I ended up posting my notes from the keynote yesterday, but I didn't want to give the impression that that is what Dreamforce yesterday was about. I concentrated on sessions about reports and dashboards, since that's where I think we need to go next at FaithAction.

But I had the BEST time going around to the Expo booths, talking to the folks, getting my card scanned (oh, God, think of all the fruitless followup calls and emails I'm going to get!) And getting their swag. Then I came back to the Youth Hostel and gave most of it to the kids here. It was lots of fun, seeing what they were handing out so you'd remember them. For the most part, I avoided the candy jars.

That's the other cool thing. I don't have to spend money on food. It's all here. So I'm going to splash out for the coat-check...leave my laptop but have it on site in case I want to do an "hands-on" session.

Okay, that's really it!

So the internet isn't working this morning. I forgot to turn OFF my 5am weekday alarm, and then forgot that it was on. So I shook myself awake and put on my headlamp to brush my teeth and get dressed. One of our room's lodgers didn't come back last night, but there were still two young women asleep. The self-absorbed one turned on the light at whatever time she got in. It was a revelation to her that she could just open the bathroom door a bit and have plenty of light without waking everyone up.

The first clue I had that I was up too early was when the kitchen door was still locked. Huh? The door says 7am. Surely it had been more than half an hour since I'd gotten out of bed. It had. My phone said 5:40. Registration and breakfast at the conference is 7am too. Oh, well, I thought, a little internet. Not to be either. It's either off or out. I don't want to go PAy someone for coffee, so I'm left with organizing the files on my computer. Probably long overdue job, but not what I had in mind for Wednesday morning.

The flight was uneventful. I sat next to a retired English teacher who lives in Ashland, Oregon, which sounds like Asheville...ecumenical, artsy, cool. She volunteers with the local community theater company. My flight from GSO was delayed enough so that I had to actually sprint to make the flight to San Francisco in Philadelphia. I'm not used to flat out running. I arrived just after they announced the last call for the flight. Huff, puff.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put my computer and most of the stuff in my purse back in the room. And I'm going out for an early morning walk in San Francisco. A plan.

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Waiting for the keynote. Total huge, huge hall, filled with blue light, projections of clouds everywhere. Trying to figure out how to get back to the hostel to dump some of this stuff. I am not even sure I want this laptop with me, but certainly the coat...They want $2 to check the coat and I am keeping this really on the cheap. Breakfast was lovely. Cute video intro. Software disks hover, take over meetings. Turn into surfboards with jet pipes. Up into the cloud. The room changes color. Sunset orange. Loud rock music.

Marc...19,000 people registered for this conference. At a grand apiece... 10,000 people in this room. Allow us to all come together. See the future, understand it, create it. Company update. Level set it. Strategy. Product strategy. Open a door and walk through it...That you see a new possibility. ceo@salesforce.com for what's bothering me. COFFEE before 7:30! Safe Harbor statement...Magnitude of the announcement. Recogize all the folks from outside the country.

Thank you....This is our way of giving back to you. Mission: cloud computing driver, catalyst and evangelist. Applications moving to the cloud...Then platforms moving to the cloud. Force.com. Multi-tenant, pay as you go, elastic, five times faster and half the cost. 67,900 payng customers. Largest...marquee customers. Can serve every size of the market.

A different set of values of philanthropy and giving back. 1 per cent...equity, profit, time.

Mayor of SF...celebrates its diversity each and every day. Dreamers, doers, entrepreneurs, leading edge of cutting edge. Talk about the various give-back. Project Homeless Connect. Mobile capabilities. Power of an enabling model. Easy to put in place. 108 cities replicated.

Year Up ED to represent all the nonprofits. Earn a career in technology for young adults. Six months of IT training, internship. Social entrepreur model. Real data in real time, allocate limited resources. Use SF every day.

Update on the company...
force.com infrastructure...SECURITY. A lot of the power of security. We've learned much from you. Virtual cycle. Security and reliability. System with scalability. Five minute upgrade. Move data back and forth...salesforce to salesforce.

Force.com development platform. You've built tens of millions of customization. Knowlegement system.

Applications on top of the platform. 4th cloud, major new market segment.

Sales Cloud 2 --

Service Cloud 2 -- 55% market share. One problem we were trying to solve. Concept of customer support. Companies invest in contact centers. Waiting for calls while the action is happening on the internet. What happens when you have a next generation of service cloud. Customer service offering...Tel and online communities, email. Products she bought, sales calls, Search knowledge. Rich media in knowledge article. Customize to match your business. When we want to include this new category...Publish to the web site.

Salesforce Answsers...shipping it as a facebook application. Went to Dell's home page. Also installed Answers Application. People vote for the answers. Dell has access to all these answers and can put it in their knowledgebase. Made accessible to service agents, google and everybody in the facebook community.

Twitter...How do I join that conversation? Salesforce for twitter baked in. support channel on Twitter. Automatically created a case. Integrated into the Knowledgebase. Send tweet. Reduce call handling time. 360 view of our clients.

Custom

For those of you who couldn't make the Gala Premiere of our movies, here is a link to the album on Vimeo.There are all nine videos on there, plus the video I put together the day the Flips arrived, plus one called Camera Class, which JF is going to clean up and make into a better video showing the whole process of how we run the class. I think from there you can get to the other videos I have uploaded there...including the video that got me a free pass to Dreamforce, the Salesforce conference this week.

I got a call tonight from Jessie, one of my oldest friends...I keep forgetting he keeps tabs on me reading my journal. James got after me for being absent too.

So since they have free wi-fi at the youth hostel, I'll TRY to post a little during the conference.

Later then...

Oh and p.s....There have been 39 viewings of the movies in the past week. Most of them yesterday (when I posted on FB) and today.

There have been more upheavals, triumphs and craziness, but that is really no excuse for neglecting my LiveJournal. I keep having LiveJournal kinds of THOUGHTS. I keep wishing that I could post something to Facebook and then click Send This to LiveJournal. Or vice-versa.

The two biggest pieces of news are:
1. JF got hit by a car while bicycling to the Y about two weeks ago. He's recovered, pretty much, but it really does sort of rearrange your brain cells. No...I didn't mean that he hit his head, he didn't. And don't ASK about the helmet.

2. Movie-making class got finished and the Premiere Gala we held in honor of the students went incredibly well. JF is supposed to be making a video incorporating the videos from the classes themselves as well as footage he shot on the day of the gala. He's also supposed to be making a video of the evening we spent with the United African Sisters of North Carolina.

Actually, he's been cleaning out my old but well-loved van because we are about to donate it to our local public radio station. I bought a different car, a very large gas-guzzling Suburban, which is an amazingly comfortable, roomy, camping-friendly, schlepping-friendly, great tank of a vehicle. I paid cash for it, and so instead of the car payments so many of my friends are paying every month, I'll just have a somewhat larger fuel bill. I think I still win, though I know that going greener would have been better. We live in the last days of these kinds of vehicles and I just love sleeping in a van. So I am.

The videos we made so far are here. I've also put the link on Facebook in a couple of places.

I leave tomorrow for San Francisco for a week. Staying at the Youth Hostel and attending Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce convention. I won a free pass to the conference for making a video telling them why I want to come. I didn't win the all-expenses trip. The guy doing a very witty take-off on a Bob Dylan song won.

Okay, I'm tired now. Beddy-bye.

One thing I like about this is what a great French accent this kid has. Wanna brush up on your vocabulary? I think I even heard a passe simple verb tense go by. Play it phrase by phrase, and when you've got it down, you'll be ready for the Big Trip!

While we're in French, karlkunkel wanted me to comment on the fact...not confirmed by me, by the way, that Micky D is going to open up a shop in the Louvre. MacDonald is an American icon...it stands for everything the French think of us, including the fact that we eat badly. Including, but not limited to, mind you. JF loves to say that the French LOVE to eat at MacDonald's just to come away talking about how badly they've just eaten. It's a sort of reverse snobbism. In the Louvre, they'll have even more opportunity to cluck and do their Gallic shrugs. And can you imagine the numbers of American tourists who will flock there? It's a marriage made in heaven.

Click on the photo of this wonderful cat to access all the photos from our birthday celebration spa in Hot Springs, North Carolina. The cat lives in this fabulous bead shop in Asheville, one stop on our way home. Other photos include extensive pix from the Duckett House Inn, where we stayed, and some from the hot tub where we relaxed and got massages. Ahhhhhh.....

1. Visit our new website: www.faihouse.org. I must say, says she, dusting her fingernails, I am pretty proud of it. And having to rebuild it from total scratch wasn't a bad exercise. Some things I got righter the second time.

2. Spa! one of you asked how that went. Well, it was just lovely. I do have some photos that WILL get uploaded sooner rather than later, but for the past week, I've been trying to restore the backed up files to my wiped-clean computer. The B&B we found was reasonably priced and more like a European B&B-- shared bathroom (though we were the only ones in the building besides the owner, so we didn't have to end up sharing anything.) Nice quilts. Very antique-look. Wood. Nice lamps. The breakfast was scrumptious. And then we headed over to the Hot Springs themselves. This is something I love to do, and have done maybe five or six times. Only before we stayed in the campground. We read aloud from Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. We talked about our vision of our future. It was wonderful. The masseuse was not brilliant, but was perfectly adaquate. I give her a B+. It was a great getaway.

3. Computer woes: Here's the rule I broke and so read it and learn: Back up your computer files. And THEN test your backup. I worked with Judy on Sunday. That girl has enough on her computer to copy in about three minutes. She doesn't need a complicated backup system. Me, on the other hand, I've got something like 130 GIGA bytes. Sheesh. Takes hours. I need to get it done overnight. I had done the backup because that computer was acting sort of wonky and I didn't trust it not to crash on me. Which it did. But what I hadn't done was TEST the backup system. It turns out I just couldn't get the computer to recognize my backup files AS backup files. So it won't go in and restore them for me.

4. Tell No One. If you can't stand to read subtitles, you should get a reading course and get better. This is not a movie I thought I'd go for. I thought it would be too violent. It was violent at times, but so wonderfully shot, so well-crafted, such a nuanced and compelling story, that the violence didn't bother me. Rent that sucker!

5. Movie-making. Whew! All the movies are finished, though a couple of students needed some outside help to GET finished. I'll put the evaluation of the course up on the Worlds Touch Blog when I get it done. I learned a lot, including that not all students are going to love me. What a concept! Not loved by all? How can that be? But I do know that I'm a very intimidating teacher to some people...one reason why, if I ever tell you I'm going back to teaching high school, please shoot me on the spot.

Movie-Making Gala Premiere

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Where my mother's ashes are buried, along with some from my father.

I did a couple of things right to get through the computer disasters of the past couple of days. The best decision I made was to call the young man who had helped me set up the web site for FaithAction in the first place, Dave. I had started out thinking I could think my way out of the problem, but after talking to him, I realized that I had not adaquately understood the underlying structure of the way WordPress works. I knew the information for your site is store in a MySQL database. Somehow, I imagined that the database lived in the files up there in the control panel when I log into the place I keep my site, my host is the way we geeks talk about it, my garage, is how I've come to think of it.

So when I uninstalled WordPress and saw all those files still there, I thought I hadn't actually ERASED anything. Ha. I had in fact erased everything. All that was left was the shell, the icing without the cake, the glory without any of the guts.

Dave and I did a bunch of exploring around...and of course he had to see all the clumsy things I'd done to try to rectify the situation in my ignorance. What on earth do people do who are hesitant to appear stupid and inept and ignorant in front of others? How do they get their messes cleaned up? Do they just not MAKE messes? Of course, Dave assured me that everything I'd done, he too had done once. Whither thou goest, I too have gone kinda thing. Which of course assuages the embarrassment of being a techie who didn't quite realize that if I uninstall WordPress, about two weeks of work is going to slide right down the tubes into oblivion.

And while it did take me two weeks to GET there, it won't take me two weeks to get BACK there. I spent about five hours last night after our board retreat reconstructing the site. It's still bare bones, but it's at www.faihouse.org. I have a couple of tweaks I'll do to it today before we leave for Hot Springs, but basically, this is the site. I rebuilt all the pages and put all the words on there and I'll get the pictures up next week. And there will be some changes anyway, since at our board retreat, we revised our vision and mission. Not a total tidal wave of change, but some good solid changes.

Now, as regards my laptop, which also crashed Friday. I have found my backup files and while Windows won't just "restore from backup" easily (because it thinks this is a new machine, is all I can gather from it), I can certainly just move the files manually from the backup. I need to check out and see why we aren't all just using Windows' generic backup on a regular basis. And the whole thing is a wakeup call about getting backups into the system as a regular and ongoing thing.

That'll fix the files, the photos, the documents, the videos. After that, there is the patient and steady evaluation of what programs need to be reinstalled here. I've got to get ahold of my virus protection people, since this machine thinks I didn't have any and so wants me to pay for a new deal. And there's iTunes and my podcast subscriptions. Essential. I've got my Office to install as well. After that, it's sort of waiting to see what comes up. My guess is that I've swept out a bunch of stuff that I wasn't using and didn't need.

So besides the most important technology lesson (BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! -- JF says the NASA rule is three backups and that is what he does, methodically and consistently-- and amazingly for the rest of his space looks like haphazard chaos), what am I taking away from this disaster? One is that panic and drama just would not have served anywhere in this process and boy am I glad that my boss didn't fall into even the first particle of that because I might have if he did. The other is that, with all things computer, patience is really the most important virtue. When intelligence fails (as mine did...I KNEW there was a database back there. I should have known I couldn't uninstall the program without eliminating the database. Duh, really!) then patience saves. The other of course is to get help from people that know more than you do, and that carries with it the willingness to turn up flat stupid.

Okay, I'm off to install iTunes.