"As the Earth Science Information Partner Federation (ESIP) was preparing its Winter 2005 symposia, which inclined a special "Grid track," it was felt that as the only 'Grid provider' among the Federation's members, I should give a talk to serve as an introduction to Grid technologies and compare and contrast these technologies with Science Tools' approach. But due to time constraints, I was given a half-hour at the end of the first day.

"A half hour is hardly enough time, so I summarized greatly and this led to some fairly strong assertive statements by me about the state of Grid technology today. I knew there would be"Grid practitioners" in the audience, so I anticipated there'd be some howlers in my talk and therefore made the talk even shorter so we could entertain questions and discussion. I also had to consider that I spend my time mostly working with our own technologies and haven't ever tried to build a Grid using GGF derived tools, so I had to consider the possibility that I'd missed something.

"The well-known Peter Fox of UCAR gave a talk earlier in the day about his multi-year trek creating the Earth System Grid using the Global Grid Forum's collective offerings, and I was gratified that his war stories seemed to fit well with what I would say later in the day.

"My talk was very well attended with about 25 in the audience, including Peter. I got through the material in only 17 minutes and opened the floor for discussion and was quite surprised that when I asked the group what they thought, they said that I'd done a great job of summarizing the situation and that "nobody would disagree with you about the current state of Grid technologies." As my view was rather pessimistic about what you can do with other Grid tools, I pushed harder to flesh out anything I'd said that was over the top or just wrong, but to my satisfaction, the audience felt I'd nailed it."

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