree that ESL is a prediction, as opposed to a > guarantee. Sure, the material presented was mostly over my head. I > developed an instant respect for the guy doing the presentation. > People like this don't scare me; rather, they inspire me. Regardless > of the topic, I felt I could at least participate as a user in any of > the projects that were presented. I truly disagree with trying to rate presentations or to pre-judge that which someone _volunteers_ to offer our group at a meeting. The real point of NLUG is the G - Group. None of us can make every meeting; life is too busy and gets in the way. To have a Group to fall back on when I have a situation in which I really need help requires that I support that Group. > > Where I want to disagree is where you write "it just wasn't worth my > time" - sure, our presenter speaks in rapid-fire, as people often do > when they are trying to share a great deal of high-level information. > His presentation style will smooth out as he matures. This wasn't > just an opportunity for us to learn about some new technologies - it > was also a growth opportunity for him. If he gets feedback that tells > him he "went too fast and too far too quickly" he's going to take a > different approach in the future. We benefited, he benefited. Please notice that our presenter was not insulted by the several questions I asked in the course of the presentation. He would have let me know by subtle cues that I was annoying him. The lack of feedback from the group that "hey man, this is going waaaaay too fast" is the same as telling him that "we're cool, keep it going." The topic of managing large datacenter implementations may not be germane to many of us (some of us wish it was just now...). There is much to learn and gain from any presentation besides what I always feel - jeez I don't know squat! One line of questions we could have asked the presenter - what were the sequence of events and issues that led you to working on these projects. How does an open source project evolve (to the extent that any two projects follow a similar course). We also could have asked where Cobbler or Func interact with a code repository like Subversion and maybe ask for an example of that. If nothing else, we might have learned more about code repositories which I need to do thank you very much. > > For my part, having rubbed elbows with some true Linux gurus, I'm > grateful for several things: > > 1. That people at this level are on "our side". > 2. That he's developing tools that will ultimately make my life > easier, particularly as virtualization becomes more common. > 3. To find out I wasn't the only one in the room who didn't come > close to keeping up with him...! > > I thought the meeting and the presentation were both awesome. > > Curt That's the spirit, Curt. Hey, I sat in on a presentation, in French, of which I got maybe 65%. My French was almost useful at that point. My struggle to understand the base language took away from my appreciation of the topic. Tuesday night I understood the nouns and verbs but the context was "out there." Howard White --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
