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Spencer here!” the Kitty screamed into his cell phone as his furry form was being passed above the sweaty throng along the edge of the mosh pit at the Ozzfest at Bostons Tweeter Center. The Katt caller apologized for interrupting the Maven of Murmurs merriment at the marathon musicfest but wondered if His Hirsuteness had heard anything about a top-secret Microsoft project called BOA (business-oriented agents). Plenty had been written about Redmonds SOA (service-oriented architecture), said the caller, but right after Tech Ed Europe, news began percolating on blogs belonging to groupies of Microsoft XML architect Don Box that BOA would be part of the Microsoft Transaction Server (code-named Viper) family and would take “Indigo” and BizTalk to the next level via a new BML (Business Markup Language).
“Dont buy it!” shouted Spence as a hand lingered too long on his tail while he continued to ride the human wave. The Kitty said some Microsofties were just engaging in sport with the code-name-curious cats and kittens in the press to see whod bite. But since the faux facts were posted on blogs that many Microsoft aficionados peruse, innocent bystanders started picking up on it, too, taking it as truth. “Those boys better not quit their coding day jobs,” laughed the Lynx. “Ive seen better bluffs on Celebrity Poker.” Just as the Furball touched down on terra firma, he thought he felt another attendee getting too familiar, but it turned out to be the vibration from his BlackBerry. The caller was a pal who claimed that even though Sanjay Kumar parted ways with CA as of June 30, theres still plenty of intrigue at the company. The pal claimed that some on the executive management team may have recently seen a cut in their daily responsibilities as the executive vice president of product development, Mark Barrenechea, has been tossing his weight around in the Kumar vacuum.
Spence wished he had a program as he endured bands with names like Hatebreed and Everytime I Die to see if any of his favorite groups like Bros or Air Supply were playing. After being elbowed in the head, the Mouser noticed a tipster in the writhing humanity around him and shouted, “Whats new?” “Whispers from May that 3Com may resell WLAN switches from Trapeze Networks on an OEM basis are getting louder,” shouted the tipster as the crowd re-engulfed her. Spence stumbled to the parking lot and found a lad wearing a T-shirt that read “Have you Grokked Your Sysadmin Today.” The kid said hed bought the shirt at ThinkGeek.com and was wearing it to remind his boss that July 30 is the Fifth Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Spence noted hed have to get his sysadmin something. “When you cant say it with flowers,” mused the Mouser, “a basket of Twinkies, Doritos, HoHos and Haagen-Dazs bars will always do.”