Life, the Universe, and where the hell is Dana?

Lack of posts. Yuk.

I wish I had a good reason. I don't... past being swamped. I am touring like crazy talking about information security, (mostly about strong authentication these days), presenting to crowds varying from small user groups to large conference halls. Not to mention the fact that I spent over a week with Microsoft before and during the MVP Summit last week. That was an awesom trip, which I can't really talk about due to the NDA nature of the event. There is a scary picture on Flickr of a group of us wearing our Team Canada jerseys at Bill Gates keynote. (You can even see me in there if you know what I look like). That's right... a sea of red and white. How patriotic.

And to boot, I have been balls to the wall working on some identity and access management code at work. Let's see, I have written a two-factor authentication server using web services and written a web service proxying layer to allow it to be used in things like Windows logon agents, RADIUS servers and web servers. All exposed via COM and web services to make it easy to place anywhere on the Windows stack. And did I mention the backend has the capability to hook in CardSpace? Some of this has been integrated into LOB apps already, including a neat deployment to a company we all know and love (which I can't talk about yet). Ya.... I've been busy.

Been going crazy wanting to get some thoughts on my blog, and hope to do that in the coming weeks. I just have a few conferences (like Microsoft's Small Business Summit) that I need to put behind me first. Speaking at these funtions are always fun... but require quite a bit of effort to pull off.

So, yes, I am alive. Just busy doing the security ambassadorial role and building the software to protect you guys from the baddies out there. ;-)

If you are interested, here are some upcoming events I am presenting at:

• March 22nd, 2007 in Redmond, WA: Microsoft Small Business Summit - Presenting on my 5 Rules of Regulatory Compliance for small business
  
• April 28th, 2007 in Bellingham WA: Linuxfest NorthWest - Presenting on adding strong authentication to Unix environments
  
• May 3-5, 2007 in Islandia, NY: SMB Nation East - Presenting on strong authentication in Windows environments
  
• May 29-June 2nd in New Orleans: Small Business IT Disaster Planning for Risks and Recovery Conference - Presenting on the role of security and risk management during IT disaster planning.
  

Yep.... going to be a busy few months. In between there, I have a new version of our strong authentication software at work to be released, as well as some new goodies. Time to get the Dew intraveniously I think.