Dammit, people…

Okay, so simianpower has the disease, rev_e has the disease, my friend Sarah has her away message set to “Sick as a Dawg”, and there’s a raging discussion on my friends list about the merits of “Cold-Eeez”. Somehow, the bug has jumped the distance between all of us, and now my throat is hamburger. Gah.

Seems that last night was “nuclear rant” night.

• We had one potential customer tear us a new one because (so far as I can tell) he was expecting our product to solve different problems than it actually does. Oh well.
• One of the prominent people in cluster building for bioinformatics cut loose on a *big* mailing list with his review of a new O’Reilly book on cluster computing. Good thing I resigned myself to do a shot of tequila after every typo I found. It dulled the pain this book inflicted. Yikes.
• And Mainely A Cappella just unleashed a broadside against my friend Mark’s National Championship of High School A Cappella. Oopsie, it was really the not for profit Varsity Vocals who announced their International Championship of High School A Cappella. There’s a longstanding smokescreen of BS obscuring the fact that the Varsity Vocals is a marketing arm of Mainely A Cappella. They have the same staff, the same web server, and notes from VV come on MAC stationary. The only difference is that VV is tax exempt.

  You may have already heard of another high school a cappella tournament operating under a very similar name to the ICHSA. We want to emphasize that this other tournament is NOT a Varsity Vocals event. We feel that it is unfortunate that this company has chosen a name so similar to those that our company uses, and we regret hearing that so many of you have felt misled and confused by the similarity in names. Unfortunately, this other tournament has refused our requests that they change their name.

  While we do encourage your support of and involvement in any event that benefits your organization and the a cappella community, we hope you’ll choose the ICHSA and will continue to support Varsity Vocals. We pledge to continue bringing quality programs to you.

  Their contention seems to be that they hold exclusive rights to organize any a cappella competition, anywhere. Weird.