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	Phil's Blogservations Wednesday, August 29, 2001 Posted by philgomes 5:58 PM RIP Phil's Former Office: Oh, shit...Now the tech casualties of this economic downturn are creeping a little closer to home. I just found out that the office where I spent my most formative years in public relations closed completely. A shame, since it was populated with good people in one of the best places in the Bay Area where you could possibly have an office-- downtown Palo Alto. Tuesday, August 28, 2001 Posted by philgomes 6:23 PM ...Because the Phrase "No One Ever Got Fired For Buying From Oracle" Never Took Hold: Lee Gomes at The Wall Street Journal (no relation to your humble blogmaster) wrote a piece wherein Oracle is chronicled has having cried foul regarding several Gartner Group reports. One particularly funny comment: "a review by Oracle of six months of Gartner reports showed 23% of them were critical of Oracle while only 8% were critical of IBM." Am I the only guy that finds this funny? I mean, aren't we all adults here? No namecalling, kids... Monday, August 27, 2001 Posted by philgomes 5:46 PM Lampooning Microsoft's Astroturfing: For those of you in-the-know, the term for a faked grassroots movement (usually sponsored by the company whose interests would be served by such a movement) is called "astroturfing." Microsoft, apparently, has done just that with its letter writing campaign to certain politicians who are examining the company's business practices. Some of these letters were even written by dead people. (!) Well, Dan Gillmor and his brother believe that Microsoft's strategy has one fatal flaw: it needs better dead people! He's posting some interesting suggestions from readers, based on famous quotes. Can you figure out which one is mine? Sunday, August 19, 2001 Posted by philgomes 10:35 PM RIP philgomes.com Contributor: I just found out from a philgomes.com visitor that C. Lee Burwasser, who contributed to this site with a Library of Congress-blessed bibliography of science fiction research texts, has quietly passed away in her apartment. My correspondent, whose sister worked with Ms. Burwasser for about fifteen years, tells me that "apparently she was missing from work for 10 days before her employers, [the Library of Congress], called the apartment manager and she was found dead. Next of kin have been notified." This site doesn't get many outside contributors, so I'm saddened that one of the very few is no longer with us. "That is not dead which can eternal lie; For in strange aeons, death may die." - H.P. Lovecraft Tuesday, August 14, 2001 Posted by philgomes 2:15 PM Lucent Exec's "Golden Parachute" More Like "Golden Solid Rocket Booster": By way of The Industry Standard, Reuters is running an article about the phenomenal severance package that former Lucent Chairman and CEO Rich McGinn received. In summary, we're talking a $5.5M on-time payment, the company's assumption of $4.3M worth of McGinn's loans, and $1M per year for life! All of his vested stock options are underwater, but the company repurchased $7M of McGinn's restricted stock and applied it to the loan payment. Oh, did I mention the $9,000-per-month office space stipend? The CFO didn't make out too badly either. Can you imagine what they both would've received if they left the company on good terms instead of getting fired? I remember that the company was once considered unassailable. Sad how the whole telecom equipment industry very suddenly turned sour. I'm having fun calculating, based on McGinn's golden parachute, what my severance package would add up to. I'm not going to publish it here, but it is interesting nevertheless. Monday, August 13, 2001 Posted by philgomes 12:27 PM "Columbus Sailed the...Awwww, Screw It! I'm Goin' Home...": Tech pundit John Dvorak has a wonderful column about the dumbing down of America called "America For Dummies," poking obvious fun at the "faddish" series of IDC books. I write this from the state that is 50th (out of 50 total, dum-dum) in the nation in terms of education quality. Face it, people: We are a country of smart bombs and stupid kids. Soon, we will be bombing hostile countries with our illiterate paratrooping children as they graffiti "fuk soddom hoosain" and "bag dad sux" all over "iRack." Dvorak also sees the irrational dot-com exuberance of the past couple of years as a symptom of this nationwide stupification. One can hardly disagree. Friday, August 10, 2001 Posted by philgomes 6:00 PM Elderly Couple Has Trouble Keeping It Up...The Plane, I Mean: Friend and colleague Craig Kaufman submitted this story about an elderly couple who chartered a flight on the pretense of getting some mile-high octogenarian nookie, only to try to hijack the plane to Cuba. In a struggle with the pilot, the plane splashed down and the pilot was the only one to survive. "The couple probably was too busy getting dressed to save themselves," Craig tells me. Posted by philgomes 12:35 AM I'd Be Happy If They Pointed This Technology At BART: Seems like the boys at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) are soliciting proposals from research institutions to help create "immune buildings." They aim to create "military buildings (such as barracks, office buildings, and Command and Control centers) far less attractive targets for attack by airborne/aerosolized chemical or biological warfare agents." DARPA-funded technology-- like the Internet --tends to make it into the hands of John-or-Jane Q. Public eventually, so I can't wait for people to install such systems in public transit and office buildings. When I was at one job, you could reliably track the most probable spread of an office infection (cold, flu, whatever) by looking up at the air conditioning ducts. Can't wait for this "immune building" technology to make its way into the private sector. Thursday, August 09, 2001 Posted by philgomes 6:47 PM What Being Worth Over $45 Billion Will Do To You: If you want a good laugh, you can download this MPEG movie of Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer whooping it up at a Microsoft chest-beating corporate rah-rah event. The whole thing appears inspired by Planet of the Apes. In particular, note the part where he hurts himself from all that jumping and afterward when he's so winded that he can't speak. A very good friend reacted by saying, "I am embarrassed to be a MSFT shareholder right now." I can hardly disagree with him! Posted by philgomes 3:33 PM Somehow, I Always Knew: Read this article, then tell me how productive you are afterward! Posted by philgomes 3:20 PM Faster Than a Speeding Batarang: SciFi Wire is reporting that Warner Bros. is putting together a flick that teams up Batman and Superman. Funny thing is, I can't think of an actor who'd want to take either role. Everyone who's played Batman has pretty much faded into obscurity (West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney) and nearly all those who have donned the blue-and-red tights have met with unfortunate fates. (I'm counting Dean Cain's stint on Ripley's Believe It Or Not.) Wednesday, August 08, 2001 Posted by philgomes 8:38 PM "Feels Good to Be a [Beltway] Gangsta": While national VC funding numbers are down 12% nationwide from the previous quarter, it seems that Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. numbers are actually up 27% to $765.7 million. Some needed optimism amid today's negativity. Thought I'd post it to help balance out some of the doom-and-gloom that's been coming across my field of vision and winding up on this blog. Posted by philgomes 1:10 AM Uncle Sam Even Punishes Unredeemed Financial Success: It's bad enough that taxes are pretty much contrived to punish progressive success by levying a similarly higher degree of confiscation, but a little-known provision called the "Alternative Minimum Tax" or "AMT" can sock you for cash that you didn't even collect! According to a piece in the The San Francisco Chronicle, the AMT can tax you on the difference between what you might've paid for your options and the price at which you exercised them. Even if you didn't cash out, you take on a tax liability. Those of you who think this only affects the very, very top of the high-tech food chain take note-- even the Valley's rank-and-file are getting hit with high-five-figure tax bills. However, the article was quite right to point out that many of the people who are stuck with this unusual tax burden were either greedy ("Pshaw! How could my shares go down?") or just simply ignorant of the responsibilities of sudden wealth. The article mentions a nonprofit organization dedicated to AMT reform, suitably called ReformAMT. Senator and former VP hopeful Joe Lieberman is fighting the reform cause, as is San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. Tuesday, August 07, 2001 Posted by philgomes 5:52 PM Gives New Meaning to Phrase "Hail Mary Pass": Hmmmm...And I wonder what Jesus Christ's batting average was last season? Posted by philgomes 3:43 PM A Personal Perspective on the Tech Slowdown: Cisco's John Chambers was right: "This is the fastest that any industry has decelerated." With that in mind, the Merc has put together a series of idiographs on real life stories of the Silicon Valley downturn. Doubly sad, since a lot of bright people are now jobless. Within one week, both Lucent and HP flooded the job market with over 26,000 pink slips. The foreign workers whose H1-B visas were begged for in Congress are now being asked to go back to where they came from. Unless the Valley's power elite manage this downturn correctly, they will soon be at the mercy of the vast number of foreign-born engineers who came here to ply their trade, learned technology's peculiar brand of business savvy, went back to their respective countries, and built the next bootstrapped economic miracle in Seoul, New Delhi, Jerusalem or Manila. If talent and innovation is not kept in the Bay Area and loyalty to its architects of innovation is not maintained, decades from now, Silicon Valley will be remembered as the place that seeded an unbelievable economic force of nature, only to have it scattered to the four winds and germinate in the form of a new generation of foreign technology powerhouses. Posted by philgomes 10:23 AM The Disposable Society Hits a New Peak: The New York Times is running a piece on disposable cell phones or, as they put it, "putting the phone card in the phone." That's all we need: The extended ubiquity of not-so-private portable communication gadgets interrupting my meals at restaurants, ruining my cinematic experience, or reducing the already-low automobile operation capabilities of California drivers. Besides which, cell phones are getting so small that I'm always afraid that even my comparatively bulky one (always set on "vibrate" out of respect for others' auditory privacy) might someday wind up in the washing machine. I can only imagine that I'd kill about a dozen card-sized phones in a month that way. Monday, August 06, 2001 Posted by philgomes 8:51 PM Star Wars: Episode II Gets a Name: I wish I were making this up. The official name of the next Star Wars prequel is "Attack of the Clones." I checked to see if this news was a spoof, but here is the official release from the Star Wars site. The title sounds like a bad Roger Corman flick. I'll forgive them if they kill the Jar-Jar Binks character. Posted by philgomes 5:40 PM According to CNN, multitasking is bad for you! I wish they could've found this out before I got a job in public relations! Posted by philgomes 1:02 PM The Merc is running a series on IBM and Microsoft's blatant rewriting of history...Uhhh...I mean "The 20th Anniversary of the Birth of the PC." Noted columnists Dan Gillmor and David Plotnikoff weigh in with their opinions of the whole affair. Mr. Gillmor was kind enough to mention my own first PC: a Radio Shack TRS-80. Ahhhh...Memories of the ol' "Trash-Eighty" and the desire to open up the breadbox-sized hard drive 'cause I couldn't understand the concept of the non-removeable disk. (Scared my dad when his curious six-year-old approached it with a screwdriver.) Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc fame offers his observations and refreshing optimism for the PC's continued future. Sunday, August 05, 2001 Posted by philgomes 1:21 AM IT'S THE INNOVATION, STUPID!! Provided here by way of Yahoo, Reuters has a story about the recent severe drop-off in venture capital funding. What some people call a dearth of VC money, I call a blinding flash of the obvious that selling baby clothes on the Internet does not a sound business model make!!! Sure, fewer start-ups are getting money, but the the good ones are! Check out VentureWire if you don't believe me. I'll take a handful of good ideas backed by solid engineering over a score of fly-by-night online pink slip factories. Saturday, August 04, 2001 Posted by philgomes 1:21 PM My morning net.browse just told me that Chuck Billy of the Bay Area thrash legends Testament has cancer. (!) Testament-- particularly the lineup of Billy, Skolnick, Petersen, Christian and Clemente --was very much a part of my formative years, musically speaking. (Practice What You Preach still amazes me.) I even had the opportunity to see the band at the Berkeley Square before it closed somewhere around 1996 or so. The good news is that the cancer is treatable, so I hope Billy is back growling his aneurysm-generating vocal brutality soon. (For the record, I really haven't dug the band's death metal bent lately, but more power to 'em!) Friday, August 03, 2001 Posted by philgomes 10:41 PM This marks the inaugural post to my very own weblog ("blog"), called "Phil's Blogservations." Realizing that simply hitting my Updates page every six months wasn't enough to convince people that I actually have a Web site for a reason, I thought I'd try this. Now, I can inflict my opinions upon you all whenever I have Web access!! Call it "open-source journalism." Call it an abhorrent use of technology. Call it whatever you like! Just enjoy. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.