One of my hobbies is writing stupid autobiographies, mostly just to see how people will respond to them. No less an authority than Norbert Mikula (Chief Technology Strategist of DataChannel, XML guru, and all-around good guy) complimented me on a recent bio. When I commented that my autobiographies generate far more responses than the technical content that's so difficult to create, he responded:
Here is the way I would look at it. Since - it seems - quite a bunch of people - like myself - have read the story until the end of the page, it means you must have at least kept their interest until the end of the story. I would consider the bio a modern - and more intelligent - version of the good old "counter" graphics at the footing of an HTML page. It could - of course - just simply mean that they got bored and wanted to find out whom to blame it on.
Tools
Xircon-encrusted tweezers This one got a number of comments from Frank Zappa fans; the tweezers are a reference to the Mothers of Invention classic "Montana," about someone determined to drop out of society, move to Montana, and become a dental floss farmer.
Doug Tidwell is a Senior Programmer at IBM. He has well over a sixth of a century of programming experience and has been working with XML-like applications for several years. He was a speaker at the first XML conference in 1997, and speaks on XML, Java, security, and Web design topics at conferences around the world. His job as a Cyber Evangelist is to basically to look busy, and to help customers evaluate and implement XML technology. Using a pair of xircon-encrusted tweezers, he holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelors Degree in English from the University of Georgia.
The Los Alamos XML Conference Partly to poke fun at self-important people who inflate their biographies with all sorts of pretentious nonsense, and partly to see who's paying attention, I often exaggerate the length and scope of my career.
Senior Programmer Doug Tidwell is developerWorks' evangelist for Web Services and XML. He was the keynote speaker at the secret Los Alamos XML conference in 1943, and has been working with markup languages for more than three hundred years. He holds a Bachelors Degree in English from the University of Georgia and a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of O'Reilly's book on XSLT. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, traveling, and writing ludicrous autobiographies that are published, unedited, on developerWorks. He can be reached at dtidwell@us.ibm.com.
Some of the notes I got suggested this was a typo, others asked how this was possible, but most got the joke....
MC Dug-T The gangsta rap bio. The picture is from a Halloween party I went to last year. I dressed as a geek, complete with pocket protector and glasses held together with Scotch tape. (Several of my oh-so clever friends asked, "Where's your costume?" Ha ha ha.)
MC Dug-T is developerWorks' Minister of Science, droppin' the XML, Java, and Web services 411 on the public. In his travels, he gets mad props from his peeps worldwide for the stone-cold, stoopid-fresh style sheets he leaves behind. All his mad-phat nollidge has been published by O'Reilly and Associates in the Strictly Non-Fiction book XSLT (order your copy today at amazon.com) which is now slayin' soft-sellin' suckas at tha local booksella. Discussing the book in a recent dW interview, he boasted, "I'm gonna empty mah dome into one supa-fly tome."
Some of the notes I got suggested this was a typo, others asked how this was possible, but most got the joke....
