Security Post

It’s been a while since my last post, so here we go…

My first thoughts were to go to Washington DC, but looking at the prices and possibilities I decided not to go. Off course it is the political capital of the USA, but I need some thing extra other then that to spend that kind of money on a trip.

In Atlanta, I enjoyed the skyline from the Westin Plaza from the 59th floor… incredible! Unfortunately the weather wasn’t that good all the time, so I was almost shocked to see a dark gray wall when I woke up the second morning. And after a short moment I noticed it was just the clouds. It is so weird, because it is just like you don’t have any windows in your room. During the weekend I paid a visit to “The new world of Coca Cola”, and the Georgia aquarium. The two biggest attractions here in Atlanta. It was nice to see what impact such a commercial business can have, and the different ways in which they managed to accomplish that. You can see some pictures in the gallery.

Later on in the week I joined a training session from the Franklin Covey Institute. Most people know them from Stephen R. Covey’s book the “7 habits of highly effective people”, a bestseller in the business category books. The Franklin Covey Institute has been giving the 7 habits training throughout the whole world for years.
Just over a year ago, the follow up “The 8th Habit” was presented. And less then 4 months ago, the Franklin Covey Institute introduced a training based on this book: “Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Teams, Great Results”. During this training you work through many tools and tips to improve your leadership skills, which are based on the 4 leadership imperatives: Inspire trust, Clarify Purpose, Align Systems and Unleash Talent. So it is not a spiritual training as many of you may think, but there are some great techniques, frameworks and ideas to lift your leadership skills. I can recommend this training to everyone who is familiar with the 7 Habits, or who has a leadership position. I am sure this training has a pretty high Net Promoter Score (NPS ). For those who do not know what this is, you should take your time and read “The Ultimate Question” by Fred Reichheld. And I especially want to thank Ruth Williams for some greatly inspiring days.

Walking through Atlanta (downtown) was nice, the people are great, the parks are great, the streets are clean. The only downside is, everything closes early. No Starbucks coffee after dinner because they close at 7pm, almost no nightlife, and so on.

Last Friday I flew to Chicago with Delta Airlines, I’ll give you an update on that shortly.

Today is my last day in Miami. I ended my trip in Miami at the Seaview Hotel in Bal Harbour, a great hotel for a great price. The only downside is, it is very quiet here now. No Starbucks, not many dining options, just very expensive shops across the street in the Bal Harbour shopping center. The hotel is nearly empty, the season here starts in November, then the hotel will be filled with shareholders and guests.

I met some interesting people here, there are two dutch girls working here for a school training period. And although they had to work, I had the change to talk to them a bit afterwards. So we exchanged stories about all the differences we noticed between the USA and The Netherlands… the food, the working environment, the people, and much more. So it was very nice to compare my thoughts with those of other dutch people here.
I also had a change to talk to several other people, like business owners and a retired US ambassador for the European Union. Some great stories about an American couple traveling around Europe, and see those differences from a different perspective.

If I had the money and the time to stay here the rest of November, I think I could have met some interesting people with amazing stories. Mainly the shareholders have some great stories to tell. But there is still much to see around the country. So I am leaving this afternoon to Atlanta (GA), to stay in the Westin Plaza Hotel for a couple of nights.

Hopefully the image will update along the flight. If not, you can track my flight here.

After a long flight from San Francisco airport I arrived in Miami. The weather here in the States changed almost everywhere the last few days, with mostly temperatures around 50 to 60 degrees (10-15 degrees Celsius). But here in Miami, it is still warm (75-85/F - 23-30/C), although there is a very strong wind and a few showers.

Here in Miami everything is about seeing and being seen. Everywhere on the streets are expensive cars, but on the other side there are Lamborghini’s parked all over the place with big signs in them: “Rent me!”. But even if you don’t own one, driving one isn’t cheap either I think. I thought I had a pretty expensive hotel, but all the others around my hotel cost between $400 and $800 a night for the smallest room.

Fortunately food isn’t too expensive here, you can have dinner in one of the small restaurants on Lincoln Road for about $25 - $35 including a drink and tip. And finally not too many Sushi restaurants, but variety all over. The dishes are so filled up, I could eat for three nights from one plate. But I don’t have a microwave of refrigerator in my room, so no doggy bag for me.

Miami is one of the cities where you can clearly see what matters most to almost all of the people here… money. But on the other hand, it is also a big trouble maker here in Miami. Many people have to sell their house for low prices, or even worse they get evicted because they can not make the payments. Because of this, real estate is booming business over here.

The people I talk to, tell me starting businesses here in Miami have a pretty high success rate.
But I can’t find any hard evidence on this yet, because all the numbers are dominated by Florida’s rich import and export businesses. Many billions of dollars pass through Florida every year. Although Miami doesn’t seem to be a real business city (asides the importing and exporting) there are a few big companies with their roots in Miami, the most internationally known is Burger King.
Others are more nationally known.

After many miles walking down the streets and the beach, I decided I am going to take a look around Washington next. But after some advice from Gilles and my mother not to wander outside the center of Washington DC, I took a look at some hotels near the Whitehouse. Shockingly enough, room prices are quite high. So I think I’ll switch to a cheaper hotel here in Miami first, and do some more detailed planning before I go there.

I’m am also planning to do an ISO27001 bootcamp like training. Orange Parachute gives several training courses, like “ISO 27001 Lead Auditor”, “ISO 27001 Implementer”, and “HISP” (Holistic Information Security Practitioner) training. This will likely be around the first two weeks of November at the main office in Minneapolis. And a second thing I am thinking about is the ISSMP review seminar. Most of you guys know I got my CISSP certification after a grueling six hours exam a few months back, and the ISSMP is the Management concentration for this certification. Fortunately this exam will only take 3 hours. There is also an exam scheduled for this certification the day I go back to The Netherlands.

Being on the road this much is catching up with me now. Calling companies, searching the internet for places to sleep and eat, planning my trip, keeping in touch with loved ones at home, it is quite some work. I didn’t even take the time to read the morning newspaper during the first month, and nether did I manage to read more than 30 pages in my first book. So I decided to slow things down a bit, worry less about all the e-mails, hotel bookings and things like that. It took some time to think about all those things, and put them in the right order like Stephen Covey explains in his book “7 habits of highly effective people”… what is important, and what is urgent.

So now I read the newspaper every morning, and keep up with the current news topics around here. I even managed to read another 30 pages in my book “Strategy Safari”, a book I also bought for my brother last Christmas… good stuff! Ok, 30 pages still isn’t much, but at least I’m not rushing it and stay relaxed. I’ll read some more the next few days.

During these day’s I also took the time to think about some conversations I had a few weeks back with some people at the MISTI convention. Mainly the ones with the people from Orange Parachute and Christopher Grillo. Especially Christopher managed to let me look at the managerial and personal skills from a different perspective. So I have read some interesting papers he sent me, and tried to convert them into my own views to get a better perspective of my own current status. The next step is to put these on paper and refine them.

Next to all this, I tried to get in touch with some other companies. Unfortunately they are hard to get in touch with. If you are a client, you can talk to the sales people (that’s not me), if you are interested in a job, please have a look on the website (but they don’t respond because I’m from The Netherlands), and if you are at the door, the guard doesn’t know who to call because I don’t have a appointment. So I also posted my resume on some websites like Monsterboard and Yahoo, but so far without any worthy reply.
And Orange Parachute has yet to reply on the first interview we had almost 3 weeks ago, which took almost 2 weeks to set up. So I’ll have to be patient some more

For those who allready know I am in Miami… I’ll try to write another update tonight or tomorrow. For those who didn’t know… I am in Miami South Beach

After the weekend, I started my return trip to San Francisco. This time I started driving around lunchtime, so the trip was less boring. Driving during the night doesn’t give you things to look at, and there aren’t very many cars on the road. However this gave me the opportunity to look around, although traffic near the larger cities was a lot busier.

Here on USA television, there are some commercials about the oh so happy Californian cows. Well… I passed a Californian cow farm half way back. I noticed the bad smell 2 miles before I drove by the farm. The farm land for the cows was about one square mile, and it was packed with cows like cigarettes in a pack. The smell was real bad, and there was no grass anywhere. So we are doing real good back in the Netherlands. At least the pictures in our cow commercials are a bit more honest…are they ?

Oh well, after a long drive I finally arrived at the Hotel in San Jose. Because parking is expensive in San Francisco, and the rental office was closed at that time, I decided to stop in San Jose the night before. That night I had some great Italian pasta on Silicone Valley’s well known University Avenue. I had a great night sleep at the Crown Plaza in San Jose, and all that for a great price. So if you ever need to stay in San Jose, go there!

The weekend started off with a good evening with Patrick (one of the people behind Orange Parachute), and some of his friends at his place in Newport Beach. Newport Beach is quite different from downtown LA, not as busy, less traffic and great views of the Ocean. After a tour around the new house, we went over to a restaurant and had great sushi, sake and great conversations.

Today I made a tour around Santa Monica, Hollywood, Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles. As you can see in the gallery, we went by many big houses. Many of them owned by celebrities. We went by the walk of fame, the Rock walk, and some more stuff. We ended our tour with a great view on the famous Hollywood sign, and the Universal Studio’s.

Yesterday, I took my rental car and drove around Silicon Valley. This virtual valley stretches out over several cities and villages, so traveling around to the different companies can take hours. You can see some pictures of several big companies I drove by in the new gallery.

Next to driving by those companies, I spent some time at the NASA AMES Research center. This was a nice addition to my visit to several NASA sites some years ago in Florida. Some nice satellite, vehicle and airplane models were displayed all around.

I also paid a visit to the Intel Museum in the Intel building. I learned some extra things about making chips and their history. This is one of the examples where you can clearly see computers help building computers.

Weirdstuff warehouse is like my garage, only they make money with it. This store is huge! All packed up with old computer stuff. PC’s, servers, electronic parts, cables, cases, racks, switches and much much more. Walking through this store made me think about the first few years I spent my time on hardware. All the parts and things I had trouble finding in The Netherlands in those days, are available in big quantities in here, and they just cost a few dollars.

Fry’s warehouse is the biggest electronics store I’ve seen so far. For those in The Netherlands, it is as big as the Bijenkorf. The only difference is it’s just electronics. Al kinds of things for your car, PC, at home and more. The Mediamarkt is childsplay compared to this.

I ended my day at the San Jose Tech Museum where I visited the Bodyworlds 2 exposition. It was quite impressive to walk around real human bodies. It was clearly art, but if you take a close look at some details it can creep you out. Some of those things made me think of Gunther von Hagens like he could be a good friend of Hannibal Lecter.  He put a lot of work in to these expositions, and all the educational things around it.
Unfortunately I was not allowed to take any pictures, so if you want to see more of this, you will have to go yourself, or buy a DVD on the BodyWorlds website.

After the BodyWorlds exposition, I drove all the way down to Los Angeles. It was quite a long drive (6 hours), and it was quite boring in the dark. But I arrived around midnight to get a good night of sleep at the Westin Bonaventure hotel. The first 10 floors are just shops, restaurants, offices and things like the swimming pool and a fitness center.

After some really bad muscle and stomach aches and a relapse last evening, I feel better today. I had some breakfast and tea this morning, and I still feel fine. So hopefully I will be able to go out, and have a look around some of the bigger companies around this area.

Maybe I had some bad sushi yesterday as Sushitomi here in Mountain View, or maybe it’s the really bad smell in my room… But fluids are poring out of every body cavity I have.

So today I will stay in my bed and get some sleep (after I have moved to a different room).

Update: I have a different room now, smells much better!

Thank you all for your (Skype) calls, e-mails, SMS’es and other congratulation’s for my birthday. Today I turned 28, and my day started with a Dutch Happy birthday song from my little nieces and my sister on a Skype video call. It was a bit strange with the 9 hour time difference, but it made me feel like it was my birthday way before it really was.

This morning I expected a call from Orange Parachute’s HR department for a phone interview, but unfortunately they didn’t call. So I’ll have to pursue this on Monday. After replying on all your calls and messages, I jumped on the cablecar towards Fisherman’s Wharf to start my cruise to Alcatraz.

Walking around on Alcatraz and hearing all those stories in the audiotour, gave me the creeps. You can see the scars on the walls and floors, each of them have a story behind them. Just looking at them brings you back in time, and some of them give you goosebumps!

After this I took a look in the Bay side Aquarium, walking around all those cool fish! Because there was going to be a party at the aquarium, I had to leave early. So I went up to Pier 39 again, enjoyed the view and enjoyed a bit of reading. I ended the evening by having a nice Red Snapper filet at an Italian restaurant on the Pier.

Have a look in the Gallery to see more pictures, I finally managed to get most of them up there.