Earlier today I was asked what the MotivatedTurnip was and why is he riding again? There is a cake in the oven, so I have a few minutes and a shiny new blog in which to post the story!
The tale begins in 2000 with a bunch of bored engineers sitting around a conference table describing how unmotivated we were. Things were bad. We were seriously unmotivated. That is probably what the meeting was about, though I have no memory of the agenda. I do recall saying something like “I have the motivation of a turnip,” and everyone laughed. Not long after that, our team decided to use AIM IM as a notifier. I had to create an account, my name was taken, and the MotivatedTurnip was born.
The handle made me laugh, and it was quirky, so I kept it. It googles well, too. Having it in the blog keeps that going.
I added “rides again” because I used to have a Sun Microsystems blog called MotivatedTurnip. I still work for Sun, but I rarely posted. Even though I work on Linux, none of my projects are open source and all are pre-release. Can’t blog about that.
Not wanting to use a corporate blog for personal posts, I deleted it after a year and a small handful of updates to move here to my family site where I decided to just use my real name. That may ultimately turn out to be a mistake, but I’m not trying to hide so why not?