What Do Underpants Gnomes and Rob Conery Have in Common?

No, the fact that Rob Conery may or may not be partial to stealing underwear is not the commonality I had in mind . So what is their connection? First a little background for those of you not familiar with either of these characters.

For the culturally illiterate among you, the underpants gnomes are characters from a classic South Park episode that satirizes Starbucks, large corporations, and people who assume mom and pop shops are inherently better than giant corporate chains like Starbucks.

The gnomes are little men who sneak into the room of a hyper-caffeinated character named Tweek and steal his underpants at night. Of course, nobody believes Tweek when he first tells them about the thieving underpants gnomes. But, eventually the gnomes are caught in the act, at which time it is revealed that they are really businessmen who know all about corporations and have a three step master plan to make profit.

There is one slight catch. When questioned about step 2 of their plan, which consists of only a question mark, none of the underpants gnomes actually knew what step 2 was. It seemed like a little bit of an oversight to the characters of South Park, who did not immediately grok the connection between stealing underpants and making profit, but that didn't seem to bother the underpants gnomes.

That brings us to Rob Conery, who is best known for being the creator of SubSonic, a popular open source framework that does Railsesque database scaffolding and code generation. He's also an excellent blogger and the most recent addition to my top 10 blog roll because of posts like these.

He recently announced that he is going to work for Microsoft and that he would possibly be paid to work full time on SubSonic, which is surprising because Microsoft isn't exactly known for its patronage of the open source community.

Following Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman, Rob makes the third popular blogger in as many months that Microsoft has wooed to join the Micro-Collective. Does anyone sense a trend?

For those of you who haven't had your morning coffee yet and still don't grok the obvious connection between Rob Conery and the underpants gnomes, I'll spell it out for you.

Thanks to them, I now have a solid three step business plan of my own, which includes the following steps:

Drink lots of grande, triple-shot, non-fat lattes
?
Make a huge profit by becoming a popular blogger and subsequently getting hired for Microsoft.

Following the lead of the underpants gnomes, I'm not going to fret too much about step 2 of my plan. The important thing is to figure out how I am going to spend my big fat Microsoft signing bonus that will soon be coming my way...at least what's left of it after I buy the Glambo Signature Series "My Little Pony" M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight. Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 5:30 PM Musings, Rants, and Humor , Reviews | Back to top