Dateline: SWA flight from Phoenix to Providence, 11 March 2005
Last night gave my second lecture at Berkeley. Same hot room, and I had one key slide self-destruct in its animation (the final slide on Who Gets Custody of the Kids? that shows how the military's main assets pools are spread across the Leviathan and SysAdmin forces). That's not happened to me in several years, and probably is some snafu of running a PC-derived brief on a Mac. I will have to fix.
But other than that, the brief went well. Couple of nastily-delivered questions that were more rhetoric than reason, but other than that, the Q&A was fine. Conversations at the reception following were also good, with a couple of goofy exceptions. I bagged the effort at 11pm, an hour after the event was scheduled to end, feeling like I had fulfilled my contract in full. Earlier in the day I did a lunch with a Reserve Officers Association chapter, as well as almost two hours of talking and Q&A with naval ROTC cadets. With the 3:30am wake-up call, I wasn't going to stay out as long as the previous night, so I hit the hay, after packing up my gear, about 11:30.
Up well before dawn, I get in my rental and drive to Oakland International Airport, where I drop of the car and catch the shuttle to the terminal for my 0600 flight to Ontario airport, just outside of San Bernadino in southern CA. There I am picked up by partner Bob Jacobsen and we head over to the HQ campus of ESRI, the "Microsoft" of global spatial data management and analytical software for a fascinating morning of demos and discussions. Their stuff really knocked my socks off like few technologies I have ever encountered, and it's all open-source and web-based to boot!
We were invited to sit down and talk with some senior managers about PNM (which they really like) and possible overlapping future interests and projects, and I must say, it was an eye-opening discussion. ESRI is a very impressive company, and the senior leaders we met with left me even more impressed. I'm hoping NRSP, or the New Rule Sets Project, can find some mutually-beneficial common pursuits with ESRI in the future, because their way of looking at both technology and the world is very similar to my own. Plus, they're a natural pillar of any SysAdmin-like effort to shrink the Gap, which I remind you, will be an overwhelmingly private-sector, non-military effort driven by technology and the connectivity it brings.
Flying home rest of day. Get back to house around 12:30 to find Kevin up and waiting for me, which was very nice.
Here's the catch:
■ The transformation of military transformation
■ Why the West Isn't Winning the War on Terror
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