Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Network Dictionary — Magic Hand Wave

October 23, 2008 by Greg Ferro · Leave a Comment 

This Post is Part of a Series — click for list on Network Dictionary»

Any suf­fi­ciently advanced tech­no­logy is indis­tin­guish­able from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)

Refers to those times when a col­league says “let me fix that” and pro­ceeds to issue a string of com­mands on the key­board (thus wav­ing hands about) and then says “there you go”.

I call this the “magic hand wave”. This was picked up by man­age­ment in some com­pan­ies and is now the stand­ard term for describ­ing “tech­nical work”.

In dis­cus­sion, “John can do his magic hand wave, and that work will be complete”.

List of Posts in this series:
  1. Network Dictionary — Freelance
  2. Network Dictionary — Resume Generating Events
  3. Network Dictionary — Scalable
  4. Network Dictionary — magic hand wave
  5. Network Dictionary — NAT’d
  6. Network Dictionary — Pain Relief Technology
  7. Network Dictionary — work­shop
  8. Network Dictionary — Process Humping
  9. Network Dictionary — appsel­la­tion
  10. Network Dictionary — Spinning Rust
  11. Network Dictionary — Server Hugger
  12. Network Dictionary — Facepalm
  13. Network Dictionary — Nortard
  14. Network Dictionary — Ciscotist
  15. Network Dictionary — long­horn
  16. Network Dictionary — IEEEdiot
  17. Network Dictionary — foo
  18. Network Dictionary — Ethereal
  19. Network Dictionary — Signal Slope
  20. Network Dictionary — lever­age
  21. Network Dictionary — Microsoft Standard
  22. Network Dictionary — Brandalize
  23. Network Dictionary — Blamestorming
  24. Network Dictionary — CCIE Pounds
  25. Network Dictionary — borked
  26. Network Dictionary — tech­nobabble
  27. Network Dictionary — Markenauts
  28. Network Dictionary — Implementation
  29. Network Dictionary — Distributed Attention
  30. Network Dictionary — func­tion­al­ity
  31. Network Dictionary — cof­fice
  32. Network Dictionary — Rubber Duck Debugging
  33. Network Dictionary — Unicorn Tears
  34. Network Dictionary —  survivor’s bias
  35. Network Dictionary — IPocalypse
  36. Network Dictionary — slugged
  37. Network Dictionary — Project Manager
  38. Network Dictionary — Sanity Cheque
  39. Network Dictionary — goodth­ing
  40. Network Dictionary: Fun Detector
  41. Network Dictionary: Cock Blocked
  42. Network Dictionary — TACrathon
  43. Network Dictionary — Backhoe Attenuation
  44. Network Dictionary — heater
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