Reconnecting with PhoneBoy of old
I’ve apparently been a little too busy to update my blog lately.
One thing I did on my recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area was attend the Check Point User Group meeting that was going on. When Barry announced the meeting on my mailing list, I was surprised that it lined up with my calendar. I decided to go for the heck of it to see what it was about. I ended up giving away door prizes, including a couple of autographed copies of my book.
One surprise I had was at this meeting, I met an old friend of mine from my days at Qualix. After a painful several years where his business shifted hands a couple of times, he’s essentially started from scratch and is running an outfit called Sharper Technology. The business is doing well.
The other surprise was a territory manager at Check Point whom talked with me a couple of hours after the meeting had adjourned for the evening. Let’s just say she helped encourage me to speak at CPUG next month, which worked out mostly because I was already planning on being in the area at that time anyway. She thinks that it will really help jumpstart the group to have someone with “Rock Star” qualities in the FireWall-1 community come and speak.
Last weekend, I also had a conversation with Barry, the guy who is starting CPUG. He wants to do what I did with phoneboy.com and FireWall-1 stuff, but also branch out into an actual meatpsace user group and do some other things I didn’t want to do, or at least didn’t have the time to do. I’m trying to figure out how to assist CPUG in promoting the Check Point community as a whole, something I believe in, even though I have other distractions these days.
