Where have I been?

Everywhere. Sorry for the blog delay people. I'm in SFO, again, for 28 hours. Red eyes might be the equivalent of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm on American. I used to be someone on American – not anymore. It's ok, the biggest airline ever will be Northwest/Delta – neither of which I fly or enjoy. That deal is just like two drunks holding each other up in a bar if you ask me. Now there will be less choice, more cost, and crappier service by really old belligerent people. Cool. Jet Blue is the only one who should survive.

The valley was 85 degrees and sunny, surprisingly. It will be 14 degrees and sleeting when I land in 4 hours. The only flight that ever lands early is a red eye – because that's the only flight you don't want to land early.

The Santa Clara Marriott might be the real ground zero. Unfortunately, because I was there and irony is my middle name, the Internet didn't work. Too funny really. I also had no toilet paper, which one only realizes way too late as one might expect housekeeping to keep house on such things. No need to continue on that path.

Had a very nice dinner with some ESGers and Ash from HP (founder of AppIQ and a wonderful, not tall, person) at something in Palo Alto. Nice Greek place. I had been there before, many years ago, with Jerry K. of Riverbed and Chris Schaeppe of Lightspeed (VC but don't hold that against him). Chris gave me a bottle of Harlan, which I drank too soon. Jerry couldn't figure out what possible value I brought to anyone. Smart man that Jerry.

Last week I was in Orlando at the vendor love fest called SNW. I never left our suite. I will be the last one to leave that show as it's fantastic for me. It's great for vendors who want to do a bit of biz dev too. Why anyone else goes is beyond me, but guess what? 11,549,993 IT professionals were in attendance! A new record. They were invisible, which is why you couldn't see them, but they were there. Trust me.

I saw the sun for the first time in well over a decade. It was great – my wife and 75% of my kids came down for a few days. In another classic ironic bit of my life, the geek show left town, I went to the pool, my kids came by, and just when life was good – 8,000 teenagers checked in to the hotel. The Florida Key Club – some sort of good samaritan thing I'll never quite get – invaded the hotel. I don't even like my teenagers that much, let alone 8,000 other ones.

There are a LOT of acquisition deals in play right now, none of which I can tell anyone about. 7 that I know of. I am not only speaking of the Moshe/IBM "buy everyone who has ever been in Israel" kind of buys – some are really big. Of course I'm not supposed to know about any of them, so I shall now go get on the most uncomfortable plane ever and be accosted by a flight attendant.