(Fritz Nelson looking around...gazing, bewildered. A vague familiarity registers.)
What's Preston done with the place? I hardly recognize it, all cleaned up, rational, serious, grown-up. Get busy for a while and come home to find the family moved the furniture around, got a new dog and turned your playroom into something useful.
(Suspicious squint. Devilish grin. Errant, idle thought. Tosses dirty socks on the bed, moves a picture off center. Uncaps his pen.)
They say you can take the girl out of the farm, but not the farm out of the girl. Even though I can put on a suit with the best of 'em and my audience might now be a handful of marketing people from whom I'm trying to delicately extract money and not the five people who used to read my column, some things just don't change.
"Though much is taken, much abides," some dead poet wrote.
I am still, for instance, taken with company and product names. I've been pondering meeting with a vendor that sells NAS servers ("320 GB NAS at below $2,200 ... less than $7 per gigabyte"). Its name: Siliconrax. I haven't the slightest idea how good this stuff is, but I think I need to try Siliconrax before I criticize. It may be just like a real NAS.
When visiting Proxim, one of the leading wireless companies, I noticed another company in close, er, proximity: Synplicity. That it makes design-automation systems strikes me as neither simple nor sinful, but the company's marketing is as simple and generic as any that you'd see on the enterprise side: "Synplicity's mission is to provide systems and IC hardware designers with solutions that provide best-in-class results and productivity through technology innovation."
"Best in class"? I hope they won't be "out of pocket" when I call, so we can "move things forward," and maybe even "take it to the next level."
Like Quarry Technologies, maker of edge routers. Contributor David Willis told me about an interesting meeting he had with this company, which told him it had invented an approach called "Technology Independent Traffic Shaping." Um, exactly.
David suggested that the folks at Quarry could also market an "Asymmetric Scalability System" and hold a product launch party at Hooters. I'm sure Siliconrax will join them.
And what of SecuGen Corp., "one of the world's leading providers of biometric fingerprint recognition systems"? Associate reviews editor Lorna Garey sent along a press release about a new model of its Hamster series fingerprint input device. Contributor Richard Hoffman asked, "So to authenticate to your network, do you have to stick your finger in a hamster?" (Oh, today's mixed-up youth!)
While I'm not an authority on decency, ethics and privacy, I do recognize that they've become banana peels on the road to a digital economy. Take, for example, a ShortNews.com item that technology editor Lori MacVittie alerted our editors to. It seems a James Woodcock tried to sign up for a Microsoft Passport account but was denied because his name was offensive (no more so than Synplicity, I would think). Contributor Bob Moskowitz said that a former colleague, Paul E. Ekholm, had a similar issue when the company used initials for IDs. (Names revealed to expose the innocent.)
The names may change, but my song remains the same, even if I have to take the Full Nelson show on the road now. For example, I discovered a new favorite during a recent visit to application powerhouse, SAS, where I couldn't resist offering my idea for a new marketing campaign: Nice SAS.
Send your comments on this column to Fritz Nelson at fnelson@nwc.com.
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