Flying High – Life is About Possibilities

My life has been amazing of late, I am going through some really horrible personal issues but that aside – life is beautiful and I am open to the possibilities of absolutely anything. And with this new possibility and sharing myself with people you would be amazed at the results.

My last few weeks have been charmed to say the least. I have written about Kart racing at K1 Speed and this was a great event, I went to the Google main campus and was treated fantastically well and my good fortune just seems to be continuing.

My great friend and confidant Troy who just sold his business invited me for a spin in his new plane. For a split second I was thinking about crashing and how that would really suck and realized that it as the old me and the new me that knows that anything is possible and that possibilities are endless decided that the experience would be worth dying for. So I drove about an hour north of San Diego to Temecula and I was pumped for the experience. It had been a while since I had seen Troy and it was going to be a great chance to catch up. When I got there Troy was just pulling up in his new BMW M6 in black and he lead me around a few corners to his hangar.

He hit the garage door opener, the hanger door opened and inside was this polished and pristine new plane. Wow, this was going to be fun. We pulled the plane out for the garage (literally pulled it, you would be amazed at how easy it was to move) and after a few quick checks and some new oil we were ready to go.

First thing i noticed was a sign that said “EXPERIMENTAL” on the inside door…

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Google All the Day

A few weeks ago I received an invitation to go to the Mecca of the Geek – the Google Campus. Even though I know a number of people that work there it is still a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I went there with Wayne to meet our dedicated account representative Christian. We flew into San Jose from San Diego and it is just incredible to see the number of people that commute every week from one part of the country to Silicon Valley. These are people who live weekend to weekend and work out of the house every week. There is real dedication to commute and be a part timer in a full time relationship. But enough about that lets get the show on the road.

We landed and went to pick up our rental car, and we picked up the new Dodge Nitro. I loved the look of this beast – Wayne was less than enthusiastic about its appearance. Well I was driving and I dug it. The car is just a very chunky machine and other than the spongy breaks it was very cool to drive and easy to navigate. Not like there was much navigating to do because the Google offices are just a few miles from the airport.

We got to Google a few minutes early for our appointment and met in a smaller building just the the west of the Googleplex. We signed in and went up to Christians office, he shares this office with one other person and her dog. Man that dog was cute.

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Montana Meth Project

For those of you who question if the message is the medium take a look at Montana Meth Project. It has one of the most powerful anti-drug messages that I have ever seen…This is not the old eggs in a frying pan slogan of “this is your brain on drugs, any questions?”.

These images are powerful, potent and really speak with a potent level of authenticity, clarity and honesty. You really need to check them out.

If you have not yet experienced their message – watch each and every one of their Television Ads.


The Montana Meth Project is a large scale prevention program aimed at significantly reducing first-time meth-use through public service messaging, public policy, and community outreach.

Take Action.

How Much is Your data worth?

I was reading this article from MSN entitled Oops! Techie wipes out $38 billion fund. A quote from the article is “Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.” So I got to thinking and about how much is my data really worth.

I am not talking about business data I am talking about personal data and the information on my hard drive. Those of you who do business with me know my standard quote is “There is almost no such thing as having to much protection for your data. The servers may cost you 15k but the data is worth millions.”

So I have decided to see what my own personal data is worth not only to me but in real $$$. I have pretty much grown up in the technology age, in High School and College I was typing everything and everything was being saved for future use (you never know when you will need a three page paper on Shakespeare) and it has countless hours invested in this information. Fortunately I purged my old data but if I were still in school this would be almost priceless.

Back to reality here:

On my PC I have about 3 years of customer invoices and accounting records – I have had to pay an accounting firm a while back to straighten out a tax issue for me and based on their invoice it would be about $3500 to recreate most of the data from hard copy.

I also have 6 years of digital travel photos – I have uploaded most of them to flickr but the originals are priceless. But if I HAD to put a price on them – one trip to Western Europe for viting 5 countries – $3500, one trip to Eastern Europe $2900, two trips to South Africa $7500, one trip to China and Hong Kong $3500. So the images are worth $17400 just to go back to the places to retake the photos, but the memories are irreplaceable.

Emails and letters to my wife before we were married – priceless.

Songs that are loaded into iTunes from a CD that I no longer have.
Tax returns – ask Uncle Sam
Passwords to about 50 web sites that are just saved as cookies – I have an account where?
Spreadsheets and business plans – this could be a million bucks just sitting there.
Rants and Raves. $0.02

I estimate that I would suffer about $20,000 in replacement value and about $1950 in actual damages if my hard drive died..

I am not even going to include software and aggravation costs nor the time it would take to set my machine back up again the way that I like it.

I urge you to backup your data. There are so many easy ways to do this: burn a CD/DVD, use an external Hard Drive, USB stick, another machine, tape backup, floppy disks or an online backup service.

Bottom line backup your data. Its cheaper than you think.

Penetrating the Orange County Broadband Market

It has been electric the last few weeks because we have finally entered into the Orange County Broadband market. This is a significant milestone for Skyriver and helps to solidify our position as a major player in our industry.

It has been tough to keep this news quiet but the press release is out and I can finally share my enthusiasm for this expansion. Today Orange County…tomorrow the world?

The engineering team has worked double time to make sure that the expansion was more than just symbolic and we have architected this to be a meaningful and robust addition to our ever growing network.

Great work to Ron, Mike, Shane, Chris and the rest of the team.

Skyriver Communications Expands Its Wireless Broadband Coverage Into Orange County

SAN DIEGO, March 20 /PRNewswire/ — Skyriver Communications (www.skyriver.net) announced today it has added Orange County to its fixed wireless footprint. Wireless broadband speeds of 1.5Mbps to 45Mbps can now be accessed in Anaheim, La Habra, Garden Grove, Fullerton, Brea and Orange County Broadband map. This expanded coverage is part of Skyriver’s aggressive growth strategy, which includes a fixed WiMAX rollout throughout the Southwestern United States.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer Skyriver’s rich suite of converged communications services to the businesses of Orange County” states Manny Fennessy, Skyriver’s VP of Sales. “Skyriver’s entrance into the Orange County market will vastly improve the depth of services available for business customers and will provide a much needed and true alternative to the traditional data service providers. Further, Skyriver’s Agent Program will provide local software providers, LAN consultants, ISPs and technology integrators with the opportunity to generate new sources of revenue while providing their customers with enterprise grade access solutions.”

Brad Slavin, Skyriver’s VP of Engineering and Operations added, “The successes that Skyriver has achieved in the technical trials of our next generation network and wireless platform has given Skyriver the confidence to push the envelope of the services that we can deliver over the air. We are at the forefront of service delivery and implementation of the next generation Wireless Broadband internet connectivity.”

About Skyriver Communications

Headquartered in San Diego CA, Skyriver Communications is an innovative connectivity services provider, offering a complete set of converged communication solutions to enterprise, small-medium businesses, and hospitality markets. Through its trusted and reliable wireless broadband, hotspot, business continuity, IT services, and ISP offerings, Skyriver is uniquely qualified to meet the full spectrum of mission critical connectivity, implementation and support needs of today’s fast paced communications environment. For more information about Skyriver Communications, please visit www.skyriver.net.

St. Bernard Eliminates Thousands of Spam Emails Per Month for Skyriver Communications

Readers will remember a few weeks ago I was talking about the anti-spam solution from St. Bernard Software (previously Singlefin) and just how amazing I thought that their solution was in the marketplace and how they really met the need for SMB spam filtering.

Well life has been very interesting since then, I was invited to participate in a radio show along side the CEO of St.Bernard Software as a customer representative – you can hear it live on MyTechnologyLawyer.com or download it directly from the site here.

I really think that the radio show rocked and the PR Firm for St.Bernard an agency called Lewis Pr asked me if I would participate in a press release for the LivePrism product. I said that I would be happy to participate and on Friday there was a press release about how Skyriver has utilized the LivePrism product to protect our clients.

I have attached a copy of the release:

SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 16, 2007–St. Bernard (OTCBB:SBSW), a global provider of security and hosted office solutions for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), today announced that Skyriver Communications has deployed LivePrism throughout its organization and to selected customers. St. Bernard’s on-demand services include hosted email, instant message (IM), Web filtering and hosted office solutions. LivePrism eliminates spam and ensures that Skyriver’s customers are compliant with federal and industry regulations.

Skyriver Communications is a Broadband Wireless Communications carrier, serving SMBs throughout Southern California. The company required an easy-to-use and cost-efficient service to reduce email spam and ensure that its customers in the financial-services industry meet necessary compliance regulations by archiving all electronic messages.

After testing solutions from multiple hardware- and software-based vendors, Skyriver selected LivePrism as the most reliable offering to manage configurable and scaleable email, Web and IM filtering. In January 2007 alone, LivePrism identified and stopped 75,542 spam emails from reaching users on the Skyriver network.

Designed to specifically meet the needs of SMBs and leveraging on-demand infrastructure, LivePrism services are remotely managed and delivered to Skyriver over the Internet, removing the burden of costly hardware installations and sustaining IT management. Skyriver and its customers now have access to the power of enterprise-class solutions, but with the flexibility to choose services and scale as business requirements dictate.

“Since our customers consider spam to be the most pressing IT issue, we needed a solution that provided exceptional functionality at a reasonable price,” said Brad Slavin, VP, network engineering and operations at Skyriver. “We chose St. Bernard’s LivePrism because it is scalable and requires minimal maintenance and support, while offering maximum security and reliability.”

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A Need For Speed – K1Speed

Last week I set up an engineering field trip. Unlike our previous outings this trip was not filled with wireless site surveys or any computers at all. The team really needed this, there have been some huge issues with communications in the last few weeks and it was just time to blow off some steam. Nothing like a little friendly competition to open up the communications again.

As a team building event we choose to go to K1 Speed and it was an amazing experience. K1 Speed is the thrill of high performance Italian kart racing mixed with some friendly racing competition. If you are not familiar with electric Karts these little rockets are fast. They have an amazing amount of torque and power and because they are electric there are no fumes. Electric Karts are like having fun and saving the environment at the same time 🙂

The facility is about 75,000 square feet with a track that twists and turns for an absolutely amazing experience. The staff was professional and if you asked they gave helpful hints about getting the fastest time possible. It felt as if we were professional drivers getting ready for Formula 1 excitement.

There were nine of us that went racing, we signed into their computerized system that creates a unique drivers profile for each racer and it is the basis for the statistics that are provided after the race. We had a 14 lap qualifier that measures the fastest single lap and uses that data to determine the starting position in the MAIN event.

I know that they were just being kind but I won the qualifying round with the fastest lap time of about 33.04 seconds a full half second from the next person..these Karts are fast and have enough power to make the back end drift!

Oh, yea – crashing and careening into a wall is not an unusual event. Staying out of these pileups is a great way to gain position as the others untangle themselves.

The main event was potent, we were all driving like our lives depended on it, if it were not for the SMILES 🙂 that were plastered into our faces you would have thought that this was a life or death challenge. After 16 long and well fought rounds Mike, Paul and Chris rounded out the top 3 positions.. I came in fourth and without glory.

After the event each one of the guys let me know how much fun they had had and how just hanging out together in a relaxed and offsite location really helped. K1 Speed has my vote for a great team building event – pizza, fast cars and computer controlled statistics – who could ask for anything more?

A Punch Biopsy

Today I finally went back to the dermatologists office after my initial visit late December when I complained that a piece of metal that got stuck in my finger from about a year ago was beginning to hurt. It was like nothing that I have ever felt before. I am sure that it is a piece of metal but there seemed to be a hard ball surrounding the site under the skin and I was concerned that it was something a little more serious than that.

During the initial consultation Dr. Stuart told me that foreign bodies in the skin usually make their way out after a few months and that I should give it a little more time and let nature take its course. She also told me that I might be able to use a clean needle or razor blade to try cox it out and have it come out. So for the past few months i have tried everything short of minor surgery to get this out of my finger.

Finally it got to the point that it was actually irritating to type because each push of the keyboard would cause the ball under my skin to hit some nerve and it was beginning to freak me out. So at 8:10 this morning I went to get it looked at one more time and this time she offered me the solution…a punch biopsy.

Basically a punch biopsy for those of you who are not skincare professionals is where the dermatologist numbs up your skin with an injection, and after the initial pain of the needle and the stinging caused by the medication proceeds to do the real work. She took what can only be described as an amazingly sharp cookie cutter and pushes it though the skin (like the needle piercing the heart in Pulp Fiction) and remove the foreign body by taking a “core sample”. What she removed was about the size and shape of the tip of a q-tip, it was white and honestly gross.

She dropped it into a formaldehyde solution and screwed the lid onto the jar, she then looked at it and said what had to have been the funnies thing that I have heard all day which was “well I don’t think that was going to make its way out by itself” and then she sewed me up with four stitches and sent me on my way.

It was really an strange experience, I could see what she was doing the whole time, I could see the blood but because my finger was numb it seemed as if it was happening to someone else.

It was quick and painless and the only sign that I have is a finger that is all bandaged up and it looks like E.T. trying to point the way home.