Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Aren't You Just Dying To Hear My Story?








Marie is not her real name by the way.





Kate Nepveu said...

Question: I am collecting all the blog posts I can find about Readercon and posting them to the Readercon LJ community.

It's completely obvious to me what panel this was, but since you've gone out of your way to not specify, I'm reluctant to tag it with the panel name without your permission. Please let me know your thoughts on the matter.

Kate Nepveu said...

PS: two panel reports did mention this that I've seen, though in less detail.

gail said...

Someone just sent me a link to a description of this panel that did name names, though, as you say, without as much detail.

This is a public blog, so you are welcome to link to this post as you would any other public post. I'm sure it would be obvious to many Readercon people which panel this was, whether they actually attended it or just read the panel description in the program. I don't believe many Readercon people follow my blog, though. My readership is primarily children's literature people, who might recognize the name of one person involved but probably not the others. Since the point of my post was my own discomfort at witnessing the discussion, I didn't think I needed to risk embarrasssing any of the people involved by identifying them.

Christopher Davis said...

There's a somewhat similar "author in the audience" incident in the technology field.

At a conference, someone from Microsoft was talking about how their new product was going to include a version of the Korn shell.

One of the audience members said "that version isn't very compatible with the Unix version". Mr. MS said "it's pretty compatible, it'll run everything." This went back and forth a couple more times.

Then someone else stood up from the audience and said "You realize you're arguing with David Korn, right?" (As the name implies, he's the author of the Korn shell.)

gail said...

Clearly other fields have much more exciting conferences than the kidlit events I've attended. (I'll see if I can get my computer guy to explain to us what the Korn shell is.)

Civilguy said...

D**m it Jim, I'm a civil engineer not a computer scientist. I'll give it a shot, but feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken. In the most basic sense, a "shell" is the software that you uses to interact with the computer's operating system. Examples of shells are (the "C:\>_" prompt) in the DOS days and Windows Explorer (not internet explorer) in Windows. Korn shell is a specific type of command line interface for the UNIX operating system. Lest you all think I am a total geek, I had to look up Korn Shell on the internet since I don't use UNIX.

gail said...

Well, CG, unless Jen Robinson happens to read these comments, I don't know if any of us in the kidlitosphere will be able to tell whether or not you got that explanation right. Not to worry.

And, ah, I think you kind of gave yourself away as a total geek with the line about DOS. Well, that and the Star Trek reference.