On the Road

5:10 PM -- 2005 saw some strange trade show experiences, from a press room fracas at Interop to acts of god at Storage Networking World. (See Interop Oddballs and Storm Clouds Gather Over SNW.) Then there were Radware Ltd. (Nasdaq: RDWR)s saucy gifts at the Infosecurity show and a very rude awakening at the Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) Forum. (See Why Don't I Feel Protected? and Stomping With Sun.)

But my most surreal moment of the year took place on a trip to the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee for a conference attended by the great and the good of the High Performance Computing world. It goes without saying that the meeting -- which took place at the birthplace of the atomic bomb -- was pretty serious stuff. (See Oak Ridge Plans Petaflop Supercomputer and Clusters vs Supercomputers.)

Events took a very strange turn during a bus ride on the final day, when the bus driver suddenly decided to show us -- myself and some other attendees -- his Vietnam war wound (thankfully, it was on his shoulder). Then, as his bus was filling up with half the Ph.D’s on the planet, he treated us to an audio tape of his favorite comedian, who, if my memory serves me correctly -- went by the name of Thunder Pants.

How we laughed all the way back to the hotel.

— James “Kerouac” Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch