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a drone of undefined terms
Monday, January 11 2016
One of the first things that I learned this morning after feeding the cats and dogs and giving Clarence his Clavamox was that David Bowie had died. I hadn't been expecting that news. I keep wondering when Henry Kissinger is going to die. Or Gerald Ford. Okay, I know that Gerald Ford is already dead, but some transitions from life to death are bigger than others. And Lemmy Kilmister died while I was in the Galapagos. The people of perpetual youth are starting to die of old age. Gretchen took the news worse than I did, and when she took the dogs down to the cornfields this morning for their daily walk, she listened to pirated copies of David Bowie's music on her non-Apple MP3 player.
This evening I was involved in yet another phone conference about security and server management with that company I work for in Los Angeles, the one that suffered a credit card data breach back in the spring. The company is talking to a number of providers of security audits and services, and today we were talking to a woman from one such company. She spoke almost exclusively in jargon and undefined abbreviations that nobody (including me) was willing to ask her to define. If I were to have asked her for such definitions, it would have been exclusively a dialog between me and a very annoyed her. Evidently her technique of talking this way is a successful one, because it has the effect of snowing parties others with whom she conferences. But if it were my company and I were interviewing her for a contract or a job, I would find her verbal style a deal breaker.
Since I didn't have much to contribute to the conference call, I set my phone on mute with speakerphone. And then I tinkered with a much larger (but still cheap) quadcopter drone that had come in the mail today. I could actually fly it around a little in the laboratory while that woman chirped away with her endless stream of undefined terms.
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