I have officially arrived

I was at the Search Monkey Developer Launch tonight to answer questions and give demos to the attendees. The event itself was a nice success, but that's not what I'm writing about. What I'm writing about is one particular attendee. Apologies to this guy if I embarrass him, but he had to know I'd say something.

After getting through the initial queue of developers asking about Search Monkey, I was approach by a tall young man:

<guy> Hey, you're Sara Golemon, right?
<me>  Yeah...
<guy> Nice to meet you, I really like your blog entries about how PHP works,
     and I bought your book!
<me>  Oh fantastic! Are you enjoying it?
<guy> Yeah, it's really heavy, and I haven't had a chance to use a lot,
     but I was experimenting with writing my own libssh2 wrapper...

By this point, I'm suitably blushing. I'm easily swayed by compliments thanks to my lack of self-esteem. Then he takes a turn...

<guy> I almost emailed this to you, it's a photo my girlfriend took of me without warning...
     Let me just find it in my camera
* guy shows photo of himself lying in a water-filled bathtub, naked, covering his... bits
     with a copy of my book

I... um... well... okay... I can see why you wouldn't email that out of the blue.... Now, I try to think of myself as a fairly progressive, hard-to-phase sort. I can tell a dirty joke with the best of 'em, but this just... left me giggly for the next hour. Like, um...wow... okay... Thanks for sharing...

Is this a sign? Is it a measure of notoriety when strangers show you naked photos of themselves at random tech gatherings?

Dress Code

The background

As most know, I work for Yahoo!, the US Web Search front-end team specifically. The company as a whole has (to my knowledge) no more of a dress code than "Don't show up naked". Consequently, most employees, especially those in engineering/operations roles, tend to dress pretty casually. During the summer, this progresses clear into the realm of shorts and sandals.

There's one coworker in our team, Venu, who insists on "dressing for success". Not ultra formal mind you, but we've never seen him wear anything short of a dress shirt, slacks, and nice shoes. At the other end of the spectrum is our boss, Lalit, who has only rarely been seen wearing anything other than shorts (and then, only in the coldest of winters). It was from this, that another coworker, Venkat, hatched his plan.

The setup

To everyone but Lalit:
 Hey, we should play a prank on Lalit, next monday, everyone should show up in shorts and flip-flops
        to make fun of him for his slacker dressing...


Meanwhile, to everyone but Venu:
 Okay, Venu's falling for it, now the REAL prank will be on him.  He'll show up in shorts,
        and the rest of us will dress formally...

Sure enough, today Venu "the slob" showed up in shorts and some (but not all) the rest of us showed him up in our "business professional" attire. Looking at my towering stature in this photo, I'm doubting the wisdom of wearing heels, but somehow flats just didn't create the right effect ;)

Lalit, Me, Venu, Ryan, Venkat, Nam

Moving right along

After well over half a decade at the University of California at Berkeley, I'm moving on to greener pastures. Well, maybe not greener (Berkeley is full of evergreens and...other verdant plant substances), but pastures at the very least. Next monday, my life's journy will bring me to that farmland come technopolis known the world over as Silicon Valley. I'll be cubefarming private sector style for one of the few dotcom survivors, a little mom & pop outfit called Yahoo!. I've worked in education and the public sector since 1997 and while I'm optimistic everything will go smoothly, well....I think Dan Aykroyd put it best as Dr. Raymond Stantz in Ghostbusters: "You don't know what it's like out there, you've never worked in the private sector, They expect results! (shudder)". If nothing else it'll be nice to get my commute back down to the 20minute zone. At any rate, I've got 2 days and as many going-away parties to get through, then it's on to the enemy camp (Yahoo's birth {not as a company, but as the index site it started out as} was at UCBerkeley's long-time rival, Stanford University).