Why Salesforce?

There are some great CRM tools in the wild.  In addition to being a certified Salesforce administrator, I’ve personally set up, configured, and used ACT, Goldmine, SugarCRM, and Zoho.  The first two are fine for small offices or individuals and the latter two can do a great job even for enterprises.  Prices range from free on up.

With all that in mind, why is Salesforce my solution of choice for most situations?  We could spend all night arguing about which product is easier to setup, more customizable, or gives a better user experience, but there is one factor that to me, makes the decision obvious.  That factor is Force.com from Salesforce.

In a gross oversimplification, Force.com is a cloud computing platform that allows development of multi tenant applications that are hosted on Salesforce’s servers.  Using this paradigm, applications can be built, tested, and deployed in a fraction of the time required for traditional methods.  Developers can concentrate on creating applications and not on IT resources, server versions, and hardware.

The potential for bringing the entire—or at least a large portion—of a company’s internal applications under on banner, while at the same time hugely reducing the onsite hardware requirements, is to me, the killer feature.  I have no doubt that other enterprise CRM vendors either are or will work to extend themselves in a similar manner, but for now, Salesforce is the gold standard for cloud based platform development.

Your mileage may vary.  What have I missed?  Why am I wrong?  Leave a comment and educate me!

Rats in the Mailbox

In the online edition of the excellent newspaper, “The Fergus Falls Journal” of Fergus Fall, Minnesota, the headline reads:

Woman finds rats in mailbox

The story relates, “The woman opened the mailbox on 275th Avenue, located off Highway 210 near Underwood, to find a black and a white rat.”  Even worse, “The woman said she had not ordered rats by mail, according to the Otter Tail County Sheriff’s Office.”  (No, I didn’t make up the name of the sheriff’s office!)

Recently, I hesitate to admit, I put metaphorical rats in one of my user’s mailbox.  The one I lobbed in did not, “…urinate and defecate…” on his data, as those at 275th Avenue did, but it might just as well have, for the trouble I caused him.  What I did was make a substantial change to his data without consulting adequately with him and without proof testing it for him. 

We’ll call my poor user, “R”.  R had requested that I make a few changes to the bundle of reports that he used every Monday to consolidate the information for his sales team.  He then took that knowledge and presented it to his boss who gave it to his boss who gave it to the BOSS.  No problem; it took me less than an hour to make the enhancements he wanted.  Then, like the painter that can’t resist one more brushstroke on his masterpiece, I decided to “tighten up the columns a little.”  Then I figured I’d remove some of the out of date fields.  Put a couple of useful rollups in for him.  Reworked the presentation so he could see it both by salesperson, as well as by account.  Then I tweaked a few more things before I leaned back, rested, and admired my work.  That was on Friday.

Monday afternoon I received a call from R, thanking me for all my hard work and praising my helpfulness.  Not. 

In reality, Monday afternoon I received a call from R.  His voice oscillated from anger to despair and back to anger.   “Why had I done that?”  He was hung out to dry in front of his boss and from there, the trouble rolled down hill and up the food chain.  No one could get the numbers they needed.  No one was happy.  I certainly wasn’t by about 30 seconds into the phone call.

After much apologizing to to R and to his boss and bosses all the way to the BOSS, I knuckled down and fixed everything.  In the end, all was forgiven and I  was out not much more than some dignity and an afternoon of work.  But why had this happened?  Why did my good intentions end up as a rat in the mailbox?

It happened because I took the wrong path when I went beyond my mandate.  A user requested a change and he and I discussed it and came to an agreement.  When I went beyond that agreement, I broke the explicit contract between R and me and the implicit one with all of my users, that is, to do no harm. 

The takeaway for me is to be very, very careful when changing someone else’s reports, GUI, or in general, in altering a users view of the data.  Users are funny and set in their ways.  What seems like a minor revision to those of us in love with technology can seem like a shattering event to those who are technophobes.  Even if objectively something is an improvement, without buy in, it may end up a rat in the mailbox—an unwelcome surprise.

Photo courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigfatrat/104501587/

Weeds in the Garden, Reports in a CRM System

 

 

Years ago, moved by a yearning to return to the land and break free of the shackles of the supermarket, I planted a garden in my urban backyard.  Not just any garden.  Not a garden slightly larger than the one the year before.  This was the Mother of All Gardens.  Stretching from my back steps to the alley and reaching to the side of my garage, it looked less like a city vegetable patch and more like the Green Giant’s vacation home.

 

Everything was great at first and encouraged and emboldened by some early radishes, I planted more tomatoes.  Then more onions.  Next, more carrots.  Then more cabbage and potatoes and corn and….you get the idea.  By midsummer, the garden was entirely out of control, the weeds were running loose like gang members in the hood, and the cabbage had its hands around the neck of the corn.  Discouraged, I abandoned my plans and settled for a frozen TV dinner and a beer.

 

Similarly, I am familiar with a CRM system that was laid out with the best of intentions and greatest of care, but fell beyond the reasonable control of the system administrators (the “gardeners”).  Like me when I planted my huge patch of plants, these gardeners of data did the best they could, but their knowledge was limited, the rollout rushed, and mistakes were made.  Most of those errors were of only middling importance, as were most of mine, but one was near fatal. 

 

When I set out to create Green Acres in my yard, I thought of many things, but the one that I didn’t was weeds.  I failed to put down mulch to control them and I failed to aggressively cull them before they could strangle the useful plants and then go to seed.

 

When these administrators set out to create the best CRM system they could, they were particularly delighted that their users were freed from the yoke of having to ask the Zeus like DBA in IT to create reports in SQL for them.  Rather, with only a little training, they could create ad hoc reports to their heart’s content.  More complex ones could be whipped up by their eager and helpful administrators in short order.  Even dashboards were easily built.

 

What our friends with the rolled up sleeves and their hands in the warm soil of data didn’t notice at first was that just like weeds, reports have a way of multiplying.  As sales people came and left, the reports they sowed in public folders stayed.  Managers crafted (0r had someone craft for them) great works of reportage—which then promptly became stale, inaccurate, and were still used to steer the business.  Worst of all, in this particular system, reports tied to dashboards could not be deleted at all, much like once the kudzu entwined my sweet peas, I could not kill it without destroying the crop.

 

At the end of the summer, I was getting a trickle of tomatoes, a bit of basil, but that’s all.  The rest fell victim to my carelessness.  In the CRM system I’ve alluded to, it isn’t that bad yet, but there are thousands of weeds, rogue reports that threaten to decimate the harvest of useful business intelligence.

 

My garden could have been saved by better planning.  If I had known to lay down black plastic and mulch to reduce the weeds that sprouted, if I had known to kill them the second they started to run amuck, and most of all, if I had know not to plant too big a plot that I couldn’t control with my skill and resources, it would have ended much better. 

 

In the same vein, our tale’s administrators should have done more research into best practices (and actually followed those practices, but that’s a story for another day).  They should have severely restricted end user ability to create ad hoc reports, instead encouraging them to bring their needs to the team, so good, vetted solutions could have been shared with everyone.  A regular, detailed process needed to be in place to deal with old, unused reports.  Policies regarding what reports were to be used for mission critical functions should have been in place and honored.

 

It’s far too late for my garden, but these administrators I’ve told you about still have a chance.  It will be ten times harder than if they had mulched from day one, but the battle is winnable.  They will have to endure pain and frustration, but they can and will chop down the report weeds and get their CRM system under cultivation again.  Too much is riding on them to not succeed.

 

If you are today planning a data garden or if yours is already “knee high in July”, take notice of the reports.  They can choke off your project just as quickly as kudzu.   Plan now and your users will thank you, or the corn will grow tall, or…enough with the analogies, but you get the idea!

 

Image courtesy of http://www.freefoto.com

KY Jelly and Cloud Storage

 

 

A couple of years after 9-11 I was traveling by air for my employer.  Since I was heading out to our Western office, my boss asked me to take 50 USB thumb drives with me.  I think they were whopping 256M units and retailed for something like $75 each.  “Sure,” I said, “no problem”.

 

Not wanting to trust thousands of dollars worth of electronics to the baggage handlers, I managed to stuff all of them in my laptop bag.  Still not problem.  As I went through security at EWR in Newark, NJ, I anticipated having to explain why I had all the drives.  I didn’t anticipate the scanning line stopping dead, the TSA officers triggering a panic alarm, and being dragged off by three police officers, my feet not touching the ground.

 

I wasn’t even too worried when they locked me in a small, windowless room.  Then I saw the tube of KY Jelly and box of surgical gloves.  Now I was worried—big problem. 

 

Thank God, they listened to my explanation, called my employer, and commonsense prevailed.  No cavity searches were done and I was allowed to continue on my way, with only a stern warning about, “Causing a disturbance.”

 

Maybe that was the start of my dislike, but I’ve never been a fan of USB drives, portable hard drives, CD’s and the like.  They’re too easy to lose, leave behind, or drop in the toilet.  Still, traveling often and needing access to a variety of files and tools while at client’s sites, what to do?

 

I tried several solutions, including setting up my own server, using Mesh from Microsoft, and even emailing things as attachments to myself.  Each worked to one degree or another, but each had fatal flaws.  Then I found Dropbox. 

 

Dropbox is a free, cloud based storage site that is very simple in its design.  You can easily access it directly at www.dropbox.com, but the real power comes from installing a tiny piece of software on your “home” computer, “work” computer, laptop, or any PC that you use regularly.  Having done so, it appears as just another drive and you can use it as such. 

 

No matter how you access Dropbox, the site has been, over the course of a year, consistently reliable, fast, and secure.  I’ve used it at home, at work, abroad, and even from a smart phone. 

 

Logging on directly to the site, the GUI is clean, logical, and easy to use.

 

 

Unlike some designers, they don’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead being happy to stick with conventions.  On a machine with the Dropbox software installed, a tiny icon appears in the system tray.  To access your files, you can double click it.

 

 

Alternately, it can reached by the file explorer or in the save dialog of a program.  There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

 

 

They offer 2G of space for free and if you need more, you can upgrade for reasonable prices.  By referring your friends and family to Dropbox, you can also earn an extra 250M of space, up to a total of 3G, for each that sign up for a free account.  Best of all, if you use this link, you’ll start with an extra 250M, right off the bat.

 

Give it a try.  It’s free, safe, and reliable and a whole lot more comfortable than anything involving KY and exam gloves!

Adultery and You--Online

 

In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his magnum opus, “The Scarlet Letter”.  A twisting, dark, exploration of the human condition, sin, revenge, and ultimately, redemption, it is a book to be read, savored, and reread.  The story in simple terms is of a young woman who commits adultery, has a child from the affair, and is force by the townspeople to wear a scarlet colored “A” on her dress (“A” for adultery) for the rest of her life.  In a heartbeat, a poor choice reverberated with consequences that not only tainted her life, but that of her child, her lover, and her husband, not to mention the townspeople who tormented her.

 

Interesting, but this isn’t an English literature or morality blog.  Why am I bringing up this 160 year old book?  Because with the same carelessness, we can brand ourselves with the digital equivalent of the scarlet “A”.

Consider this, how long do things stay on Google?  On Bing?  On other search engines?  Does the blog you’re reading at any given moment—and commenting on—have archives?  Ever hear of the internet Way Back Machine?  Each one of these can trap your comments like an insect in amber.

 

Think about it.  Have you ever found yourself in a fight on the internet?  Lord knows, I have.  Email is bad (sorry, Russell!), but nothing can quite compare to a good, old fashion flame war on a forum or comment board.  It starts with a simple disagreement on something innocent, perhaps the proper implementation of RFC 2549.  By the time one or both parties is banned or leaves in disgust, someone will have been compared to Hitler and grown people will have been reduced to the level of children scuffling in the school yard.

 

Even more serious damage has been done than just hurt feelings or being banned from a site.  Things on the internet are in many cases, there forever.  A year from now, five years from now, a decade down the road, someone may stumble across your tirade on an eBay users group.  One day, a potential employer doing a deep screen could take note of your colorful comparison of your foe’s mother to Parisian streetwalker’s female dog.

 

How likely is it that someone will link you to your temper tantrum from a few years ago?  Hard to say for sure, but do you ever use the same user name on more than one site?  Register with the same email?  Is it worth the risk?

 

In all of human history, no one has ever won a fight on the internet.  No one has ever changed someone else’s mind.  No one has ever been involved in a mud slinging match and managed to stay clean.  Lower your weapon and back away.  Trust me on this one.

 

In the end, the choice is yours.  You can experience the thrill of taunting some other person with things you would likely never say face to face.  You can try on the electronic, scarlet letter, when your intemperate comments surface ages later or you can be the bigger person and quietly maintain your dignity now and preserve the only things of any real value in a virtual world:  Your identity and reputation.

 

Mom, the Microwave, and Tree Chippers

My Mother, may God grant her soul peace, was not a stupid woman.  She raised two sons and three step children, started a new career after she was widowed in her 50’s, and adapted to a world that started with segregated busses and ended with a black president of South Africa, not to mention the burgeoning career of a young man in Chicago who would one day be the president of the United States.  Yet she was still brought to tears by the on/off switch of a microwave oven.

Back in the mid-80’s, when home microwaves were still very expensive and not that common, I saved my pennies and bought her one as a birthday gift.  After carefully warning her not to put metal in it and to reduce the cooking times for her favorite foods, I stood back and watched her excitedly try to heat a hotdog.

In the tiny oven the sausage went.  She shut the door with a gentle touch and set the timer dial—then she waited.  “Mom,” I quietly said, “you have to press the start button.”  Valiantly, she searched for it.  She peered at the smooth, white plastic from variety of angles, unable figure out the proper action.  Then she poked the biggest button and the without warning, the door sprung open, hitting her squarely in the face, knocking her glasses to the floor.

After everyone calmed down and I pointed out to her the small, flush, button with the 0|1 on it was what she wanted, peace again returned to the kitchen, at least until the hotdog exploded. 

Here’s the question, “Why should a woman in her early 60’s be reasonably expected to understand that 0 and 1 are standard notation for off and on in the electrical and computer fields?  Why should she have had to wade through a thick manual to operate a household appliance?  Why wasn’t the on/off switch obvious?

Something similar to my Mother’s challenge recently happened on the net.  A very good site called ReadWriteWeb published an article examining Facebook’s push to be a single login system.  Interesting, if slightly arcane topic, but for whatever reason, Google’s algorithm pushed it to the very top of its results.  Suddenly, new visitors by the thousands started showing up.

A blog’s dream come true, right?  Not in this case.  Huge numbers of the new visitors were leaving angry comments condemning Facebook’s “new” look and demanding to know when they could log in again.  What??  Yes, they thought they were actually on Facebook and not on a site writing about Facebook.  Instead of typing www.facebook.com in their browser, they always searched for Facebook on Google and mindlessly clicked the first link.  Apparently, the nicely branded site and lack of a login didn’t faze them.  Take a few minutes and check out the article, the explanation, and some of the comments.  It will be enlightening.

Cool stories, but what’s the point?  The point is, when designing a CRM system or anything else that will have end users, you absolutely, positively, 100%, have to be clear and plan for confusion.  Sure, control, alt, F4, left shift seems perfectly logical to clear the cache to you and me, but what about Jim in marketing, Sue in legal, or your 62 year old mother?  If it isn’t as foolproof as possible and as clearly documented as possible, you’ve failed.  No matter how well you can demo the system, you’ve failed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from my Mom’s microwave adventure and the actions of users who landed on ReadWriteWeb, is the design of the modern wood chipper.  A wood chipper is a large piece of equipment into whose gaping maw, bushes, branches, and even small tree trunks are fed.  The whirling discs inside grind the material to the tune of hideous din and spit out sawdust on the other side.  It will easily do the same to a man.

Take a look at a diagram of a generic wood chipper:



The feed tray extends several feet to prevent the operator from getting close enough to easily insert his hand into the feed, where it would pull him into the discs.  Surrounding the entire opening is a feed control bar.  If by some horrible accident, the operator is being pulled into the chipper, any touch to the feed control bar will instantly reverse the feed, ejecting the entrapped person.  Insofar as possible, the chipper is end user proof because unlike with most software, human life and limb is at stake.  The margin for error is zero.

Microwave buttons should be obvious and well labeled.  Controls on software should be equally obvious and well labeled.  Also, consistent.  If “OK” is green on one page, it needs to be green on all the pages.  Remember, your end users are not necessarily going to be well trained, familiar, or even particularly motivated.  It’s up to you, to compensate for their limitation.  If you don’t, the failure is not theirs, it’s yours. 

User acceptance testing should be the end of a long process that includes requirement gathering and constant feedback from the intended users.  Just because a system appeals to you and makes sense in your eyes, does not mean that it is well designed.  Without keeping your end users in mind constantly, you will fail.

As a final thought, if you think I’m exaggerating the matter, take a few minutes and see people respond to a Google employee asking, “What is a browser?”  Watch it and be afraid; be very afraid.

Promise and Peril of the Cloud

This is the view out the front door of my house at 0915AM on Saturday, 06 February 2010.  I just finished a leisurely breakfast and am now sitting in my warm study, jotting down a few thoughts on my blog.  And I’m scared.

Nearly everything I do is in the cloud.  My data, my applications, the games I play, the sites I depend on for my news, the social networks that keep me in touch with my friends.  All those things depend on a very old, very vulnerable infrastructure.  See the wires in the picture above?  They may have been strung before I was born, but they carry the 21st century in them.  Electricity, landline phone, the power that keeps cell phone towers working, cable television, internet, they’re all right there.  By “right there,” I mean, “right there where a squirrel can chew through them or a branch loaded with snow can snap them in two”.  If that happens, I guess I’ll dig out paper and pencil and start my “Amish in America” blog.

As much as I love the interconnected world I live and work in, the aging infrastructure and lack of “Plan B” is starting to bother me.  When I try to talk to people about this though, I sometimes feel like I’m shouting, “The king has no clothes!”.  They just don’t want to hear it. 

Sure, our data centers are all secured like a fortress and have triple redundant, armor coated, fiber optic lines, but what about the last mile?  That’s what has me wondering where we keep our flashlight and if know where the manual pencil sharpener is…

[Addendum:  In the balance, the good and potential of the cloud FAR outweighs any potential hazards.  I have no desire to go back to managing my own storage network or even to scribbling notes on paper, with pencil nub.  My point is, we need to be realistic and have a "Plan B" in mind, for mission critical applications.  Squirrels chew and snow falls, know what I mean?]

Linux, the Cloud, and the Beatles

  
http://mistyvamp1111.deviantart.com CC BY-NC 2.0

Back in about 1999, I picked up my first copy of Linux, Redhat to be precise, and started playing with it.  I don’t remember the full configuration of the machine I had then, but I think it was a Dell with 128M of RAM, what seemed like a screaming hot processor and get this, I was rocking out with a 2M video card.  Yeah!

The installation went OK.  It was a little dicey, with the bare bones installer, little to no documentation, and my only source of live help, an arrogant little… that is, a confident member of the university user group.  In the end though, I got it done, had connectivity, a reasonable set of colors on my 14 inch monitor, and a working mouse.  Then I tried to play Yellow Submarine by the Beatles.

What followed was a solid week of installing drivers.  Compiling drivers.  Rebuilding kernels.  Reinstalling the OS.  Talking to a guy in Germany at 2AM my time.  Bitter tears.  Finally, those magic tones drifted out of my $6 speakers and I shuddered, thinking if it was this tough for me, an IT guy, what chance did the average Joe or God forbid, my mother ever have of getting this Linux thing to work?

Fast forward a decade and a year and you would find me tossing a DVD in a cheap PC I knocked together out of the pieces in the bone yard in my basement, answering a couple of questions, and reading a magazine for 15 minutes while Kubuntu Linux installed itself.  Afterward, I pop in Yellow Submarine and sing along heartily, much to my darling wife’s displeasure.  The system’s sound is perfect; mine is not.  What a difference a decade made in the maturity of the OS. 

Only a few years ago, the computing cloud was domain of the very few early adopters who could function in the rarified atmosphere, similar to Linux in 1999.  Access was difficult and businesses, if they had even heard of the concept, were deeply skeptical, to say the least.  Who could really blame them?  What kind of foolish idea was it to hand your data to strangers, so those strangers could stream it across the internet, and then store it who knows where?  It sounded to most people, one step removed from a Nigerian lottery scam.

Times have changed.  Just today at my day job, I sat in on the presentation made by our new cloud storage partner, Nirvanix.  [Disclaimer:  I am an employee of CommVault Systems and Nirvanix is one of their partners.  This blog is not sponsored, approved, or endorsed by either of them.  All opinions stated in here are my own.]  I was surprised to find out, to our software, the cloud is now just another target device, the same as a disk array, tape library, or WORM drive.  The end user doesn’t have to know anything other than how to pick a value in a drop down list of target devices when configuring our software.

The security of the cloud in this case is vouched for by a variety of certifications and audits.  You can see the geographical spread of Nirvanix’s data centers and they document the protocols and processes involved in moving the data to and from the cloud, but if you don’t care, you don’t have to read a word of that.  You just need to be able to pick a name from a list.  Even my mother could do that.


During the one hour meeting, it hit me like a baseball bat.  The cloud is ready for primetime.  No longer the province of the technological elite, the masses are about to start filling it with persistent, far line data, with no more difficulty than me playing Yellow Submarine.  The whole course of IT changed.

Losers?  Potentially hardware vendors, traditional backup and data management companies, and anyone who can’t adapt to a rapidly realigning world.  Winners?  Just about everyone else who has data and is sick of changing tapes, swapping power supplies on Christmas eve, and simply wants the damn thing to work.  Me?  I’m sort of sorry that people may not quite look at my knowledge of REST, distributed computing, and other cloud issues with quite the same respect, but on the other hand, I could do without those late night hardware emergencies.  Oh, and I don’t miss compiling sound drivers either.  It’s good to be alive in 2010.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurajo/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Technology is Great--When it Works!

Dear readers,

I was just alerted to a problem with the RSS feed for this blog.  It looks like if you use the widget at the top of the page to subscribe, it does not work correctly for the Google Reader.  I will work on this tonight and get it fixed.

In the meantime, here's the raw link that you can put right in the Google Reader (or any reader, actually):  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeizeTheFutureByTheThroat

Thanks,
Paul

Buttonhooks and Google News

One and half centuries ago, the humble buttonhook was cutting edge technology and irreplaceable in the average household.  A buttonhook was a piece of thick wire, similar to a coat hanger in diameter, that had a small, open, hook at one end.  The other end was either a larger, closed loop or a handle, sort of like the handle on a hairbrush. 

During this time, fashion in Europe and much of America dictated dozens, if not hundreds, of buttons on women’s clothing.  The buttonhook was poked through the buttonhole to catch the button and pull it through.  Its use could reduce the time to dress by 50% or more.

By the dawn of the 20th century, this device that every cosmopolitan home possessed, was on the way out.  By the time Ford’s Model T raced across the plains in great, shiny, black hordes, the buttonhook was a dim memory for most people, the need for it removed by changing tastes and the zipper.

In her February 3rd 2010 blog entry, Heather Hopkins said, “Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. “  Read that again.  Facebook is driving more than twice the amount of traffic to news sites as did Google News.  This is a paradigm shift, plain and simple, just like the move from hundreds of buttons, to a few buttons and zippers.

What happened to companies that didn’t understand the change in women’s fashion?  They kept building buttonhooks, maybe even improving them.  They probably tried ads and sales programs and held their breath, sure that a return to Victorian styles was just around the corner.  But they were wrong and they are gone, just like the dinosaurs.

Today, in nearly every company, in my own company, there are people who are sure that social media is a flash in the pan.  “Sure it’s hot now, but give it a few years….”  “Show me the ROI and we’ll consider sending some ‘Twitters’ announcing our press releases.”  You’ve heard them too.

What the naysayers don’t get is, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the others and even ones that aren’t so much as a dream yet, are the next wave.  Miss out on it now and you and your company can sit happily in the dustbin of history, along with the leading buttonhook manufactures.

This is the time to start the shift.  Sure, there are still plenty of garments with lots of buttons, but aren’t those zippers starting to look good?  PUSH your clients to understand social media.  PUSH them to not only try it, but to do it right.  The new frontier is not like the old.  No longer is it a matter of a company spraying news from a fire hose.  Social media—successful social media—is a conversation.

You have the knowledge (or you should!) and you have a responsibility to the people paying your salary.  Don’t let them be left behind in a fading age.

"REBOOT" A Matter of Life and Death

Humor me, dear reader as we take a small detour from the usual format of technology, operations, social media, and such.  Tonight, I want to talk about death.

What??

A good friend of mine was working out at the gym last week when God rebooted him.  As Charlie tells it, one minute he was on the rowing machine and two days later, he woke up in the hospital. In between, his heart stopped, another gym patron did CPR on him, the ambulance squad treated and got him to hospital alive, and from there, the doctors took over.  A week later, he went home with a implanted defibrillator and a new appreciation for life.

I don’t know about you, but most of my waking hours are devoted to computers and software and sales and….blah, blah, blah.  All of this is important in its place, but in the face of the ultimate reboot, every bit of it pales.  What do I suggest?  Should you hop on Twitter and update or maybe touch up your LinkedIn profile, just in case it’s needed for an eulogy?  No.

Put down the memory sticks.  Log off.  Shut the SQL book.

Go hug your spouse.  Call your mother and tell her you love her.  Walk the dog.  Forgive an enemy.  Feed the cat some tuna.  Go watch the leaves fall and be thankful your motherboard is still powered up and say a prayer for those who are blue screening right now.

Peace,
Paul