You hear and see a lot of things ...

at conferences. I saw an inspiring thing and I heard the silliest, stupidest thing all in just one day!

First, I saw a blind professor giving a computer science talk. It was amazing! I didn't even realize he was blind until I heard the reader that read him what was on the next slide. You don't even realize how complicated things can get, like for example he could not integrate a video in his slides (must insert then change property - or is it drag'n'drop in powerpoint ?) and he had to alt+tab (reader aided) to a directory and open the movie from there. Or, when glitches happened like an empty slide he would have to go back and forth a few slides just to get back on track. It was so inspiring to see somebody deal so well with a thing like that, not giving up and continuing to do what (I suppose) he loves. Needless to say he was very smart and funny.

[Warning! Geekish comment coming!!]

And yes, girls and boyz, Microsoft is planning to take over the High Performance Computing (HPC) market!!! Their spear is the Windows 2003 Cluster shit something. Motivation? As given by some general manager something or other at Microsoft, and I quote: "we want to hide ssh calls from the user. they don't want to learn so we are totally hiding it from them". Wtf?! "We offer complete integration with Microsoft products, like Excel (is Excel HPC!??!!? sheesh!!) and Active directory". Brrrr! Anyhow, it gave me a good laugh and it was a great end to the day. Go M$, go!