WARNING: This is a non-technical post.
Having joined the Upstart team at Canonical recently, I had the privilege of naming the Upstart 0.6.7 release (“Return of the Mole”). This, my first post, is intended as a follow-up to Scotts 0.6.7 release announcement to dispel the quizzical looks people have when seeing the release name.
You may have guessed, but the link between the name and the release itself is tenuous in the extreme. No, the name has nothing to do with moles or moles and also has nothing to do with seeing either of them again. Rather, it is a snippet of wry jocularity referring to the supposed err… reflex discharge of an alleged and previously consumed “sauce”.
Around the time the Upstart 0.6.7 release was coming together a few of us at Canonical went for a meal after work. Unfortunately, due to bad weather Scott was not with us, but he was there in spirit nonetheless. Having scanned the menu, I decided on tapas and ordered (in retrospect somewhat bravely) what I thought was a chicken tortilla. The crucial point here is that the name contained the unknown 4-byte word “mole”. What actually arrived looked more like a bowl of hot tar. After wading valiantly way beyond my tines in the liquor and sampling a few mouthfuls, I found the solid stuff and dug into that. Seemingly, not content with bathing the tortilla in this incredible concoction, just in case the dish hadn’t made its point clearly enough, the chicken had also been cooked in it as well!
Mole it turns out is a Mexican sauce containing — amongst other things — chocolate. For the uninitiated, it is designed for those with stronger stomachs than mine. It is rich. To use a metaphor, if the subtleties of Japanese cuisine could be described as a gentle warm
breeze wafting over the calm, lucid depths of a beautiful Koi pond, Mole is a hurricane ripping your roof off. Subtle it is not. A food connoisseur might describe the taste as “complex”. To be manifest, solo no me gusta mucho (I just didn’t like it). I didn’t like it a lot.
In general, I love Mexican and Spanish food, but after careful sedentary consideration, my intestines tell me that they require chocolate to be sweet – not savory, distilled and smeared over chicken! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The name of the release is also somewhat ironic in that both the sauce the name refers to and the release itself are far from “tenuous”: 0.6.7 introduces some useful new features and lays the groundwork for the upcoming release for Natty. In fact, you could almost view the release, the name and the Mole as a kind of sandwich or maybe a cake, or a… tortilla… aaaarrggghhhh!
Oh well, it’s important in life to keep trying new things and to never stop learning. I did that alright.
Note to self: never order what you can’t translate…
Note to readers: we’ll revert to technical content next time.
