Cat Power

A few months ago, there were a bunch of posts of cats with funny, somewhat leetspeak dialogue as if the faintly unintelligent cat was uttering them. Somehow this resonated enough with geeks worldwide that the lesson learned was "put a cat in you presentation". I've already been to three talks already that used cats in it (and one that used a dog). Evan Weaver used cats extensively. Jarkko Laine used one cat in his slides. Adam Keys opted to show a lot of dogs, mostly his own dog.

Why do these geeky cats appeal to us? Maybe it's their propensity to get everywhere, including computers. Wil Wheaton has cats, and he's a geek. Dogs don't seem to get in these messes.

Of course, cats could suffer from overexposure. Pretty soon, people will say "Cats? That's so 2007!". But you can never underestimate how cats can enhance your otherwise mundane talk.

Pretty soon, other animals will join the frey, from lovable gerbils to exotic fish to parakeets, to wild emu. Heck, most of these are already on the covers of O'Reilly books, like screenshots of Jumanji.

Well, that wasn't much of a blog entry, so I shall stop.

All your cats belong to us!