@jay and I set our clocks back a couple hours and did a 9AM show. Well-rested and over-caffeinated we talked about corporate conference room naming conventions, jury duty (#ACAB), #Musk's joke of a GenAI ("Grok"), Keith #Rabois's case of brainworms, and the sad demise of #Mesosphere. We also ran out of disk space in the middle of the show so there's a rather abrupt cut about halfway through.
@igb@jay@live Another conference room naming story, apocryphal this time. At HP Labs in Palo Alto, they named the conference rooms after famous computer pioneers, e.g., the Von Neumann Conference Room. Some time later an additional room was converted into a conference room so they named it the Non-Von Neumann Conference Room.
@stuartmarks@igb@jay@live The only 4th floor room at Netflix (I think this building may be Roku nowadays) was reached through a walkway over the roof and had a view in all directions. It was called Towering Inferno and was where many brainstorming sessions for the cloud architecture work were held. In 2008 we watched the fires on the local hillsides from there.
@igb@jay@live Did you know about the conference room naming scheme for Sun’s Santa Clara campus? Each building had a theme; the themes were fairly dull though, such as candies or children’s games. What was cool was that the number of words in the name corresponded to its floor. Thus, given any name, you could pretty much tell which building and floor it was on. 1/
@igb@jay@live In my building, the Pez conference room was on the first floor, Gummi Bears was on the second floor, and Nestle Crunch Bar was on the third floor. When Oracle took over they entered the rooms into their scheduling system. Unfortunately the database column wasn’t wide enough, so some names ended up like NstlCrnchBr. This caused continual confusion because the abbreviated names were hard to find! So Oracle “de-named” the rooms, and they’re all now just numbers. 😞 2/END
@synec@igb@jay@live My best guess is that, like most IT projects, there was nobody maintaining the room scheduling system (database + web app). They could change the data but not the system itself. So the change tickets — if any — either just piled up, or they were closed with “No Staffing.”
@stuartmarks@igb@jay@live As I recall there were also a couple of mistakes with rooms being on the wrong floor for their names. Also "The Firewall" conference room and the executive demo room on the third floor (fully stocked bar!)
@bondolo@igb@jay@live Yeah I think those were converted labs and so they weren’t part of the original naming plan. I think the Firewall eventually got added to the reservation system though.
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