Lazy Susan
May 14th, 2007
When out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Vegas with the Ingres crew a few weeks ago, and it struck me that the creator of the Lazy Susan most probably named it after his ex-wife or girlfriend, and that she no doubt flinched every time one was set down on her dinner table. Since my Blackberry is never out of my hands I decided to check it out in Wikipedia and learned that the invention is attributed to Thomas Jefferson who may have named it for his daughter Susan who had complained of never getting enough to eat and of leaving the table hungry. I like the Lazy Susan as a food delivery mechanism; I can get what I want easily, I can try things without a real commitment, if I like something I can always get more, everyone at the table can build a completely different meal from the same set of dishes, I can recommend stuff to friends and get it to them instantaneously and if I don’t like something I can make it disappear to the other side of the table fairly quickly. The parallels to open source software are obvious, although we like to think of our community as smart rather than lazy.While in Vegas the Ingres team worked two shifts, manning the demo stations and mini theatres by day, team building and relationship building by night. I’ve always been a firm believer in the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” slogan, so I won’t spill the beans on their night time activities. I remember a few years back saying something I shouldn’t have at a Comdex show in Vegas and seeing it reported in eWeek. That time I truly wished it was a policy rather than a slogan. More about that Freudian Slip in a future blog.
