Don Xml's Grok This

	Friends Versus Fame While at the party at Universal Studios, I was complaining that I couldn’t meet up with everyone that I wanted to meet, and Chris Sells joked that “real geeks” are not popular.  Later in the evening (after lots more beer), the “geek fame” topic came up (with a different group of folks), and I said that I’d rather have friends then have fame.  After giving it some thought, I’ve updated that statement to this rule: You can have friends, or you can have fame, but don’t count on having both for long.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Published Thursday, September 15, 2005 3:05 PM by donxml Filed under: PDC Comment Notification If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS Comments Esther Schindler said: I disagree. By my observation -- including with some "brand name" musicians -- famous people do have real friends. (They may not have a lot of time for them, but that's a different story.) However, those Real Friends tend to be primarily people who knew them before they were famous. It's easier to trust people who loved you before there was a payoff for it. September 18, 2005 2:51 PM

About donxml

I’m an independent consultant, specializing in .Net solutions architecture, based out of New Jersey who also doubles as an evangelist for XML, Domain Driven Design, enterprise architecture and .Net. I do not work for Microsoft, the W3C or any other big company that you may know of (at least not yet). I’ve been an indie for over ten years, and although I’ve been tempted a couple times to take a job with companies like Microsoft, I’ve haven’t found something better than my current situation. I work mostly with the large pharmaceuticals that are based here in New Jersey, and usually find myself on long term contracts. Definitely not the prototypical indie consultant, but it lets me dedicate time to my non-income generating activities like the developer community stuff, plus financing open source projects like XPathmania and MVP-XML. If you would like to talk to me about doing some contract work, just contact me via the contact page. My rates vary widely, depending on lots of different variables, but mostly distance from Jersey, and type of work. Plus, I’ve been known to donate some of my code for various projects.