Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn about application modernization and the performance gains that are being realized by using SQL and modern programming techniques.
This reminded me of an experience I had WAAAYYYY back when I was a programmer for a System/36 consulting firm.
Continue readingOk, talk about a panic.
A few weeks ago I attend the System i Innovation Award banquet at the COMMON conference.
This was a formal affair, suit and tie, but all my suits were pretty old … since I don’t wear them to work (only once or twice a year), there hasn’t been a driving need to get a new one.
So off to Nordstroms Ginny and I go … we find a really nice charcoal wool suit that requires minimal tailoring.
Fast forward to the COMMON conference … because I’m only going for the awards banquet … I wasn’t able to get MKS to pay for me to attend. I did a bit of wheeling & dealing, arranged to room with my friend Aaron (who is a vendor) , and paid my own airfare (Ginny was able to find me a pretty reasonable rate).
When I arrived at the hotel, I found Aarons room and dropped my stuff off … including hanging my suit up in the closet. A little while later, a friend of mine told me that he was in a suite at the hotel … and had an entire room available that he wasn’t using. He asked if I wanted to stay in that room instead. Obviously I said yes. He gave me the key and I went back to Aarons room to get my stuff (including my suit).
Fast forward again to Monday evening … about an hour before the awards banquet. I’m getting ready, pull out my suit … only to find my suit pants missing.
The first thing that flashed in my head was that I had forgotten my pants at home. I called Ginny to see if she could check the closet (not that she could do anything about it at that point). She wasn’t home. I tried calling Aaron, who would be on the expo floor, to see if he knew if they were still in the closet of his room. I got his voice-mail.
As a last ditch effort, I called Marty (who is a co-worker at MKS, and also on the expo floor) to see if he could go and ask Aaron to call me. I got a text message from Aaron saying that he couldn’t leave the expo, but I could come over and get a spare key.
I sprinted over to the expo (luckily it wasn’t far) and got the key … then ran back to Aaron’s room and checked his closet … THANKFULLY the pants were still in the closet. I had taken the pants off the hanger the jacket was on so they could hang separately.
I then ran back to my room and finished getting ready … took me a bit of time to cool down, but I was once again presentable … and the rest of the evening was a success (although I didn’t win the award 🙁 ).
A recent thread on MIDRANGE-L got people talking about some of the old hardware they had worked on.
I mentioned the fact that, when I was in school, I used to know how to program an IBM 029 card punch.
Ken Shields generously sent me a link to information about the 029 … just in case I need to re-hone my skills.
Dunno if I will really need to bone up on 029 card punch programming … I have enough of a problem just dealing with the differences between Unix and iSeries editors. You wouldn’t belive the number of times I click on the “X” close button on my 5250 emmulator when I’m done editing source in SEU. Heck, occasionally I’ll start editing in ‘Stream of consciousness’ mode, and look up to find a bunch of J’s, K’s, I’s, and L’s in the middle of my seu screen (J, K, I, & L, are the cursor navigation keys in VI, the standard unix editor).
I received a rather interesting email from an IBM Business Consultant the other day.
Elizabeth said …
I wanted to touch base with someone in your organization who is responsible for your technology purchases for your end user needs (i.e. xSeries, Intel servers, Rational software, services etc.) I’m newly assigned to your account for your end user purposes, hoping to better explain my role and the value I can add to your account.
Now, the interesting thing about this is … I don’t have an IBM account … and I am certianly not an IBM partner (not in the official sense, anyway) … and I also do not use any of the systems or services mentioned (not from IBM at least). So I’m not sure where she would have gotten my contact information.
The even more interesting bit of information is this: Her title is “IBM Business Consultant, Metro New York/New Jersey”.
Now why would a business consulting in the NY/NJ area, be contacting me? I’m in the Chicago area. If you do a whois lookup on midrange.com, you will find that the zone contact listed is register.com … and they are in New York.
Could it be that some IBM’ers are farming the whois database’s for email addresses?