Wired Oct/96 P.147:
excerpted from NetHeads VS BellHeads, by Steve G. Steinberg
.....
SprintLink - a small guerilla operation within Sprint - suffers almost no
interference from upper management. And there I'd pick Sean Doran,
SprintLink's lead engineer and outspoken bad boy, as the person who
runs the Internet.
Doran, we learn from his Web page, is 26 years old and a Canadian
citizen. He is, in his own words, "a person who is deliberately cheeky
toward people in authority, rude to people who think that they deserve
respect that they have not earned, and who generally causes trouble
on IRC." He tells us that he is "cute", "annoying", "brilliant", and
"arrogant". He is "both bisexual and queer". His likes include "chocolate",
"flirting", "fast computer networks", and "obscure poetry and allusions."
He dislikes "Tories and other suchlike right-wing twits" and "people
who try too hard to impress other people". He is, in short, completely
likeable, but different from what you might expect of the person
responsible for the technical administration at the heart of the Internet.
In person, Doran's manner is rather high-strung - always fidgeting,
interrupting, and blurting out great huge paragraphs. He's extremely
articulate, perhaps a reflection of his liberal arts education ("I'm not
a science-y person", he admits). Every question elicits a 10-minute
response, which, you get the feeling, is done more for some abstract
notion of completeness than for your edification. When challenged
on a point, he tilts his head, and his eyes begin to blink faster
as he overwhelms your argument with masses of examples, quotes,
and anecdotes.
------
It goes on. It's not a bad article, actually. Even a telco guy like me
learned something :-)
So what gives with us Canadians anyway?
Marshall McLuhan, Derrick de Kerckhove, Donald Tapscott, James Gosling,
Sean Doran, ....
Maybe the global source of cluons comes from Santa's workshop at the
North Pole and wafts gently down over the tundra on us lucky northerners....
Naah, on second thought
we've got just as many 97%'ers up here, rest assured :-).
Ron.