Remember that time when, instead of doing any work, I went to conferences all day and my chief business was to scmooze and make connections and take photos like the one below of MC Hammer? That was a sweet week.

Check out my album on Picasa for some other photos, including more celebrities.

It is surprisingly tiring, this conference thing. Cool though. At least now we’ve moved into much more specific stuff about the State of the Business and how we are going to change the State of the Business. That is way more interesting to me than general wishy-washy feel-good stuff about how we’re swell, have room to be even sweller, blah blah blah.

It’s funny. We’re in a state of a huge amount of change and drive right now, and while I am interested in a lot of the external forces that are going on, it’s the sort of businessy, advertisy things I never would have expected to find myself interested in in college. But however big the external changes are and may be (or, you know, may not be, in an over-hyped sort of way), it’s the internal process of continual change and improvement that I’m much more interested in. Is this narcissistic, being relatively uninterested in how Giant Merger will affect our customers, but being fascinated by the changing support needs and the ongoing process changes we will need to keep up with them?

I guess I’ve always been interested in process more than facts. It’s what made me such a good Parliamentarian back in the day. The patterns, they continue. The bigger picture, where will it go?

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Ok, one more thing: Happy Pangynaskia Day/Beltane/International Workers’ Day. Have some Internationale and silly conversation about Marx and Engels. And, for the balancing force, just a little bit of First of May.

Now that I have brought up Communism, I need to distance myself a bit from the potential that I myself am a Communist by quoting relevant dialog from my favorite movie ever (totally not because one of the versions of the Internationale you can download is performed by one of my favorite dead gays, Marc Blitzstein. If you trust me.)

Welles: Are you a Communist?
Blitzstein: [something to the effect of having been purged by Stalin, maybe?], but I’m faithful to the ideals of the party.
Welles: Well, I’m faithful to the party of ideals.
Houseman: You’re faithful to the idea of a party.

You get bonus points if you can identify the tag in my cloud that contains another quotation from this movie. I can sneak them in anywhere.