"Reconnecting with Old Friends" Week...

What a crazy week.  I literally drove nearly a thousand miles this week, between my regular stuff, a trip to Orlando and back on Weds. and then a trip to Tampa on Thurs. pm and back tonight.  Whew!  And who says it isn’t fun to drive (OK… ME!).

Got two phone calls from old friends this week and had a chance to catch up a bit.  Nicholas Eisner, one of the guys I got to know best but also enjoyed working with the most at Shana called, and he’s coming to Florida on business next week.  NASA was one of our oldest, largest and most loyal clients, and believe it or not, Nicholas is still working with them, albeit now for FileNet (knowing just a little about what FileNet is and isn’t doing with our technology makes this amazing to me).  Nicholas is a very interesting guy… one of the most talented customer-facing folks I’ve ever met, and the customers just love him for it.  I’ll slide up to Cocoa Beach or thereabouts on Monday night and we’ll catch up a bit.  Nicholas is coming down from Ottawa, and just in time for the start of our “summer” weather.  Can’t wait to see him!

Bill Kalmbach, AKA “Clueberg” at the Hacienda

Then tonight the phone rings and its Bill Kalmbach from Motorola.  Or I should say from FreeScale, since Motorola spun off the semiconductor business.  I have to say Bill is one of the hardest working guys I know, and he’s a whiz at all sorts of electrical, electronic and communications stuff.  It was Bill’s vision that saved Motorola from a terminally incorrect view of bridging e-mail and paging in Austin that led to the opportunity to build our paging gateway solution. 

Then, Bill was truly a visionary in terms of how alternative communication devices like alpha pagers would be applied in business, but more importantly he bucked the (uncharacteristic for Motorola) bureaucracy, got decisions made and then helped architect a solution that’s still transmitting over a million internal paging messages a year.  I still can’t believe that software works (grin), but it does, and that project was the springboard for my little consultancy and also for building business confidence.  Thanks for everything, Bill.  Good to hear from you, and can’t wait to see you and the family in late October when I come out for AMTC.