Worth Repeating

by Tina Darmohray
<[email protected]>

Tina Darmohray, editor of SAGE News & Features, is a consultant in the area of Internet firewalls and network connections, and frequently gives tutorials on those subjects. She was a founding member of SAGE.

There were a lot of things to see and do at the recent LISA conference in San Diego. One of the highlights for me was the short, impromptu speech that Paul Vixie gave as he accepted the annual SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award. I wish I could think up such "right on," heartfelt words on the spot. He did, and they really went to the heart of one of the reasons why it's so cool to be a part of this technical community.

The award reads:

I've included them here for those of you who didn't have the opportunity to hear Paul's words live. But even if you caught his speech, I think his message is worth repeating.

My first reaction on being told of this was that you guys are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now!

I guess I've got a couple of remarks to make.

One is that at my very first USENIX, I was sitting in the very first tutorial and the fellow next to me was from Alaska, or somewhere else far away, and he was remarking on how it was amazing him to walk through the halls of the conference and see all of the people that he had been hearing about and reading articles from on USENET over the years. And I got to talking to him about where I was from, and what I did, and I told him that I had just started at DEC Palo Alto. Now, he was sitting on one side of me and my badge was hanging on the other side of me, and he said, "Oh! Isn't that where Vixie hangs out?"

And I said, "Uh huh."

And certainly, on one hand, I was very glad to have been noticed (we all like attention), but I was a little bit concerned at his tone of voice, in that perhaps I had been even more vitriolic than I had intended to be on the various mailing lists and newsgroups where he might have noticed me. And that sort of gave me my first inkling that someday I was going to be a well-known person, and I wondered what that would be like. What I've discovered is that it's a little bit like parenting: when you're a kid, you think your parents know everything and have super powers, and that someday you're going to grow up and you'll know everything, too. Then you get to be a parent and discover that your parents were shining you on; they didn't have a clue! So here I am!

I would not be here if not for the kind attentions of Rick Adams and Brian Reid, both of whom thought that I was worth teaching at various times. And if their work can be an example to me it will be because I have found other people who were worth teaching and I hope that that in turn will be an example to all of you. The way that this industry works is not that we all go to school. Some folks have been lucky enough to work with Evi and other really great instructors. But, for the most part, we're in this for fun and we're trying to learn and it's only to the extent that other people are willing to work with us and tell us the clues so we can prosper and succeed and get better at what we do. So if you're not mentoring somebody, you should start thinking about how you're going to start doing that. I thank you for the award.