MEETING THE PANEL

Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

I attended a conference the other day that was quite different

from an ordinary IT event. I’m not even sure how I got to it – whether I took a wrong turn, or whether a wrong turn was taken for me through some distillation of the experiential space-time penumbra. In any case, I emerged from a hazy hallway into an inauspicious conference room, where a very peculiar and antagonistic meeting had reached the communicative equivalent of ear wax served on a cracker. Several strangely dressed participants sat about a semicircular table. They seemed to be in some form of panel discussion. Their business suits appeared to have been fashioned from burnished aluminum foil, although each was dressed quite differently, and, in fact, each looked quite different – and not just “different” like from a different country, but wholly individual in species, for among them, one could find no unity in the number of lips or eyes or even the position of the nose in regard to any particular axis of symmetry.