Friday, June 23, 2006
The Secret to Happiness
At the end of Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, talk he posts this Glasbergen.com cartoon of a hiker that reaches the summit of mountain (could be Nepal) facing the archetypal wise mountain sage parked there with the long beard. Interestingly enough, the sage has a laptop (the view might beat my garden’s where I like to haul my own laptop). The caption reads: “The secret to happiness is: Always get as much RAM as you can possibly afford.”
Funny that it concludes with happiness and technology, it’s what I wrote about on my blog today. In there I write:
It’s not exactly that I’m a Luddite. I have a BSEE and been a CTO. Yet I totally understood the woman (and there’s not that many women here) who snuck out of the dark conference room on a beautiful yesterday in downtown San Francisco to stroll into an art gallery.
I also wrote: “I want my technology to enrich my life, not complexify it nor drag me away from life. And if not, I simply cannot get excited about gadgetry and bytes anymore.” I’ve more common ground with ‘regular’ people (those that think Java is a drink, Ruby a gem) than much of the audience at Supernova so you can expect an ‘outsider’ view (not necessarily contrarian, not necessarily echo chamber either) of the Supernova topics in my musings even though my background makes me an ‘insider’. (So that means that cramming more RAM for its own sake - for what purpose? - is not mydefinition of happiness.)
I’m also more of a big-picture synthesist writer, so you can expect no more posts today. I typically need about a day of distance to allow the patterns and perspective among the themes to weave into something greater than individual sessions live-blogged. So the digestion and incubation begins in a few hours, emerging in posts this weekend.
Enjoy the rest of the afternoon sessions! Enjoy your weekend!
