I reckon it's been about ten years since I sent out Christmas cards. I've collected cards at garage sales for a pittance, but I just never got around to sending any. This year, something went click...and I just put a batch of cards in the mailbox. What made the difference? The cards. I happened to be at the West End Thrift Store when Brenda was hauling out some extraordinary cards from National Geographic, a wreath on the front made with different kinds of birds. Just beautiful. I bought them on the spot, and I've proceeded to address, stamp and then WRITE on them.

The lucky recipients are not representative at all of the hierarchy of friends, family and acquaintances that populate my life. They are, simply, the people who are still sending ME cards after all these years. I felt that their persistence and loyalty MUST be rewarded. So if you send me a card last year, you get a card this year. There are a couple of exceptions. My new best friend Mary Jane in San Francisco went on the list. She's the Servas hostess who was such a doll to me, hauling my cold-ridden self around the city, not giving a FIG when I told her I had a cold, even though she's 75 and living alone. I loved her energy, the hot flame of life that I felt every minute in her company. And Pam got one because she's my birding buddy.

Going through my paper address book was a trip. I kept this loose leaf marvel for years and years, painstakingly marking every time I sent a letter or a card off to someone. This is the same me that kept a running list of every book I read. All this is gone now, swept away by the computer, the internet and the kind of 40-hour-week I work. But I was astonished to read some of the names in my book, people I only vaguely remember, people I've basically lost. I never used to lose people. I remembered them all because I went through that book regularly. Who the hell is Kim Zumwalt? I remember that her father was the famous Zumwalt, an admiral in the Navy, or maybe it was her uncle. But what was my relationship with her? I am clueless. The same is true all through that book. People whose names are a complete mystery or practically.

I used to be amazed that other people would simply LOSE close friends. Just stop seeing them or calling them or getting in touch with them. I think it used to puzzle me because I was constantly moving from one residence to another, one town to another, and so held fiercely to the people who meant something to me. I didn't make casual acquaintances much. What Gladwell in The Tipping Point calls "weak relationships." As a teacher in a boarding school, those few years I wasn't writing, we were too much in each other's business, and as a lonely writer, every friend counted...until the last one died or moved away and I spent several years feeling quite frantic and bereft. I'd always had a BEST FRIEND and now there just didn't seem to be one to be found.

I don't know when I stopped worrying about that. Or, actually, yes now that I think about it... It was when I started working full time doing what I do, loving what I do, being "out in the world," being a social activist, being a tech maven, being myself at last. I hadn't realized that "I" had moved on and that nobody is going to cleave to someone who is not authentic. I remember college parties where I felt totally and utterly invisible. Jean-Francois had painted a picture of me that was not at all the way I saw myself-- a Feminist with a capital F, which wasn't SO bad, really, except that seemed to imply that I "wore the pants in the family," or as my parents-in-law put it, "led him around by the end of the nose." My aesthetic tyrant the docile and dominated one? Ha! I'm just more of a Yankee than he is. And his personality has been distorted by years of living without really assimilating in a foreign country.

In addition to the Christmas cards, I've also done a bunch of chocolate bark with nuts and dried cranberries. lizardek managed to squeak out, "They weren't SALTED, were they?" well after I'd already made the sheets of melted white and dark chocolate with salted cashews and Spanish peanuts. I tasted them and they reminded me of certain crackers you can buy in the bazaars of India and Nepal that are both salted and sweet. It's a really interesting taste phenomenon because each different taste fires on a different part of your tongue.

Every year, the entire female staff of the Modern Foreign Language Department hauls into work little presents of food for everybody else on the staff. Loaves of zucchini bread, nut bread, cookies, etc. etc. Last night we counted 18 people who needed these goodies. Every year, JF feels beleaguered by all this bounty because he never has anything to give back. They don't do Secret Santa, where you only have to come up with five little gifts, leading up to the revelation of who has been putting pencils and erasers into your mailbox. When lizardek showed pictures of this pistachio and cranberry bark with white chocolate, I resolved that this year, JF would have something to reciprocate with.

He's been telling everyone he's bringing in some toxic waste for them. Or maybe he's only saying that to his best friend on the staff. He's still the tyrant, though perhaps he's also anticipating the fact that Americans are not going to buy the "they do this in India and it's really quite good" argument. I did NOT throw it all out, run out to the store, re-purchase sacks of white and dark chocolate and cranberries and UNSALTED pistachios at $10 the half pound, thank you very much.

So this is going to be interesting. For MY people, I made up a batch of chocolate chip cookies that came last year in a gift jar with all the ingredients in aesthetic layers, topped by a square of tasteful Christmas cloth and a nice little golden cord. I got an email from Ryan. All it said was: "Amazing cookies." He's going to miss the white chocolate bark I'm bringing in today. There was one cup left over. Perhaps my reputation will plummet!

There are more polite ways of putting it, but the plain fact is that we have to start contemplating the death of our dog. She has lumps all over her body that are getting more numerous and bigger. A couple of the smaller ones look as if they're open. She has...well...I'll spare you more details.

The real issue is: is she suffering or not? Sometimes, when I'm FORCING her to go to the laundry room where she has her mats and water and food bowls, she acts as if getting up is a terrible ordeal. Then, when she wants to go outside, she trips down and back up the stairs as if nothing is wrong. She is even still playing her getaway games: She heads out on an urgent errand and then disappears and goes silent on the other side of the Avion trailer that now takes up the back parking space. She waits back there as long as possible and then makes a DASH for the other side of the driveway leading to the front, the road and the park. She has a whole routine for how she's going to get away, and she's refined this over the years as the getaway space has narrowed to just this one spot in the driveway. She likes to lurk just behind the garbage cans so that the time I have to see her and call to her is its utmost minimal. Once she's out of sight on the driveway, she's GONE.

I've started going down the steps with her to position myself in the getaway zone and even then she's tried to zip by me. In order to stop her, you have to SEE her and also be close enough to her. Sometimes, I've seen her from the back porch after she's made it to the park, which is on the other side of our privacy fence. She laughs bitterly at me when I try to call her from my perch on the back stairs, as if to say, "My captors, you have no power over me now!"

Velvet has never really been trained. That is, she can perform amazingly at staying out of the kitchen whenever JF is in it. She can even stay almost always on the tiles and not getting on the wood floors...when we are there to see. But there's no loyalty there; she does that because JF has trained her with fear of pain. Despite classes and books and efforts, I've never become her Alpha Dog. She'll come when she's called only VERY SLOWLY and only if I am about 15 feet from her. She continues to use the house as her toilet, sometimes even when we're home and would gladly let her out. Does this mean she has become incontinent? Not really...at least 80 per cent of the time she lets me know when she wants to go out.

So she gets lumpier and smellier. She rolls over on her back and seems to be scratching her back, moaning and whining as if, either it is a profound relief or a pain. It's hard to tell.

Sometimes, I look at her and think, somebody is going to feel this way about me one day. When is she just going to die? As far as I'm concerned, it would be useful for humans to have the tools to do the job that we have for dogs. But I'm not sure that would actually make anything easier for anybody but the one exiting this mortal coil. At least I could put my wishes into words. Velvet can't.

Because we had music night last night, my whole weekend's calendar has nothing on it until 6pm Sunday night, when the annual High Point University Christmas Party will take place. This will be a Nido extravaganza, if it's like former years. When I was in San Francisco, wandering around the totally over-the-top Salesforce convention, I was reminded of Nido and his grand gestures. I'll never forget the first time JF brought home 10 POUNDS of Ghiardelli chocolate.

The social dynamics at music night were especially interesting because there were two couples there who haven't come in months and months, and who really formed the core of the musicians at the beginning.

Now, I do want to say that JF and I have been doing music nights since our poverty-stricken days in Marseille, when we had two little kids and lived on $10,000 a year. We were so poor that even though we owned an automobile, we couldn't afford to GO anywhere in it. Those were eat-and-pay-the-rent days. So we invited our friends over to play music and partake of the canned dinners that JF's father created for us. He used to arrive at our apartment with cases of these quart jars filled with main dishes like "Canard aux Oranges" and "Pot au Feu." There was always some kind of meat in a sauce. We'd break out the spaghetti or rice and a couple of "Boccaux de Papa" and we always had a feast.

Those evenings in Marseille were, for a time, dominated by JF's sister's boyfriend Hakkim. He came to France from Algeria to study painting, but he already had a rich history of playing traditional songs at weddings and other festive occasions. The only thing about Hakkim was that he didn't really play WITH anyone. He simply delivered a concert of Algerian music. But he was a brilliant guitar player and so we mostly just sat back and enjoyed.

Then the music nights went sort of away while we were in Massachusetts (where we landed after we left Marseille) and Texas (where JF was finishing his dissertation and teaching. We reinstituted them here, mainly with these two couples I was talking about, and other people who have since sort of dropped off the social map. (Or moved away, sigh sigh, Traci and Rob.)

There were a couple of things about the dynamics of that old group that annoyed me. One was that while we had sort of agreed to take turns suggesting songs, one of the guys would just launch into songs he wanted to play and sort of, as JF calls this kind of move, "grab the microphone." Not unlike our buddy Hakkim. This meant that we were all more or less hostage to HIS songs, and HIS repertoire. What we've found since is that, in truly taking turns, even among those who don't have guitars, we end up with a richer mix of songs. We find stuff we had forgotten we loved. We get stretched musically.

The other thing that used to really piss me off was that these guys would start a song and be well into the first verse before the rest of us found the words in the songbook. There was the feeling that we could just damn well catch up, that THEY were the engine and WE, the singers, could just keep up as best we could. What we've found since they stopped coming was that it feels much more like a community to spend a little time so that all the guitars can get the chords down while the singers all get on the same page.

The upshot was that one of the guys from the old style (of the two couples that haven't been in months) started making "jokes" on the theme of "there are so many RULES here, and I don' want to violate any of them but it's hard because there are so many RULES." Meaning, I thought, that no, you can't simply hijack the group to sing YOUR usual songs you always sing with your buddy who sings HIS songs that HE always sings and the rest of us are there to follow as best we can.

He also likes to imply, somehow, that I'm the one keeping herd on everyone, though that may be a projection on my part. Well, I did ask the rather largish group of yakkers to pipe down when we were trying to get started. We do a wonderful potluck dinner before we sing at these affairs, and getting the group from eat-and-talk to pluck-and-sing has sometimes been a challenge. But that's also part of the new drift...some of the people there are really wanting to SING and people who talk at the top of their lungs over the singing are not appreciated. After all, there are other rooms in the house to have conversations. So it could be that after I told the peanut gallery to pipe down and got some pushback from one of them, I felt that old feeling of "oh dear, I'm too pushy, too loud, too too too..."

But I loved it when the guy started in about all the rules and being afraid of being punished for breaking the rules and chuckle chuckle I'm only just joking tone, that Judy bless her brilliant heart joked right back that there was a time-out chair over THERE and if he didn't behave he'd end up in it.

I do like the guy who used to always hijack the microphone. He had the widest repertoire of all our group until Carl came along. But I also love the new songs that come into the group with our new system.

Thinking about these guys who play guitar (and not counting Kris and Scott who are truly musical and have lived music as long as I've known them and well before no doubt), I'm reminded of something a shopkeeper told me in Eureka, Arkansas when I stopped there on my USA van trip. She described the guys who show up in her little hippie-dippie town on big motorcycles. "They came of age in the 60s, watched Easy Rider, and always wanted a hog. Now they've got gray ponytails, a paunch, and their hogs."

Many of our music night guys came of age in the 60s and really really just wanted to get stoned and play their guitars. They played along with the big name performers, they mastered their moves, and they fantasized about being musicians. But reality intervened and they became doctors and lawyers and department heads. These were the ones who didn't give up their music, even if they gave up being musicians. Since I, too, am an old hippie girl who loved to dance to that music, I'm just happy they're in my life and that, once a month or so, they come together to celebrate song.

For those of my faithful readers who can stand sub-titles, Central Station, a Brazilian movie, is excellent. Tugged at the heart-strings, I tell you!

I had a full day of Geek work, followed by Barbara's annual open house over at Handy Capable Network. Followed by an abbreviated visit to the Y...but better than not going, is what I told myself. After last night's for-EVER insomnia, I wasn't going to get up for yoga this morning, that was a given. And the Y made me feel ever so relieved after pigging out at Barbara's. They always have a nice little feast there. I got some SERIOUS networking in.

Have I talked about how much I enjoy networking? Mary Jane, in San Francisco, took pity on me for having finished all the "literature" I had with me, and so gave me a book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about three kinds of people who can influence what happens in the world. Connectors, mavens, and salesmen. The connectors are people who just love knowing people. The mavens are people who love knowing about stuff and sharing it with people they know. Salesmen are people who can persuade people, who can intuit...empathize to the point of being in subliminal sync with them. The book made me think about myself in those terms. I don't think I'm a salesman. If I were, I'd already have the money for the next movie-making class. There are elements of the connector in me. One thing that Gladwell says is that connectors specialize in WEAK relationships. People you know, people you maybe share interests with, people you admire for who they are or what they have done or are doing, but not your inner circle, not your FRIENDS. The French make a distinction between ami and copain... The ami is close, close. If she knocks on your door in the middle of the night, you are glad to see her. If she needs money, you lend it. You tell your ami what's going on in your soul and she tells you back. A copain... I usually translate this as buddy, though that feels like an awkward term. A copain is someone you do stuff with. He comes to dinner at your house. You meet for drinks. You discuss film, football, even politics. You do NOT get into the intricacies of your emotional and spiritual life with a copain. It's a weaker relationship.

The connector's relationships are even weaker, though as Gladwell points out, they are still real. We might figure these people as folks you'd send a Christmas card to, if you were into sending an extensive mailing out. We invite all these people to our Christmas open house. We invite our inner circle of friends, too, but also everybody we "know."

But the more I think about Gladwell's categories, I think I am more of a maven than a connector. I like networking not only because I basically like people but also because I have a lot to offer. I met a young woman at the gallery hop last Friday and she seemed like a perfect candidate for the Idea Exchange at the Center for Design Innovation that I attend some Tuesday afternoons. They love the collision of science and art/design at CDI, and she was talking about having been to college to study biology, but now that she's out, wanting to explore her artistic self. I loved telling her about CDI. I like knowing about technology for much the same kick...It's so fun to connect people and opportunities to celebrate life in some way. When I think of myself, I'm comfortable with the idea of being a maven. I'll go back to the text and see if there isn't more to explore there.

In the meantime, no decorations up yet. I need to sign the cards I addressed last weekend. We are now in the Holiday Party season. Nothing gets done for the next month. The Nepalis have a monthlong holiday season like this. We Westerners grump about it, and then here we are doing it.

The rain pours down, an all-night-long soaking cold winter rain. In a month, we'd wake up to sheer ice everywhere. JF goes into his seasonal affective disruption and refuses to go out. I am determined, however, so I drive through the rain to Winston where the contra dance whirls. It's live music, real bands playing this down-here music...a kind of blue-grass music. I read recently that this was dancing for people without a lot of time to practice. They needed a dance without complicated steps and figures. Even the square dances we sometimes do are pushing it for most of us. Forward and back. Do-si-do and swing your partner. That's what we are good at. I love Susie's Facebook page because she regularly posts contra dance photos and videos that remind me why I love it.

And that reminds me of something she said after the last music night. This is the way I love to celebrate life, she said.

I'm sitting in what has become the breakfast room. One of the funny things about being nomads who have stopped roaming is that we can't really stop. So we roam inside our house. We move our rooms around. We move our furniture from one room to the next. We shift whole areas of the house someplace else. This room was my office at the beginning. This is the room I painted such a bright shade of yellow that I couldn't see out the windows into the park. I was defying the Interior Design Czar I live with, who dictates ALL the colors and ALL the shapes and textures. Which is usually fine by me. But here, in this my first office in this house, I wanted to assert my own personality.

My next office, when Natasha graciously relinquished her bedroom after her first year of college, I did better with the color scheme. Jean-Francois, the Czar, was skeptical, but he had to admit I had a winner. Violet and dusty green and sky blue.

In a few days, we'll have to move out of the breakfast room and give it over to our main Christmas installation, the creche. Actually, I'd like to see it take over the living room, which has become somewhat pathetic since JF moved the easy chairs and recliners out to his new "movie watching" guest room. This is the room that was once Raf's bedroom, and then JF colonized it for his computer/music/mess and has now moved all that to his new room, the 34-ft trailer that sits in our back parking lot. Talk about colonization! It's his playroom, his retreat, his cave and his visual studio.

I'm feeling somewhat dispossessed in a way. Interior decorating is sort of like gardening for me. Perfectly compelling theories. Not such compelling ACTIVITIES. I do think my nomadic past is responsible for this lack of attention to the aesthetic environment I live in. Though, of course, maybe it's just living with an artistic tyrant. Loveable, of course...truly loveable, but not less tyrannical for it.

Work proceed apace. JF's brilliant photography has won me a web design job, I learned tonight. I'm so tickled. I love web design. I love databases, too, and this week I've finally just put my foot down and said...I will not be distracted. We must perform certain geek-type maintenance and that is that. I just love the puzzle, the play, the little thrill I get when I set up a meeting over the internet with a woman in Australia I have only met online...and she takes me to her computer and shows me stuff she's done there. And we talk over the internet. And my desktop refuses to get online so I quick set up my laptop and earlier her login didn't work and so she quick set up a new account. Raise your hands, now. WHO finds that kind of stuff fun?

It's midnight. Sigh. I really wanted to have a week of exercise. But what's a girl to do when she can't sleep? Not, I fear, get up at five. I am starting to feel Orpheus at work at last.

..and other delights of the week. ( Read more... )

I just read karlkunkel's account of Friday night in Greensboro, and it sounds just a bit more decorated and populated than our foray into the same kind of thing in the neighboring town. There are three towns here-- Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. JF loves to defend High Point as being wonderfully perverse, happily screwed up and not at all functional, which he finds delightful. That's my husband. Ever the contrarian. We went over to Winston to hang out with Cornelia and Matt, newish friends. He's a prof at UNGC's film dept, so I wanted to pick his brain a bit about whether Raf might find success applying there for the MFA. (That's Master of Fine Arts, for our non-US friend...a terminal degree that gives the possessor the credentials he/she needs to teach at the college/university level, unlike the Master of Arts, which only works for the lesser universities like Junior Colleges and Community Colleges.) It was a helpful talk and I'm feeling better and better about that being a good place for Raf.

Then we went off downtown where the galleries were open and a whole different crowd of folks were wandering up and down. I'm thinking there was probably more music in Greensboro. But Winston has the reputation for being more artsy, more DEE-sign, more sophisticated in the arts than Greensboro. I'm not a good judge of all that. I do remember that last year's "First Friday" in GSO was really festive feeling and quite well-attended.

Raf and I went to see his prof of art history to try to wrangle a non-failing grade for the semester. I got lulled into thinking Raf didn't really need to register with the Disability Service...I won't make that mistake again. Raf did pretty well at Piedmont Community College, the animation program he attended after his BA at High Point University. But it was all hands-on. This was all book-reading and slide-memorizing, and a whole lot of detail that Raf can do, but with far more effort and dedication. The Disability Office will approve certain modifications so that Raf can have more time on tests, write with a computer with spell-check, and at times deliver his short answers verbally instead of having to write them.

Reading deponti 's friends list, I came upon a long detailed tale about a fellow taking his car out and was reminded that I have a "new" car. My friend Kris, upon seeing it, said, "Oh, it's a gas-guzzler!" And so it is. But it is a comfortable car, a car with doors on both sides of the back seat, a car with enough room for sleeping on a camping weekend. A car that can haul stuff, and transport people and even pull JF's motorcycle when we get a trailer to put it on. Then we can go somewhere, leave the car at the campground, and take the bike for touring the back roads. Yes! It's a 1995 Chevy Suburban with 127,000 miles on it. It's in good shape, while my last one, the Ford Aerostar, bless its turquoise heart, was really falling apart. It was vying for the POS award. That's Piece of Sh**. What finally convinced me was that it was leaking inside when it rained. I need a place to sleep that's warm and snug and NOT likely to leak, otherwise I'd camp in a tent like I did for years and years.

Now that I'm rattling on, I can think of four or five more topics of interest. Guess I'll have to get in here more often. I had the first full exercise week this week-- four days of exercise before work: two yoga and two weight-lifting. All I need is walking tomorrow and I'll be really up to speed on that front. I'm signed up for a shot of "Get Control of Your Food Addiction" starting in January, when I'm sure I'll be a full tub of lard. I'm at my all-time high and feeling really resistant to dieting because as soon as I lose, I turn around and start putting it back on at the speed of light. Or should I say, the speed of microwave? I will NOT bore you all to tears about this, except to say I'm off to a round of group therapy about it.

Natasha is coming home in just over two weeks. Suzan is hinting she might come for Christmas. Oh joy! What else? My life brimmeth over. I just wish I could get the videos to upload. Dreamforce was just over the top and I don't want to upload the little segments, I want to have a whole video.

Life, the Universe and Everything. That's my story.

Whither movie-making?
I spent two hours this morning with my partner in the Movie-Making Class from the American Friends Service Committee, Lori. We're brainstorming where we might find the money for the next class, how we might structure it differently. She thinks that four hours every Saturday for 12 weeks is too long and too hard to get people able to commit to that.

Whither son Raphael?
Yesterday, Raf and I went to talk to the director of the master's program in film at UNCG. I'm of two or three minds about this application process. Could he get into the animation program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh? Or is it Durham? Down that way, anyway. An hour and a half away. He almost got in last year. But if he got in, could he negotiate all the administrative rigamarole necessary? Not sure.

But would the film program be a kind of sidetrack for him, since he's primarily interested in animation? Or could it actually enhance his resume in ways that would eventually be beneficial? And all the social interaction...oh goodness...it's just a minefield. And yet, and yet...maybe it would really help him with his social skills. Whew...we'll see.

Pam should be here any minute, so I'm trying to get my general news into this short report. San Francisco was MAH-velous! It's a beautiful city, as of course we all know, and while I saw little of it during the conference, I did get a wonderful tour from my Servas hostess, Mary Jane.

For those of you who don't know what Servas is, do check it out here. This is a hospitality organization that promotes world peace, one friendship at a time. There's a very active group of Friendship Force in Greensboro, which is roughly the same thing, in that they believe that it's through people-to-people encounters, patiently working the exponential effect of personal encounters, that people stop hating and start seeing The Other through the eyes of acceptance. Naive? Maybe, but it's also just a great way to travel cheaply. Mary Jane interviewed me to become an interviewer for the organization, so if any of my friends want to travel with Servas in the future, soon I should be able to be your interviewer.

The conference is best experienced through the short video I did, but I'm running into technical difficulties getting it on the internet. I may have to go the YouTube route, since my Vimeo account only accepts videos of something like 10MB and my first one is bigger than that already, and there are two more to go. I want to put them all together because they make a sort of summary statement of the experience...from my entrance into the youth hostel room I shared with three other "girls," to the view of San Francisco from Mary Jane's back deck (spectacular). I think Raf is going to put that all together for me.

...Back from a 5.5 mile hike with Pam. Feeling quite righteous.

I didn't do photographs while Mary Jane was taking me on her Famous Tour by automobile. I was really still suffering from the cold that brought me down on Friday night. I had planned to use Friday afternoon to zip around the city on cable cars and just feel like a tourist, but when I got out of the conference, it was raining. I had my umbrella with me, but it wasn't very conducive weather to running around, not with a sore throat and all that "You've Got a Cold" feeling. So I picked up a book at the hostel, curled up in bed and even slept through what might have been my supper (a can of beef stew I'd bought the night before.) So the next morning, I was still pretty much under the influence of the cold. I even called Mary Jane to let her off the hook, if she wanted to beg off, but she was game, so at 7:15 on the dot, she was there to pick me up so we could make the warehouse sale she had planned to attend. We spent the rest of the day driving around SF while she pointed out the sights and gave me snippets of history.

As for the conference, I spent one afternoon going from booth to booth in the expo, collecting swag which I took back to the youth hostel and gave away. Can you imagine that it's hard to give stuff away to a bunch of youthful travelers, who look at every item and judge whether the extra weight will be worth it or not. But I did manage to give a bunch of stuff away, and that was lots of fun. That also got me talking to the people in the booths...The sessions were okay, but really, either too elementary for me or pretty much geared to businesses, not nonprofits. The nonprofit track was woeful. There were a thousand of us there, and they had a total of nine sessions out of something like 300. And there was really a lot of fluff, I think.

Since I am not a "developer," that is, I don't plan to code, the special programmer area held no fascination. I learned too late that I could get special one-on-one tutoring for free from the Salesforce staffers. I got one good session of that in, but that would not have been worth the price of admission, even if I'd been able to do more. The thing about Salesforce is that everything you need to learn is online. Sometimes, you have to search for it. Sometimes, you have to take the TIME to watch the video tutorials, but it's all there. What is so often lacking is a perception that I have time to do this stuff, and also the self-motivation it takes to basically give yourself the course. But the courses are ludicrously expensive when you pay someone to teach them to you, especially when the information is all there, for free, for someone with the chutzpah to search and learn. So...unless my video next year wins the grand prize (which includes a backstage pass to meet the band ...which wasn't a band I'd ever heard of, so I didn't care about that part this year anyway...Black Crowes anyone?), I think I'll stay home. I'd much rather win an all-expense paid trip to the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network conference. Which, instead of 18,000 people attracts only 3 or 4,000 and everyone is all wowed at that.

Still, I think you either develop friendships across the country and the convention is the chance to hang out with your friends...or you stop going to conferences. The value...the real learning value...diminishes to zero at some point. And I certainly feel myself to be a part of the nonprofit techie group a whole lot more than the Salesforce group. The nonprofit party on Thursday was not within walking distance, and my throat had already started to hurt...and I hadn't connected solidly with any of the nonprofit crowd...so I went back to the hostel, made myself supper and played with my new Salesforce skills.

Voila...the trip to San Francisco. Spent a total of $204 on the ground...$112 for four days at the youth hostel, the rest several non-conference meals (the conference included five or six meals and probably another if I'd managed to get to the party). That is for EVERYTHING except the warehouse sale with Mary Jane, where I went nuts buying Christmas presents ($61 for probably a couple of hundred worth of paper goods). That's $33 a day. The airfare was $382 round trip. So the entire week in San Francisco cost me $647.85. Just call me travelertrish.

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.

---

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