Skip to main content

Twitter Reloaded: Musings to Close Out 2019

IBM i expert Dawn May reflects on the past year.

A few years ago, I watched “The Matrix.”  Beyond the cool effects and flashy graphics, I wondered about latency, I/O and throughput issues in such a computationally intense SciFi world. If everyone is hooked together in such a way, how might an administrator reconcile all the disparate nodes? How does one troubleshoot what must be very complex issues?  Fast forward to today and consider how the network we’re hooked into makes us blind to the understanding that social media posts are less real than reality itself. (Or are they?)
IBM i is marketed and used for big data and crunching input to produce meaningful insights in business, finance, logistics and government. It runs a very large amount of the world’s core business processes.  My “i Can” blog most often deals with details and minutia of the inner workings of IBM i, but I can’t help but wonder which OS controlled the AI system in “The Matrix.” With so much wetware complexity, how did it all work?
But that’s not what this particular article is concerned about. Last week on Twitter, I was followed by someone who appeared to be the Canadian, Keanu Charles Reeves. I thought perhaps he needed help with his IBM i performance. Perhaps his IBM Power Systems computer crapped out on him and he needed my guidance. Perhaps, (by the weirdest coincidence), he wanted to speak with my husband, who once met the real Keanu’s mom, or (an even weirder coincidence), wanted to speak with my husband’s former roommate, who the real Keanu supposedly dated a decade or so ago.
Alas, a perfunctory search of Twitter revealed dozens of fake Keanu accounts and the realization that it was not an impromptu Dangerous Liaison. A quick review of who my fake Keanu is following reveals a curious interest in quite a few women involved in the IBM i world, in addition to a great many professional women in education, law and medicine. I’ll bet that most, if not all, of my far-flung female IBM i colleagues did not even notice their “famous” follower.