Having just read about Mark’s exploits in Vegas and being reminded about a conversation he and I had, I ended up trawling back through my posts to find the conversation in question. I think this is what he was talking about. Funny to see I wrote this all the way back at IIW2005… time flies. Mark raises the question how hard would it be to “become someone else?” He claims:
Learn how to roast a chicken with celeb chef Christopher Walken.
Following up on some earlier thoughts… I read a shortened form of this speech that Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, gave a Stanford’s commencement. As a “content generator,” Kev Russell riffed on some of the same topics as well. I heard Kev once say that he never wanted to become a consumer; he always wanted to be a creator.
I mean, what other company hires the Singing CPA and produces a music video for SOX’s 5th birthday?
I just got back from Santa Fe by way of the Catalyst conference. I spent a week with the in-laws and their families. I like Santa Fe. It is a great eating town.
Back to work tomorrow… still no iPhone.
I’ll be joining Lori Rowland of Burton Group and Edward Saba of Sun to talk about compliant provisioning and how Sun and Approva have implemented it. Check us out this Thursday, July 12th, at 11 Eastern. You can register here.
So Catalyst is winding down. And as usual a good time was had by all. A couple of notable quotes from the week:
As for thoughts on the Catalyst content… There was still a lot of conversation around user-centric identity. I think Bob’s comparison of new and old school identity systems, which nicely compared federation to user-centric identity, was an excellent primer. Personally, if they had stopped with just that presentation, I would have been happy and not needed anything else on the topic. Having heard a few presentations on fine grained authorization, I still am trying to figure out the root cause behind it all. I’m unclear of what is really driving people to expose their applications’ authorization models. I think, and this is just my speculation, that cause behind this is that user provisioning systems have done a relatively poor job in managing entitlements. Am I on the right path here? Finally, I had a lot of conversations on advanced provisioning. Deployments are maturing. Companies are looking for other ways to get value out them and at the same time make their services more relevant to the business. I wish the workshop that Lori did on these topics was, instead, delivered as sessions during the main conference. There are a lot of pent up conversations on this broad topic and Burton can easily tap them. I am sitting in SFO right now headed to ABQ and on to Santa Fe for a little vacation. (BTW, how many state capitals don’t have airports? Santa Fe is one, but think there are others.) By the time I get into Santa Fe, the iPhone will be out in the wild. I am very much tempted to go to an AT&T store and get one… we’ll see. Enjoy iPhone day everyone and have a great upcoming 4th of July.
I haven’t processed the shots I took at Catalyst this evening. Needless to say, they won’t be as good as Bob’s. I rarely like photos of myself, but I do like this one.
Last night I had dinner with a cast of characters:
We grabbed a late batch of dim sum at Ton Kiang. Good stuff I have to say. One of the things that Mark Mc and noticed was that the identity market is remarkably small. It is definitely a good thing that ex-Access360/IBM, Thor/Oracle, Waveset/Sun guys can break bread and have a laugh over the deals that we used to compete. It’s that (grudging, at times) comradery in this market that I love and it is one the things that makes Catalyst so much fun.
I think I stayed in the exact same room last year. It faces west and on a day like today, the wind whips on from the west and slams into the windows. The windows open about an inch. And if you open them, you create a very interesting wind pattern in your room, one that makes a LOT of noise. Cross the sounds of Hell that Dante described with a sound a small jet engine. I apologize to those of you on the 38th floor… but I kind of like staying in a room the sounds like a sound stage for Ghost Busters. I’ll be headed to dinner to night with the identitystuff crew. Should be good fun. I’ve got the Pentax with me so I’ll try and upload shots when I can.