I wasn't sure the Pack would get another win, but I'm glad they did and I don't care that it was ugly or required a questionable call by the refs. What surprised me was that none of the three ESPN commentators actually realized what Gado was trying to do with the ball. He wasn't trying to pass the ball. He was trying to stretch it over the goal line, like you do when trying to score a touchdown, only in this case he was trying to avoid a safety. I sure didn't see the ball get to the original line of scrimmage. And as the announcers said, how you have a holding penalty on the offensive line that isn't in the endzone when the line of scrimmage is on the one foot line is beyond logic. I've never seen anything like it, but hey, I'm not complaining.

There was a great editorial by Terry Bibo in our local paper today that hit one of my hot buttons. She refers to our "service economy" and puts it in the oxymoron class of "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp". Why? Because when you try to call a human being for service you can't get one. Her funniest comment was to disagree with Barbara Streisand because "people who need people are the unluckiest people in the world." No kidding.

I hate that and I love trying to beat "the machine" and get to a real person. Fortunately there is someone else who hates it more. Paul English, who co-founded the Internet travel site Kayak.com, has created something to assist what Bibo calls the "serve-each-other economy" - an IVR Cheat Sheet. Fabulous! It's getting 80,000 new visitors a day and he supposedly has 900 some cheats he hasn't been able to test and post! I will definitely look here first before calling for "service". I may even offer to help him vet some of those 900 new cheats.

I much prefer getting treated like a human being and having another human on the other end of the phone. Maybe that's hypocritical coming from a person making his living helping to create software enabling this kind of thing. Press "1" to complain, press "*" to repeat the list of options.

Last Sunday I finished reading Michael Crichton's "State of Fear". I get a real kick out of the marketing hype on the covers (me being such a marketing guy :-) ). It is called "Edge-Of-Your-Seat Storytelling" by USA Today, "Nothing short of spellbinding" by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Thrilling" by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Now don't get me wrong, it really was a good book and I found it quite interesting. There were even a couple sections that might qualify for those definitions, but much of the book was on the whole role of fear, specifically as it relates to global warming.

Reading Dave Kearn's article yesterday on Identity Theft (here is the link Dave gave me where it will be when it is online) made me think of the book. He basically said we definitely should use caution online, but the media is playing to our fears and we should keep that in mind. Crichton is a bit more agressive in his book. He describes what he calls the politico-legal-media complex, the PLM. His character sharing this concept says, "And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population - under the guise of promoting safety". I've never read a novel with this much factual data and SO many graphs and charts. One example was DDT, which he characterizes as "arguably the greatest tradgedies of the twentieth century". It was positioned as a carcinogen and unsafe, but it wasn't and was so safe you could eat it. As a result of the ban over 2 million people die each year, some 50 million in total so far. Read this if you think that's all fiction.

Anyway, good read and the price of my copy was just right - free. A woman sitting next to me on the plane a few weeks ago left it.

I'm no wizard and just used that for a title as a poor attempt at being clever. But a real "wizard" just joined the blogosphere. His name is Neil Wilson and his cn=directory manager blog is definitely something you will want to check out. Neil is the author of SLAMD, the network load generation test tool that I think everybody in the world is using. If you haven't checked it out, you should. Neil and I worked together back at Caterpillar when he was just starting to learn about directory server and LDAP. When it comes to directory, Linux, Solaris or just anything you need a smart person's opinion on, Neil is the man.

Neil recently wrote a slick GUI (very out of character for someone we could just call Mr. CLI) for the benchmark showing how the new Sun Fire T2000 blew away the Dell PowerEdge 6850. Our directory server is the perfect application to showcase the single UltraSPARC T1 chip with up to 8 cores, each supporting up to 4 threads. It was interesting that the Sun Fire performed 250K authentications in 31.66 seconds compared to the PowerEdge's 83.93 seconds for the same number. But that wasn't the best part, which I'll share when I post a flash demo of what happened later this week.

No one asked where I went, but just in case you were wondering, I really did fall off the planet. Trust me, you do not want to go there. I can't even remember all the details, but it was on a return flight from Austin, somewhere over Missouri. All those years of agreeing with them about "Show Me" and they did. Anyway, I found my way back in a way that would have made MacGyver proud. Just in time so I can blog about some pretty interesting things that are happening.