Shirley that's not Shirley

Brian Duff

I'm Brian Duff, a Scot 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 living and working in the California Bay Area. I've worked, written, and presented about technology since the 90s.

My journey with computers started in the 80s while playing Manic Miner and hacking BASIC on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

I'm currently a Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn. Previously, I was a Principal Engineer at Google. Before Google, I worked on Engineering Effectiveness at Twitter, and then before that, led Mobile Developer Experience at Facebook. Prior to that, I worked at Google leading projects and teams on a large number of things for many years, including Nearby, Cloud SQL, Bazel, and Google+. My first job out of university was at Oracle, where I built IDE frameworks for a living.

I'm Brian Duff, a Scot 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 living and working in the California Bay Area. I've worked, written, and presented about technology since the 90s, but my journey with computers started in the 80

Warning: herein lie spoilers!

Somewhat surprised to see Shirley Manson, Scottish lead singer of rock band Garbage) show up in the second season premier of Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night. Bit of a "holy crap, that's Shirley Manson" double take when the scene opened on her as an evil CEO who actually turns out to be a T-1000 model terminator (T-1000 is the gloopy, liquid metal model that Robert Patrick played so well in Terminator 2) hell bent on bringing about the Rise of the Machines.

Haven't quite figured out yet whether she's a good actor or not... She certainly came across as kind of cold, dominating, fearsome, and a little stiff. At first, I thought her acting was a bit iffy, but the reveal that she's actually a T-1000 sort of changed my perception a bit.

Was really nice hearing a genuine Scottish accent on US network television too. Scottish actors don't get to play the Bad Guy (or Lass) in TV sci fi nearly often enough. Witness the saccharinely well behaved Carson Beckett from Stargate Atlantis (Paul McGillion's accent is also faaar from genuine, probably on account of the fact that he moved to Canada when he was 2)

Shirley that's not Shirley

Comments

More from this blog

Showstopper!

RTO at the Googleplex

Here be dragons

Instinct

Feedback

Command Palette

Comments

More from this blog