A Vendor sponsored breakfast!  Much better than
"Continental Breakfasts" offered by the convention,
which you all know are just coffee and a pastry.
I had eggs, sausage, bacon, fruit, OJ, as well
as coffee & muffin.  If ever a vendor offers
breakfast, take it!

What is it with HP people?  For the second time
this convention I want to say something I think is
important  to someone, some HP geek gets there first and
wastes flippin' time talking about HP internal politics,
techno-babble, or golf for a half hour or more.  If
the HP guy is talking to a vendor, of course the
vendor knows his "Channel Partnership" must be more
important than talking to the rabble of customers.
Ahhh, such is my station in life.

I filled my bag with goodies, not counting candy,
(which I ate) I have a new T-shirt wardrobe, some squeeze
toys, half a dozen letter openers, business card holders,
a dozen pens, 5 demo CDs, 2 can openers, 3 cloth tote
bags, 2 paper ones, 1 golf ball, a telephone cord
anti-twist device, 1 calendar for the year 2000, 2 mouse
pads, a paper holder from Robelle, useful for transcribing,
a blinking light that attaches to a piece of paper,
(Adager had no cubes sorry to say, but a company called
Bay had some), a flashlight, one lei, one notepad,
a 30 minute phone card, and a rubber duck.

Oh yes, the calendar is Y2K compliant.

The best T-shirt offered at the convention was the
plain black one with the simple "got HP?" emblazoned
on the front.  (For those out of country, that's a
play on the American Milk industry advertisement that
say's "got Milk?")

Robelle had a book out entitled "The SMUG VII
Pocket Encyclopedia of the Seldom Met Users
Group" compiled by Bob Green.  It is similar in
nature to the old VESoft colored books, but
only the one section has to do with MPE,
the rest has Unix, PA-RISC in general, MS-Window,
Internet Stuff and Software Quality.  This book
is a "must have".

The HP3000 Roundtable was informative and sometimes
entertaining.  One phrase that brought out a round
of laughter was the question most frequently asked:
"When is the HP3000 going to die?"  Other items of
interest:

- HP doesn't want resellers that do not add value.
(That begs the question, "What if you only want a
plainwrap HP3000?")

- HP will be "flushing out the channel."  I suppose
that means they're targeting more vendors to be cut
off.

- Sometimes hardware that has reached it's "end of
support" limit can be extended if HP has a surplus
of spare parts.

- Messages generated by the JINETD job in $STDLIST
are not documented anywhere.  Someone quipped: "It
was a feature to make it more like UNIX."

- There was a question about HP3000 marketing budget.
I noted that they said their marketing budget has
increased.  Also of note, the HP3000 is being presented
as a single purpose solution as opposed to a multipurpose
one like in the old days.

- There was a complaint about solution providers not
HAVING HP3000 solutions as opposed to Unix or NT
solutions.  The HP people said they had appointed
a U.S. HP3000 Marketing Manager which they haven't
done in a long time.  I didn't catch the name.

- A question was asked about bundling PERL in FOS,
shareware, freeware or whatever.  I forget what the
whole answer was, but I was disappointed to hear
that there are no plans to support PERL when it
comes to accessing Image and other HP3000 specific
files.

I PERSONALLY THINK THIS IS A GRAVE ERROR ON HP'S PART.

- Some vendors wouldn't support ports to C++ on the
HP3000 because it didn't compile the same as on
other platforms.  (I didn't understand the answer.)

- Not a lot of demand for CORBA.  Although credit was
given that the panel knew what CORBA was this time, as
opposed to when the question was asked 4 years ago,
when the panel only responded with silence.  Someone
said "That's because there are a lot more women on the
panel now."  Another round of laughter.  It was also said
that CORBA solves problems that are not evident on the
HP3000.

- ORACLE 8?  Is it appropriate?  Depends on the
solution providers.