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Just in case you missed it, I’m currently in San Francisco at Salesforce.com‘s Dreamforce 10 event. I did write about this previously. I’ll post more soon. Once I’ve caught up on sleep.

08 December 2010 by Stilgherrian | Permalink

Visiting San Francisco for Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce

05 November 2010 in Internet, Personal by Stilgherrian | 19 comments

In just over four weeks I’m off to San Francisco for Dreamforce ’10, the annual user conference for cloud-based CRM provider Salesforce.com. On their tab. This will be both wonderful and scary.

Wonderful because I haven’t been to San Francisco before and everyone tells me it’s… well… wonderful. Plus there’s a keynote by Bill Clinton and a performance by Stevie Wonder for some reason I don’t know stop asking me questions I didn’t organise this goddam event.

Scary because it’s one of those huge combined convention and trade show deals at the Moscone Center. Last year they had 30,000 attendees. I have been reliably informed that I will truly hate being in a room full of thousands of (mostly) Americans whooping it up because someone announced that some software had a minor-number version upgrade.

This is only my second-ever visit to the US. In May, Microsoft flew me to their Redmond, Washington, headquarters for a 3-day briefing about their security initiatives. That generated an episode of the Patch Monday podcast called Microsoft versus the cybercriminals as well as material for later episodes, the article Letter from Redmond, Washington: inside Microsoft HQ for Crikey, and a look Inside Microsoft’s Security War Room and accompanying photo gallery for iNews.

This time I’ve arranged to spend three days in San Francisco after the event, so I’ll actually get a chance to see something more than the inside of software company’s headquarters and the hotel. I’m sure there’ll be the usual temptation to visit the standard tourist locations, but I’d like to see something a little different. Something that helps me understand the real America.

So, while I’m in San Francisco, where should I go and what should I see?

Since California is going broke, and the US economy is crap generally, I’d like to go somewhere to see how that’s affecting ordinary Californians. But what else?

Dreamforce ’10 runs from Monday 6 to Thursday 9 December 2010, and I’ll remain in San Francisco until Sunday 12 December 2010.

[Photo: Cable Car turn around at Powell Street, San Francisco, by Loren Javier. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

Links for 31 January 2009

31 January 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 31 January 2009, arranged by intensity of floral attitude:

  • Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism? | Reuters Blogs: Reuters News editor David Schlesinger tweets from Davos, beats his own news wires, and then blogs about the experience. If Twitter is changing journalism, his response is “Bring it on!”
  • The LEGO Turing Machine | YouTube: The Turing Machine was a hypothetical computing device created by Alan Turing in 1936 to explain basic theoretical concepts in computing. While very simple, a Turing Machine is mathematically equivalent to any other general purpose computer, if slower. So, these guys have built one using LEGO Mindstorms components. The video has a bonus soundtrack via The A-Team.
  • A radical idea: Charge people for your product | 37signals: The blog post is from November 2008, but the message is current given all the media flutter about Twitter — which has yet to earn a single dollar of revenue. Need income? Um, charge for your product!
  • FORA.tv: “Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues.” I haven’t checked them out properly yet, so this is really a reminder to self.
  • GoodBarry: These guys provide an integrated “Software as a Service” (SaaS) system for small business, covering eCommerce, content management (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing and analytics. All hooked together, and all at good prices. I’m checking them out for a client.
  • Life Matters’ Mandatory Internet Filter Transcript | Off Topic with Ashley: An unofficial transcript of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program with network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby.
  • Mandatory internet filter | ABC Life Matters: On Thursday, ABC Radio National’s Life Matters interviewed network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. Audio available for download.
  • The Economy According To Mint | TechCrunch: Mint is an online accounting system for consumers. Tracing their 900,000 customers through 2008 shows how their spending patterns have changed as the Global Financial Crisis worsens.
  • Labor’s “deafening silence” as web censorship trials delayed | theage.com.au:
  • Newspapers Saw the Digital Train A-Coming | Advertising Age: Bradley Johnson points out that the newspapers themselves were exploring digital delivery of news in the 1980s, but failed to do anything about it in terms of reviewing their business models.
  • OpenNet Initiative: “ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogs about such practices.”
  • The Unmistakable Smell Of Decay | newmatilda.com: With the NSW Labor zombie army smelling worse all the time, party hacks are considering swapping their front-line cadaver, writes Bob Dumpling.

Sometimes I want to be a writer…

14 March 2008 in Arts, Personal, Sydney by Stilgherrian | 4 comments

I enjoy writing (and talking about the things I write about) far more than I enjoy farting about with technology. For me the technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. But do I really want to be a writer full time?

Sometimes I do. Especially on days when things haven’t gone so well with clients. Then on other days I read stuff like Hugh MacLeod’s piece the quiet life of a writer yak yak yak. Explaining how he loved Hemingway and Graeme Greene, he says that even though their books were very different their daily routines were pretty much the same.

Basically, they’d live somewhere cheap, quiet and relatively conducive to getting a lot of writing done. The Florida Keys and Cuba in Hemingway’s case, the South of France in Greene’s.

They’d get up early each morning, then write diligently till noon.

Then they’d head for their local café, drink gallons of booze for hours on end, and stagger home late at night.

Then they’d do the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. For years on end. Women came and went, friends came and went, children came and went, money and fame came and went, but the daily writing-booze combo remained the great constant.

I’m not sure I like the idea of staggering home drunk every night, but as somebody who likes to write, likes his beer, and likes the simple life, I can’t say I find their overall Modus Operandi unappealing.

On a sunny Friday morning in Sydney, in the city’s most beautiful time of year, I think I agree.

And now, back to reading a company’s office manual so we can build them a CRM system…

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