For those who don’t know, SOA (often pronounced soh’-uh) stands for Service-oriented Architecture and is a current fad in enterprise information systems. This conference was a buzzword-fest of the highest magnitude. There were more Powerpoint slides with corporate-speak and technology catchphrases than you could garbage-collect with a Cray.

While the breakout sessions proved to be enlightening, the general sessions in the main ballroom were definite snoozers. Almost all of the general sessions were given by “sponsor representatives” who used the time to hock their products and services with an advertising pitch cleverly disguised as a SOA lecture. Normally I would have skipped these sessions to mingle on the expo floor and get vendor demos of SOA software solutions, but they deliberately closed the vendor expo area during these sessions so that attendees had nothing else to do. To further frustrate things, the multiple general sessions pushed the conference schedule past 7pm all three days!

However, not all was lost, and the breakout sessions were really worthwhile. Once you got a corporate lecturer out of the main ballroom and into a breakout room, it was like someone lifted off their managerial sales hat and gave them a developer’s cap… because these smaller venues boasted some brutally honest lectures. Some key principles that were thematic in these more down-to-Earth presentations were:

• Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• If you’re implementing SOA because your boss heard about it from some executive on the golf course, then you WILL fail.
• SOA success stories come from BIG companies with a BIG IT staff and BIG budgets.
• If your business processes aren’t yet aligned across your enterprise, then what good is a SOA?

If SOA is a forest, then web services are the trees. I will be creating a presentation soon on the basics of web services and SOA, and I’ll post it on Negative99 when I do.

I feel like we’re natives living in wood huts on a primitive desert isle. One day a steel I-beam washes ashore, and already people want to start talking about what the skyline’s going to look like.
~ Steve Mooradian

This blog entry will have no jokes, no fluff, and its links may lead to unsettling content… so if you’d like to continue your happy existence without the burden of other people’s suffering then please… by all means, click here instead.

If you go to one site today, let it be this: TheForgotten.org

Here’s the short version. Between 1915 and 1917 the Ottoman Turks (modern-day Turkey) killed 1,500,000 Armenians with military force and starvation through forced deportation death marches into the desert. The accounts of torture and rape are unspeakable. This is known as the Armenian Genocide. My grandfather was the only one of eleven kids to make it out of Armenia alive.

Most people have no clue about any of this… it is very possible that you, the reader, are saying to yourself you’ve never even heard of this. The reasons are legion why this genocide is so obscure in most circles… politics, mostly. Don’t feel too bad, though, because it was mostly forgotten by Hitler’s day… unfortunately for the Jews.

The United States hasn’t officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as a nation, but 39 of the 50 states have. And the following countries officially recognize the genocide: Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Uruguay, Vatican City and Venezuela. Notice that there isn’t one officially Muslim nation on the list (not even Lebanon – which faced Turkish murder as well). I could say that it’s mostly because the Ottoman Turks and modern-day Turkey are Muslim and the Armenians are Christian. Even to this day radical Turk Muslims will desecrate the memorials to the genocide because they either refuse to believe it happened or don’t believe it is wrong to kill Christians.

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
- Adolf Hitler… while persuading his generals that a Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the West

…the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it … the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.
- Theodore Roosevelt… in a May 11, 1918, letter to Cleveland Hoadley Dodge

I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.
- Henry Morgenthau, Sr. US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire

On this day, we pause in remembrance of one of the most horrible tragedies of the 20th century, the annihilation of as many as 1.5 million Armenians through forced exile and murder at the end of the Ottoman Empire. This terrible event remains a source of pain for people in Armenia and Turkey and for all those who believe in freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of every human life. I join with my fellow Americans and the Armenian community in the United States and around the world in mourning this loss of life.
- George W. Bush, April 24, 2004

never-again.com
april24.info
Armenian-Genocide.org
Armeniapedia.org/Armenian_Genocide
24april1915.com

UPDATE: Here is a picture from a Turkish rally in New York City this past Saturday protesting any recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The protester in the picture is holding a sign that says “Genocide Soccer Match : Turkey, one… Armenian Hate Merchants, zero.”

Nice, huh?

While in the West Village we met up with Alissa. She took us to a most important stop… the Magnolia Bakery. It’s the West Village cupcake haven sought by the Narnia rappers in the SNL skit ‘Lazy Sunday‘ that I posted about in ‘The Chronic-WHAT-cles of Narnia!‘… and of course I had to partake myself. Delicious! As a note, Lazy Sunday now has its own Wikipedia article.

Anyways, we also attended Alissa’s church this morning, The Village Church. The church was pretty cool, yet it was a conundrum of sorts. They are a group of young believers, dressed in a very casual yet modern style, made up mostly of creative, free-thinking artists… who then meet in an über-formal church building and submit themselves to weekly liturgy with instructions on what to say during the service and when to say it!? Ok, I can understand the old church building (it was pretty cool!)… but the roomful of creative minds reciting liturgy was freakin’ me out. Alissa, you’ll have to explain this to me some more.

I have to say it was great weekend excursion. I’ll be posting more about some of the artwork I snapped in the MoMA. You can find all my current pictures from the trip here: NYC Trip.

As I poked around the web I found a CBS News piece about this same church, and a cowboy-ish church and a biker church (as in Mr. Davidson).

As you can imagine from seeing some of these images, and as you heard from the talking suit at the trailing end of the Fox News clip, there is a tub of controversy revolving around what is worship and what is ‘Christ-like’. I can’t help but crack open the book and discern that outward appearance is not eternally important. Tonight in a small-group study we ate cereal with purple milk to prove exactly that point (I’m still alive but the Poison Control Center is on speed-dial).