Tickle Me MPP

As we zip through another high speed corner into fall, I'm starting to see the undeniable signs of Christmas up ahead.

The main sign I've seen so far is this new Tickle Me Elmo doll, which, where with the earlier versions, upon tickling (this is all hypothetical to me, as so far I've managed to progress through life without tickling a single Elmo), Elmo gave a hearty, good-natured chortle, whereas this new version falls into a full-body all-out convulsing guffaw. And from some recent press reports, apparently the battles over these dolls have already escalated to the screaming and fighting stage. Basically, another Tickle Me Elmo that really only leads to hair-pulling and kicking.

Now I know email security isn't really high up on anyone's Christmas list, and software doesn't even count for a single wedding anniversary (although isn't the first anniversary PAPER, and while maybe I haven't seen every type of luxury paper available, wouldn't software be better than paper?).

So as MPP ramps up to version 3.0, I think we're going to add a heretofore unconsidered feature -- you hit a certain button, and one of the most versatile email protection engines on the market today will become even more versatile -- it'll start giggling uncontrollably.

Yes, tickle me MPP, at toy stores this Thanksgiving. How could it lose?

I've Got Blogorrhea

You read that right. Yep, I've got blogorrhea. In case you haven't heard the term before, it's a root of the world logorrhea, which, as there is no delicate way to put this, is simply diarrhea of the mouth. I've had friends with logorrhea, friends that, it didn't matter what they said, or how they said it, they simply had to be saying something, anything, all the time. There was this girl I dated once, and sitting down with a bunch of friends, I heard her talk talk and talk over this point, and when no one responded, she immediately took the exact opposite point and started talking about that. Damn, I thought, if she's always talking, how does anything ever come in so she can talk it back out again.

So yep, I've got Blogorrhea. I've got diarrhea of the keyboard.

I know what you're thinking. But Pete, you're saying to yourself, I can see all of your entries, and more than a week has gone by since your past post, and if you think you've been doing too many blog entries, well, then you must think someone with a pocketful of nickles is filthy rich.

Oh no, you see, this blog, the blog entries you see to the right, the blog you are reading right here and now, as of Monday, it's no longer my only blog. I am becoming the new enterprise security blogger for EBizQ.net. It's going to be a daily blog, maybe sometimes even twice daily.

I blog, therefore I am.

O.O.A. is Out Of Control

Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, everywhere I read, I see O.O.A. out of control everywhere.

OOA has simply become too much for me to deal with. Sure, I can understand when you need to use it for some device to stay underwater, or for some sort of emergency clinic that you can move around quickly and easily during a time of war, or even as the name of a hit TV show, but OOA has simply grown out of hand, at least in some sections of the computer industry.

And by OOA, I mean Ostentatious Overuse of Acronyms. Now stop it or someone is going to get very confused.

Hypertext or Hypertypo

Speed, speed, everything today is about speed. Here in NYC, the NY Times actually has about four or five versions, from early to late, and apparently the only way to truly know what version of the paper you have is the number of dots on the top part of the front page of the paper.

And with all this pressure for speed comes typos. Years ago, you never would have dreamed of seeing more than a few typos in the entire Times, but now it's not that uncommon to find a couple in just one article. Fewer editors, faster turnaround, that's prime soil for typos.

And I'm certainly not immune to the typo scourge. Email is just so easy to type out and send out, and usually, of course, I give it a once over before hitting send, but even with that, I'm still suprised by how often something slips by. Three weeks ago, I noticed three typos in one short email, and the worst thing was, there was even a typo in the subject line (they were all accepted words, so they didn't show up in the spell check, just the wrong words).

The most frustrating one was in San Francisco, when Message Partners was out at Linuxworld. There was one hand-out I worked on, whittling it down until it was written and rewritten to within an inch of its life. And it was just a half page of large type, no more than 100 words, but as I handed the pamphlet over to someone, they took one look down and said, "What's smap? "

All of one hundred words, two sets of eyes scouring over it, but there it was: Smap. Smap instead of spam. Damn damn damn damn damn that spam!

And now that everything is going over to video, is there such a thing as a video typo? You know, I think that's what they call a blooper.

Presentation Slam -- Part Deux

So there I was, a three floor drop in front of me, and the Avnet conference behind me, thinking, should I take the easiest route and do a swan dive off the balcony, or should I just turn around a give my three minute presentation?

You should know there were a few things working against me here. First, my boss at Message Partners had prepared the three slides I was going to speak on a week before, and he had done it quickly, and since then the speech I'd prepared had diverged quite considerably from the slides. So after I had committed my speech to memory, practicing it over and over again until I could say it doing cartwheels through Niagara Falls, but when I tried to do my presentation using the slides, everything came crashing down and I spoke like a stuttering fool.

Second, and biggest of all, was the word COMPLIANCE. I don't know what it was about that word, but everytime I came to that word, instead of compliance, I'd stumble, or say complaints, or say khaki pants, you name it, but when it came to that word, my brain simply would not COMPLY.

So there I was, perched at the baloncy with all these thoughts swirling around my head as the clock approached one. Screw it, I thought, I can always dive off the balcony later, so I turned around and headed into the conference.

And just like it's my habit, I was one of the first ones there. That's me to a T, always early or on time, as it actually takes me twice as much energy to even try to be late so why bother, and this was my first conference, which means I wasn't aware of Conference Time, which seems to run about three and a half minutes late.

Then it started. First up, Avnet gave their spiel, which was that they're now charging their ISVs to have access to all their sales channels, and the better the access the bigger the fee (whatever happened to the win-win of simply earning sales commissions?). And then it was presentation time, and the lady (speaking with total ease) said all 23 presenters had 3 minutes each, and if we went over by even a second we were going to get GONGED.

Uh oh, I thought, that's not how I planned it, I thought they'd give us at least 30 second to wrap up, but NO, they were gonna hold us hard to three minutes. So immediately I looked down at my notecards and started cutting stuff out.

The good thing was I'd be presenting 11th, which was perfect, 'cause I'd get to see what everyone else was doing while not having to wait too long to go. And as others started presenting, the first thing that struck me was, everyone is clearly nervous. Here I am, plenty of reason to be nervous, as it's my first presentation, but I'm watching salty old convention dogs stumbling and stuttering their way through, which immediatly put me at ease, as I figured I could do just as good as that.

Then I got the call, NEXT, and it was on. Things started smooth, which was essential, as a lot of my tricky words were right in the beginning, as I was there to discuss our joint project with IBM, and as IBM has so many products, anything you do with them, to differentiate from everything else, immediately becomes a word salad, and the word salad I had to say was: Our joint security solution with the IBM system p5 which is called the Network Email Security Express Solution. And I sailed past that, but there it was, straight up ahead, my iceberg in the name of COMPLIANCE.

I started to say it, COM...COMP, but of course I stumbled, it was my Achilles spiel, and my mind immediately went blank. I started to bring my right hand up, palm exposed, where, finally realizing that that word and I might never get along, I'd written COMPLIANCE in blue ink, but even before read it off my palm out it came, compliance...YES!

There, I did it, I'd made it past, which brought me to the fun part of my speech. I got to tell my joke, which was: I've read recently that a new a devastating virus is created every sixteen seconds, but I'm not too sure about that fact, as I did read it off a recent spam mail. Then I heard it, a laugh to my left, then another, and soon the room was full of light laughter. Hey, this is fun.

But as I got to the end, trouble. As I called for my final slide, the How to Buy Us slide, the MC lady said, Time's up. What, I thought, it can't be, what about my warning, what about my signal. Incredulous, all I said was, "Really?" and she replied, Yep, your time is up. I was shocked, I was surprised, and even worse, I was on a roll, so I blurted out DAMN!!!

Not the worst expletive, altogether, and I was lucky I didn't say anything worse, but as I walked off, more laughs, bigger laughs, my damn had gotten the biggest laugh of all. And alls well, as the couple of contacts I made at the conference look like they're going to pan out. Damn indeed.

The Right Byte

Hear ye regular readers, for the moment I'm going to have to put off the conclusion of my San Antonio tete-a-net.

Right now I want to digress on another issue, for, previous to this, I've been enumerating on my newness to these waters, and how deep and dark and complex I've found them to be.

But something has happened to me in the past month. I feel like I've finally taken the right bite-sized byte. I feel like I'm finally getting it.

You see, even though I started out in life as a math whiz, which led me to major in Biomedical Engineering in college (although I ended up with a biz degree), well, I as much as anyone exemplify that things don't always end up how they start out (from biz degree to owning two Yogurt shops to NYC comedy writer to getting picked for the best book of American humor writing to marketing for Message Partners).

Through all that, I have always kept up digitally, which to me meant keeping up with what was going on online. I was the first to tell my friends to check out Craigslist, as well as Flavorpill (bravo on their big article in the NY Times Mag today), and I remember the first time I was published by McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as when they accept something they never tell you when it's going to go up, so you check, and you check, and you keep checking, and the wait went on so long I sent them another piece, and then my bit finally showed up, and two days later, my second piece went up (and they hadn't even told me that one was accepted), and then two weeks after that McSweeney's was picked by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten websites of the year (oh, those were some heady times, as I was in the airport headed for a New Year's 2000 party at a castle in the Loire Valley of France when I found out).

But my technical expertise at the time was pretty much limited to writing HTML and trying to market my website, PeteTV.com, online, as well as getting Google to rate my website higher (those were the days of begging for a link). Not very technical, but since then things in my life have gotten more technical all around, well, I'd say both easier and more technical all at the same time, and really, how could it have not?

Now, though, now I feel like I'm finally getting it. I feel like I've been trying to take this all in all at once, and, while one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, I'd like to add to that by saying insanity is also trying to understand the business software world in the year Aught Six with a book published in the year 2000.

Now I know nobody understand the whole e-enchilada, but that's certainly no excuse to know nothing, but now I do know I know something, I mean I know what I know, and I know what I don't know, and that's a start. For me, that's a bite-sized byte I can finally digest.

Presentation Slam

I recently returned from the Avnet Conference in San Antonio, my second computer conference in two weeks, only this time, my friend, this time I was GIVING a presentation.

Boy, if I could bottle the sense of doom and foreboding I was feeling going into the conference, well, if I could just bottle it and sell it as a perfume, anyone who dabbed it on would never get another date for the rest of their lives.

Now I do have some experience giving presentations, or at least performing, only this was from my past life, my writing life, and the presentations I had to do were terribly nervewracking, as it was with The Moth Storyslam, where you have five minutes to tell a story, and you can use no notes and you don't even know if and when you're going to go on, you just put your name in a hat and wait (that is if you can keep breathing).

And here I am, a writer in New York City, trying to make it big in the Big Apple, and as an old writing teacher once told me, if you make a life where you have to succeed, then by God, you WILL succeed. So to do that I cut away all my support lines, and if plan A, writing, didn't work out, hell if I knew what plan B was, so I had everything riding on writing, and with some of the more up-and-coming as well as outright famous folks involved with Moth Storyslam, you better believe I was nervous as hell performing at the Moth. That and the fact that once you finish your story, three judges picked from the audience give you a score, 1 to 10.

And boy, have I heard some great stories at the Moth. One lady told a story how she had a phone affair with Warren Beatty (while in his current marriage). Another guy, working for one of those cable prank shows that quickly got cancelled, well he went to Yankee stadium unannounced with a camera crew and a not-very-good Michael Jackson impersonator. He told the Yankees he was with Michael Jackson, and that Michael wanted to throw out the first ball. Later, there they were in the dugout, with the not-so-good impersonator cowering in a corner, trying not to let anybody get too good a look at him, when the Yankees ask, instead of throwing out the first ball, why doesn't Michael Jackson sing the national anthem instead (the impersonator was a non-singing version). The prank ended with this guy in jail.

One last story was a girl who got an internship at Nickelodeon, and when enough kids didn't show up for a certain event, she, because she looked so young, was volunteered to take part in one of their events that involved crabwalking backwards through one of their gooey concotions. Well, she hadn't planned for this, nor had she dressed for this, so Nickelodeon hooked her up with some kiddie clothes that didn't quite fit, and, as she's crabwalking backwards through the goop, she feels her pants pulling down. Oh my oh my, what to do? If she lifts an arm, she topples into the muck, but the question quickly became irrelevant as her pants did pull down revealing to the studio audience that she wasn't such a young girl after all (also revealing a very private piercing).

I myself told two stories at the storyslam, not nearly so interesting, but both were very well received, and after I was through (the first one truly felt like an out-of-body experience), I thought I would never feel that much pressure on myself again...WRONG!!!

Because for some reason, the Avnet conference really had me freaked out. I guess it was the fact that it was only my second computer conference ever, and not only was I going alone, this time I was going to PRESENT!!! And it wasn't just a calm cool easy relaxed presentation, each presenter only had three minutes, and anyone who went over got the GONG.

So there I was, standing on the third floor balcony overlooking the Marriott San Antonio Riverwalk, the clock about to strike 1, the start time of the conference, and I think to myself: If I were to follow the path of least resistence here, instead of going and giving my presentation I would actually just hurl myself down the three floors to a broken-neck death.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what I do. Hint: I'll give you long odds if you want to bet I'm dead.