I got shots today! Four of them. Two in each shoulder. Now I won’t get Hepatitis A or B, Typhoid, Tetnus or even Polio! Nice to know that. My insurance company won’t pay for these either. They are $800 out of pocket.

Who are these people? I am lucky though, I expensed it as it is all for a business trip, but what about the poor student? How about honeymooners? Seem s to me that not paying for them and then having to cover the cost of treating Hepatitis is just plain STUPID. Mean spirited as well!

Oh well, maybe it is just the pain in my arm speaking. Still, going to a clinic that doesn’t deal with insurance companies is fun. The people are happy and friendly. I feel like this should be a tenet of customer service. Don’t deal with insurance companies. They will make you irritated and short tempered!

So why all these shots? Well we landed a big fish and I get to go to India! While I’m excited by that, the prospect of a few weeks in Houston preparing with the client is another story!

So what is the definition of a journalist? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, and I paraphrase, it is one whose occupation is journalism (cop-out) or one who keeps a journal.

What do I think of this? Me? An opinion? What a concept. Ok, enough with the sarcasm. Of course I have one. THIS IS A JOURNAL!

I guess that makes me a journalist. In fact, it is even a commercial endeavor. And I don’t mean in any grey, mushy way. I don’t mean that it improves my career potential over time. NOPE, I mean that I sell advertising. Actually, I trade “Blogger” space for a banner in return for the use of a system to edit, post and show off my blog!

People, that makes me a journalist. Not a good one maybe, but since when has quality been part of meeting the bar? Seen Fox news lately? One thing I don’t have is an editor. Peer review? Well, I did tell most of my peers what I was doing, so I guess so!

There have been complaints (MANY) that there is a lack of “journalistic” impartiality. I won’t go into much detail here, but I do have a FEW points:

1) Seen Fox News lately?

2) Advertising revenue?

Think what you want, I take EVERYTHING I read, see or hear the same way I take much of my food! With a grain of salt, so to speak!

(humorous aside… Blogger’s spellcheck doesn’t recognize spellcheck, Blogger, NOR Blog!)

Things have been busy again for a week. I spent a night in the Bay and spent a few hours working with our team there. These guys JUST started charging. That can’t be! But so our manager claims.

I’ll have to look into that. I pretty much thought that investors took their money and ran, so it would SHOCK me, that they had been allowed to play this long. Must be that they are charging for something else already…

At any rate, these guys wanted to change from a shared risk contract to a fixed bid contract. What is it about finance departments and fixed bids. They are so enamored with them. As someone who specializes in finishing projects on time and budget though, I like them as well.

Seems like that in itself would be enough to make the finance guy suspicious, but nope!

Speaking of suspicious. The weather here in Oregon seems to be back to its normal self. After a month of warm sun and basically NO rain since December, we’ve had 8 inches in two weeks. Can’t say in truth that I minded the 80 degrees in Sunnyvale, CA, but that is where weather like that belongs. In CA!

We had a “wildfire”, albeit tiny, right outside Portland in MARCH! March I tell you. If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d move to LA!

And what is it about my luck in the back of Airplanes? So close and yet SO FAR! I moved my flight home out of Oakland to San Jose, so of course, I ended up with a seat in the back, middle of the row! It gets worse though. In the 30 minutes or so that I’m waiting to board, I have a bit of an eye flirt with an attractive someone. Usually means nothing, but we manage to even be next to each other in line.

We get on and move down the aisle. So close, she ends up right behind me, even “brushes” the top of my head with her hair as she gets in to her seat. I get a nice waft of perfume to go with the 350 pound woman who is taking up half my seat!!! Airlines, if you are listening, it is MY SEAT. You make me share the armrest, but not the damn SEAT! MINE!

LOL

In my quest for great note/knowledgebase software and it’s intersection with the Tablet, I’ve been playing with MindManager Pro X5 from MindJet. I’ve always been intrigued by the concept and was reminded by a Lifehacker entry.

Long story short, the freemind package is really slick (and multiplatform), but MindManger on a Tablet is mind altering. I took notes during a Microsoft Regional Partners (PacWest) briefing and am completely hooked!

It took a few seconds to get the hang of, but WOW!!! Taking notes has always been a bit haphazard for me and I always find myself wanting Visio to do more FOR me. This is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for to take notes and flesh out ideas.

The free stuff is really nice too, but doesn’t support ink and therefore not something that can really be used from a Tablet. It doesn’t solve my centralized, yet distributed, knowledgebase issue, but it is a GREAT way to capture notes on the Tablet.

This time last year we were in maintenance mode. People keep talking about feast or famine, as if we go through cycles every few months, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. I have four of five irons in the fire and they all seem to be hot!

We are trying to figure out what to do about it. Not really sure what to do. Can’t hire enough people fast enough. Feels like 1998 again. But very different. This isn’t dot com startups. This is big business, small business, even mid-sized business. Everyone has projects.

Unlike 1998 no one is throwing money away. But they all have stuff that NEEDS to get done. Let me repeat that! NEEDS TO GET DONE.

I’m back to flying around again. A night in the bay and a night in Texas each week. A month in India! I guess it might be feast. Feels like track practice though. I even have irons that are hot that aren’t in the fire!

Speaking of things that need to get done!

Seth is SOOO right. And so wrong. While I love the idea that leaving your wifi network open isn’t a security breach, it really is one. Seth IS right though that file security is a different kind of security.

What he hasn’t mentioned though, or may not even realize, is that you CAN sniff files from a wifi network, but only as they are accessed by others who DO have the right access. And that isn’t really likely to happen as someone strolls by. At the same time, people who ARE trying to get your files can easily break the wireless password.

The moral of the story though, is that you probably shouldn’t mix your wireless network with you wired one. In fact, we run our wifi networks on the OUTSIDE of the firewall and people use VPNs and other secure methods to access our corporate network, just as if they were on any other unsecured network. In this way we are able to provide our visiting customers and traveling consultants easy access to their files and at the same time maintain our secure network.

So what am I saying? I am saying that we should go ahead and open our networks, but close our firewalls. Security must be maintained, not between the client and the network, but on the server. Wired or wireless, the network must be considered unsecure. SSH, SSL, IPSec and even PPTP can be used to secure the link…

Open those networks…

Ahh yes, that does however leave your network open to be used as the source of nefarious activities. People can use your network (making them look like you) and spam the world. Hack into a bank, send email, browse their network. But the truth is, that they can go down to the local Starbucks (as Seth points out) and do the same thing.

They could also step into an office and make a phone call. Use a payphone, a throwaway cell phone.

If the FBI thinks that closing open networks is going to stop the real bad guys, or even slow them down, then they aren’t really that bright. I think it just makes our top cops look like amateurs!

A reader named Dave brought to my attention the fact that I COULD certainly use IMAP as a storage medium for this Knowledgebase thingy. And he is completely correct, I could. But I would be definitely writing lots of code to handle the differences between your email client and a true knowledgebase.

While, as he points out, I CAN store keywords in IMAP, it isn’t really what it is designed for. In fact, he also points out that we could easily move messages from Folder to Folder, but even he admits it is a three part transaction. Instead, I want it to be a single transaction. I also want a note to be able to branch with multiple, non-linear edits from one or more clients.

I think it is time to start defining the data model and the server side object model. The DB on the server will be MySQL as it is FREE and fast. In addition, it is supported on everything from and IBM Mainframe to a simple XP Home box and that means that as developers we will be able to run the server on anything from big iron to your home pc. In fact, even that Tablet PC you have COULD be a server in a pinch.

I will write the server in Php 5 because, once again it is free and I can find LOTS of free hosts. The clients however will be written in whatever is best suited for them. That means that handhelds will be J2ME, Tablets and Notebooks will be .Net.

I think that is enough to get going with though!!!

So far as I can tell, IMAP is the closest thing I’ve come up with. There are web clients, the messages are searchable, the messages are “owned” at the server, but cached locally for offline access. Clients are available almost everywhere.

So, does that mean that IMAP is the way to go? I don’t think so. There are several issues with using IMAP, although the thought is intriguing.

1. IMAP is categorized by parent folder (One category per message).
2. IMAP is designed to send and receive messages (it isn’t “quick” to move a message).
3. IMAP tends to be SLOW.

Now, where does that leave us? Well, I don’t think that this has to be that complex. I think that we can start off with a simple data model. Think Blog!

We put together a central database running on a MySQL server. The client application subscribes, and syncs. The application on the client stores its data in a simple XML file. In reality though, the client application can store its data anyway that it needs to, platform specific really.

On an HTML client it can be stored in an XML data island. Basically, we can build a client application for any platform. If the platform supports ink, then we support ink. If the platform only has a numeric keypad, then that is what we support.

BUT, the data gets centralized and distributed! Doesn’t matter where the note is taken, it is synced as soon as possible up to the server and out to the client. As a user, I will be able to set up security profiles that allow me to allow my assistant to view parts of my knowledgebase, while I can see the whole thing.

It is foreseeable that we would be able to “share” a knowledgebase across an enterprise…

People have gotten fired for their blogging activities! Even by Google, the Blogger’s proud owner, if not parent. Well here is the rebutal and I couldn’t agree more!