Charles Lamb's Blog

[The following is a repost from the Sleepycat blog.  It was originally posted on 4/06/06 and has been migrated here.]

Greg, Mark, and I just returned from participating in the Golden
Penguin Bowl. This is the trivia contest where they ask you also sorts
of nerdy questions, many of them slams at high-profile execs (Larry
Ellison, Bill Gates, etc.). I've gotta say that it wasn't the kind of
thing that I'd normally volunteer for, but I volunteered for the good
of the whole. Greg, Mark, and I were really pretty scared of getting
slaughtered in this thing, especially when we heard that one of the
MySQL guys had won it the past two years, and that another one on their
team was Ted Tso (a ringer, for sure). We just wanted to escape from
the hour with having not made complete fools of ourselves, and perhaps
even answer a few questions. It didn't turn out all that bad and in
fact I think we all had a pretty good time.

I did my team honor
when I answered the question about what "Object Oriented File System
did Microsoft recently remove from Vista, and what year was it first
announced?" [Cairo, 1992]. But it was an Oh Darn! moment when I
answered the question about what AJAX stood for and I answered
Asynchronous Java And XML, knowing full well that it's Asynchronous
JavaScript And XML. D'oh. I thought Jeremy might let it slide by, but
the astute judges caught it. Mark and Greg had their own great answers
(stuff that I never could have come up with) and we celebrated those
with lots of high-fives.

Ted and the MySQL guys did an awesome
job, especially with the question that showed two pictures of Tiananmen
Square, one with the famous picture of the student blocking the
military tank, and the second with a family posing for a picture with
the square behind them. He picked right up that the difference was that
one was from google.com and the other from google.cn. It seems obvious
in retrospect, but under fire, it's not always clear.

Hint to future participants: read /. for a year or so before, and follow that with an APOD chaser or two and you'll be fine.

Comments and a link to the story are at:
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/04/06/1650223.shtml

/. says: Host
Jeremy Allison hit a few raw nerves with the opposing Oracle team,
introducing them as members of the Berkeley DB product line, 'which
Oracle will soon kill.' But to be honest, we couldn't hear much of
what Jeremy was saying because of the accoustics in the hall. So I
didn't even know he said this until I read it on /. To know what was
being asked, we pretty much had to rely on reading the questions on the
monitor.

Congratulations to the MySQL guys who did a great job.
Because we lost (not by much, I'm pleased to say), Mike will have to
wear a MySQL shirt to work at Redwood Shores. Sorry Mike.

All in all I had a great time and would happily do it again.