I do dozens of press and analyst briefings each year and I’m usually pretty confident that I can handle any question that comes my way. I’ve come a long way since that time at Comdex when I declared to an audience that included a lot of press members what I would have chosen as an alternate career. More on that in a future blog.

I did an interview recently the preparation for which had me totally perplexed. I understood from the briefing sheet that the interview would include questions about how a data center run by a woman would differ from one run by a man. I’ve never run a data center, and if I had I don’t think I would have put up window treatments and floral wallpaper, so I turned to my colleagues for input in answering this question. The one consistent answer I received that resonated with me is that women are more collaborative and, in a time of crisis, will pull a team together to get the problem resolved. (more…)

It’s no secret that I have a 400 a day email habit and need a fix for my Blackberry Addiction approximately every six seconds. In fact it has gotten so bad that my friends and family have performed interventions and confiscated the device, but even without it on my hip, I can feel it vibrate in much the same way an amputee feels an itch in a missing limb.

Yesterday I encountered a problem with my device when the Blackberry Messenger icon wouldn’t respond. (more…)

I thought that would grab your attention! Obviously I’m not referring to myself, but to my beloved Ingres. Few people think of Ingres as a “sexy” technology today, but that’s changing, and we are maturing into a timeless beauty with brains to burn! I’d love to hear what you think makes Ingres sexy, or what would make Ingres a bombshell.

No doubt you saw the recent press release announcing the expansion of our service delivery capabilities through our acquisition of Luminary Solutions in the UK and MIS in Australia. (more…)

I’ve always had a voracious appetite for books, but I have to admit that I never read product user guides. I’ll dive head first into a new piece of technology and uncover how things work for myself rather than investing the time in reading the user documentation. I’ve noticed that this is a growing trend and that many software consumers will use the documentation only as a last resort. Obviously the price we pay for not reading the documentation is that it’s unlikely that we’re getting the full benefit the technology provides and whole areas of functionality can go undiscovered. (more…)

A friend suggested recently that I use Google Maps to get the directions from New York to London; amusingly, Step 24 read “Swim across the Atlantic”. It’s a good thing that I haven’t yet tried anything quite as silly with my car’s GPS or my car would have been in the Atlantic months ago. It seems that whenever I engage a GPS I disengage my brain. Last year a couple of my Ingres colleagues and I were taking a journalist to dinner during the Red Hat Summit and I followed the car’s NeverLost the wrong way onto a freeway ramp almost killing the four of us and frightening the Ingres PR team to death. (more…)