Break out the ice skates, we’re playing pond hockey in hell.  My good friend and colleague Winn Schwartau has switched to Mac.  This is the same Winn Schwartau that has been ribbing me for two years about my switch to Mac.  The same Winn, who when presenting together at a conference would look at my Mac and say "I thought you were bringing a computer!".

He finally got religion and is completely frustrated with WinTel and made the switch seamlessly.  He’d like to claim that he came to the conclusion on his own, but we both know that it was a year of watching Betty operate effeciently on her Mac that brought him around.

He is running a 50 part series on his switch called Mad as Hell.  Good luck Winn….you won’t need it!

CNN ran a 7 minute segment on TRC’s Mirror Image training program.  Overall, I thought the piece was very well done, so congratulations to all involved and to the CNN crew for producing such a great piece from a week’s worth of footage.  I’ve posted the transcript below, but to do it justice, you really have to see it.

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The AMBER alert system has been proven to be very valuable in the early stages of child abduction.  Now, cell phone owners can subscribe to receive wireless AMBER alerts for the zip codes they live and work in.  Messages are sent directly to your cell phone via SMS in real-time.  Most carriers are waiving the incoming message fee, which means there really is no reason not to SUBSCRIBE

According to the recently released report:

"The Homeland Security Department’s $337 million network for sharing top-secret data does not meet the needs of its users, according to an April report by the department’s Acting Inspector General, Richard L. Skinner. Department officials developing the Homeland Secure Data Network hurried to finish the job in nine months because they believed they would be cut off from the Pentagon’s secure data network by a 31 December 2004 deadline. “The methods for collecting and documenting the functional and security needs of users during the requirements definition phase for the new network did not provide adequate assurance that user needs at the 600 sites will be met.” The 600 sites are DHS intelligence-gathering units and federal, state, and local agencies involved in homeland security. The inspector general recommends that all system users be involved in defining its requirements in the future and that completion of all testing be verified before deployment."  (Full Report)

We (TRC) wrote a paper articulating an approach for evaluating user requirements in this area back in the year 2000.  There have been many advocates of applying the approach utilized for this report , to establish a capability requirements defintion that is driven from the user perspective.  Unfortunately, it appears the requirements definition is being left to the contractors building the network and not the actual users.

It is scenes like the one above at our nation’s capital today that re-inforce just how effective terrorism is.