HP Sauce
A very tired, jetlagged and confused Dave sacrifices his gambling time to bring the funnies from the recent HP conference
Dagenham may be known as Vice Village, but I've traded up this week, dear reader, and am writing from the full-blown Sin City that is Las Vegas, having taken a trip to the HP partner beanfeast.
But I'm finding it increasingly hard to keep up with the esoteric jargon that gets flung around willy nilly at these things. One US-based partner leader told me and my reseller brethren that we need to become "garananimalistic".
I clearly have no idea what this means, but I can see that it'll come in handy when I'm trying to flog a few servers. And I've got quite used to being told that Dodgi needs to be the archetypal trusted adviser to our clients.
But my head was left marginally spinning at the order from one channel exec that I ought to become "a trusted implementation broker". Whatever that is. "The tide is evolving," explained the HP man in not-at-all-meaningless and thoroughly unmixed metaphor.
Meanwhile, I was bewildered to hear Meg Whitman proudly talking about her career history in "the world's oldest profession".
I was relieved to realise she was talking about retail. But I don't want to be the one to tell her there's another industry that usually lays claim to being the planet's oldest.
Under where?
Perhaps even more confusing than keeping track of the latest vogue buzzwords is navigating your way around your average Las Vegas überhotel.
On the first morning someone informed me that I could find my way to the HP channelfest by "walking towards the giant dragon then taking a left behind the waterfall".
It was a full 20 minutes before I realised she was, in fact, a helpful employee of this lavish establishment and not a raving derelict offering a brief and terrifying glimpse into another acid flashback.
Having managed to navigate my way successfully through the dragon-waterfall matrix, I found myself in the convention centre looking for my meeting amid a sea of HP-branded rooms and corridors.
Feeling not unlike Agent Dale Cooper in the Black Lodge, I wondered if I was in the market for a breakout room, a collaboration zone, or a wikiroundtable. So dazed was I that I inadvertently walked right past the HP caravan and soon realised that I was in the middle of the next-door conference.
Which just happened to be the Male Swimwear and Lingerie Expo. My account manager may have been none too pleased that I missed my meeting. But I dare say Her Indoors will be quite happy that I did.
A cock and bull story
Sticking with HP, in a story that was seemingly created in a lab for the express purpose of me writing about it in this column, I read this week that Chubby Checker is suing HP for half a billion dollars over an app that purports to be able to calculate the size of a man's John Thomas.
The app - named "The Chubby Checker", in case you hadn't guessed - encourages users to enter a man's shoe size and let it do the rest.
"Any of you ladies out there just start seeing someone new and wondering what the size of there member is," screams the grammatically cavalier app. "Now with The Chubby Checker there is no need for disappointment or surprise..."
Lawyers for Mr Checker (real name Ernest Evans) claim that the app has caused "irreparable damage and harm" to the twisting singer. It seems he trademarked his name in the late 1990s and is worried that the application will "blur and tarnish" his brand by fostering associations with "obscene sexual connotation and images".
Chubby's legal eagles are asking that "all profits" from the sale of the app - amounting to some $500m - are paid to their client. Though one tech news site noted, not unreasonably, that more than two years on from its release, the $0.99 app had been downloaded just 84 times.
On top of which, it is clearly an independently produced application that just happens to have been made for the PalmOS ecosystem. I can't help but think that its link to HP is tangenital at best. Sorry, tangential.