...and the Survey Says:

There's nothing like spending a couple of days crawling around on roofs and in attics (in June, and in Florida) to make you appreciate the concept of "inside". Add the "excessive rainfall" (a genuine National Weather Service term) that we've been getting for several days, and it's a good time to stay inside and get some work done. You'll see the reason for the outside work in a few weeks--it's for a review of fixed-point wireless networking that will be coming up in Network Computing. It involves testing out in the real world, and down here the real world includes high humidity, warm temperatures, and a fair number of insects, reptiles, and very swampy walking tours. We've just deployed the first of the free-space optical systems, and I get to spend a little time inside, at my desk, while waiting for some more stuff to arrive.

While I've been at my desk, I've seen all sorts of press releases, including two that caught my interest because they talk about surveys conducted on security-related topics. One came from The Conference Board, a business group that's usually in the news with their survey of consumer or purchasing agent confidence, and one came out of a gathering of CSOs in Chicago. Both point to the same conclusion from different angles: Our technology fixes for security are working pretty well, but the problems for which we don't have a good technology solution are cause for ever greater concern.

I've built a podcast on the two surveys. You can find it here and, as always, let me know what you think. There are some more great interview-based podcasts coming up, and some infrastructure changes that should let you subscribe to the podcast and have it arrive automatically. Cool stuff--just what we need as we enter the hot days.