Why is it that vendors don't understand me? I'm an executive in a sizable yet still growing tech oriented company. Because we run lean, I'm a jack-of-all-trades. I'm always busy analyzing, directing, fixing and planning. I have over 1300 emails in my inbox, and every one has been read but I'm keeping it for some specific reason. Only a few are more than a few months old. I periodically cycle through and make sure those projects are complete before deleting the mail. That's not counting the 65 other folders I have for long term storage.

I hate interruptions. Constantly shifting gears causes productivity loss. I don't often take phone calls. The phone system is programmed to route my wife's incoming calls directly to my desk, and my assistant handles the rest for me. Even while writing this my cellphone actually rang and showed "Private Number" on the display. I'm certainly not answering that. They didn't even bother leaving a voicemail.

For fiscal 2010, Palm said its revenue will be “well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion."

“Palm webOS is recognized as a groundbreaking platform that enables one of the best smartphone experiences available today, and our work to evolve the platform and bring industry-leading technology to market continues. However, "....

And that's a big "However." "driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated,” When you consider the over-saturated smartphone market, not only is Palm lost in the dust, but a lot of people still consider Palm to have inferior products. There's also something lacking in their marketing. I see the Palm Pre commercials all the time, but I've never even been tempted to see what exactly a Pre is all about. When I see an Android or HTC commercial it makes me think "Wow, wish I had one of those!"

When you consider the webOS 1.4 upgrade that everyone is holding out for on the Palm smartphones will finally support video, you have to wonder... where has Palm been the last 4 years?

I'm sure cellphones have a long R&D cycle. The problem is, if you aren't on the bleeding edge, consumers don't want your smartphone.

Still, I'd own a Palm long before I'd get something with Windows on it! I'll just keep my Blackberry Tour, thanks.

My wife picked up the BookArmor High Impact Travel Case for me for my birthday. I'm flying to Atlanta next week and I was looking for something more durable than the neoprene case I'm currently using.

It was $38 from Amazon.

The first thing I noticed was it weighs a ton. Well, 1 pound to be exact. It's basically constructed of two metal plates, a heavy duty zipper and some durable canvas to tie it all together. It reminds me of the cases a lot of people carry their Bible to church in every Sunday, only heavy.

It comes with an alcohol pad and two "Snap-lock" strips that you stick to the back of the nook (or Kindle.) The warning on the instructions states "do not allow regular velcro to come in contact with the snap-lock strips. Regular velcro is impossible to remove from the snap-lock strips." Considering how strong the snap-lock strips tried to grab my bed's comforter, I'm not surprised.

Due to the curve in the back of the nook, I found it difficult to initially snap it down onto the cover after the strips were applied. I really felt to get the leverage I needed I should push in the middle of the screen, which obviously is not an option. Once it starts to snap in though, it's easy to complete.

As an owner of a new nook e-book reader, I've been watching the related boards somewhat.

Occasionally the issue comes up of "if I buy a book from Amazon can I read it on my nook?"

Unfortunately with rare exception the answer is not really.

There are technical ways to make it happen. You'd think it would be fine to download a book from Amazon, run a conversion and upload it to your nook reader. Technically you can. It's also a violation of the letter of the DMCA though more than likely it will be unenforceable in that context if it ever made it to court.

The simple act of having the decryption program on your computer to allow this is a violation of the DMCA. Helping someone find a copy of it is considered "distributing circumvention tools." First time offenders may be subject to a $500,000 fine, imprisoned for five years, or both. That's the criminal penalties. Civil penalties may also be incurred. All because someone wanted to read a book that they bought.

Let me explain a bit about this graph.

First, our firewall has already chopped entire countries off from being able to access our mail server. Since I don't do business outside of the US, several major spam countries like China and Korea have been denied at the firewall. This reduced our inbound spam around 50%.

Next, I've implemented Greylisting. Greylisting stops about 98% of all of the spam that would otherwise hit our user's mailboxes.

The "Rejected" item in the above graph is partly a result of this greylisting. I can safely state that 99.99% of those messages are spam. With that in mind, you can see that we are blocking a huge quantity of spam at the server. This is spam that is never even accepted. The remaining rejected are triggered by one of the various Internet spammer blacklists that we use.

The "Spam" entry in the graph is the result of Spamassassin flagging probable spam.

Despite the entry for viruses, we aren't actually doing server side virus prevention as we're 99% Linux desktops.

To compare, only around 61,000 email messages were delivered by our server after filtering. That includes all outbound mail as well.

Chris Thorman over at Software Advice has posted a survey about tablet use in the Healthcare industry.

It will be interesting to see the results of it.

I just made a post on Nookboards about the future of bookstores and it got me thinking. That's generally a dangerous thing, but it sparks the imagination sometimes.

There are two types of shopping that people partake in. First and most common are the necessities of life. The trips to the grocery store or Wal-Mart to get food, basic items, pet supplies and for many people clothes.

Then there are the special purchases. The "Best Buy" purchases, mall boutique shopping, sporting goods purchases and even furniture would fall here.

With the special purchases category, a lot of that shopping has been moving to the Internet. For people like me who live two hours from a mall, there is even more of a probability that I'll buy online.

Unfortunately buying online requires a good imagination. Shopping in stores helps to increase the emotional bond with a product before you make a buying decision, but the cost of providing these gigantic big-box stores at premium price per square foot, plus housing all of the inventory is very high. Retail stores have a hard time staying in business, particularly in a recession.

The Linux Foundation has announced a new job posting website dedicated for Linux. That's right - people get paid to work with Linux.

But, why do companies do this to themselves? The listings include things such as one for a "Director of Technology" that states "you should be comfortable with OO Perl, databases (especially MySQL), ORMs such as DBIx, etc." or one requiring "Strong Scripting skills, Perl or Korn Shell."

Others state you must be conversant in "ASP.NET", "MS SQL 2005 / 2008" and "Active Directory" though I'm unsure why anyone wanting to hire a Linux person, where the best ones traditionally will be very anti-Microsoft, would need those skills. Perhaps the poster missed the fact that the domain name ended with "linux.com"

The biggest thing that jumps out at me is how many of the job postings required expertise in obscure or outdated technologies. I'm sorry, but I lump Perl in with that bunch. There has to become a point at which it's easier to build from scratch a version 2.0 of whatever it is that you do, than to try to continue to maintain 150,000 lines of Perl code even when integrated with DBIx. Languages like PHP and even Python allow developers to write cleaner, easier to read code in half the time.

I've used tripwire for years, but since I rarely configure it I always have to read back up on some of the tutorials I have on how to properly set it up.

One thing that almost every tutorial misses is how to actually make Tripwire email reports when run. They all cover where to put the email addresses and settings, but most skip how to actually trigger that to happen. You must use a specific command line argument to cause Tripwire to send the actual report.

So, here it is for future reference:

tripwire --check --email-report

I've recently launched a wallpaper and screensaver sharing site for the nook called Nook-Look.com.

It allows you to upload, download, rate and comment on images to enhance your nook's overall appeal.

Wallpaper groups can even be uploaded as a zip file, and it will automatically generate animated thumbnails from the uploaded zip file.

I'm still working on it in spare time, so expect the features and design to continue to evolve.

If you have a nook (or even one of those Amazon thingies) check it out!

www.Nook-Look.com