Gilding the lily (pad).

At SCALE, Sun’s Barton George interviewed our own Tom ‘spot’ Callaway about his new-ish role as Fedora Engineering Manager. (This has been up a couple days, but I just got on top of my feeds.) The whole interview is great — go download it now, it’s available in Ogg Vorbis format — but my absolute favorite part:

SPOT: If you think of Paul as Captain Kirk, I’m Mister Spock.

BG: Oh, there you go — so you’re more logical?

SPOT: HA HA HA HA HA! … Yeah.

But my friends, TRUER WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN SPOKEN. In a more hilarious world, the interview would have gone on something like this:

BG: So how does Paul fit the Captain Kirk role?

SPOT: Like Kirk, he’s straight out of a Western, what with the booze, the cussing, and the scrapping. And he tends to chew the scenery a lot.

BG: Scrapping, huh? Does open source community management involve a lot of fisticuffs?

SPOT: It’s become something of an embarrassment, honestly. He usually beams into Las Vegas for Interop, gets drunk on cheap vodka while insisting the bartenders call it “Romulan ale,” and then picks fights with all the proprietary software vendors until they throw him out of the expo.

BG: Yikes.

SPOT: And he’s also a little too overjoyed about “welcoming our alien overlords,” as he calls it. He expects quite a few of them will look like Raquel Welch and wear miniskirts.

BG: I thought that was just an Internet meme.

SPOT: I know, that’s what I told him too. Not only did he not believe me, he seems to think they’ll be impressed by his “I have a fat pipe” T-shirt. It’s probably ready to stand up by itself at this point.

BG: What does this mean for the Fedora 9 release then?

SPOT: It should be fine. At first we were just trying to keep him away from Rawhide as much as possible. You know, cutting off his commit access so he can’t put random “pwn3d woooooo” messages in kernel modules.

BG: What happened?

SPOT: I told him on Thursday that the toll plazas on the MassPike are a barrier to entry, so he was all like, “Ahead warp factor 6! Full phasers!” and just ran out of the office. I’m not entirely sure he’ll be back.

BG: So you’re in charge now, then?

SPOT: [Raises one eyebrow] That would be… logical.