Intelcon eats its own

Long time no update! I've been pretty busy this week at work, having suffered through two days at Intelcon (Intelligence + Conference = IntelCon. It's not one of Optimus Prime's enemies). Unisys sponsored a booth there and since very few actually qualified people were able to attend, I got to man it.

Intelcon is basically a trade show, not too different from similar such events for industrial lubricant manufacturers or computer accessory providers or what have you. There was a big conference with lots of interesting people giving presentations on biometrics and data mining and stuff like that. That's to lure people in, who are then supposed to wander the exhibition hall looking to buy "solutions" from the various vendors in attendance. The only problem was that Intelcon was a relatively small event; all the real movers and shakers were at DODIIS in Dallas. So instead of intelligence officials wanting to buy things I know nothing about, I was approached mainly by other vendors wanting to sell things to Unisys that I have no authorization to buy.

It was disconcerting because everyone else assumed, by virtue of my attendance, that I was a highly placed Unisys employee. People kept introducing themselves as "CEO" or "Executive VP" or "Managing Partner." Yeah, hi, I'm Tom, I'm a systems analyst, I've worked here for four weeks, and I make roughly .001% of your salary.

At our booth we were demoing a biometric application, which Unisys has developed in partnership with a company called ImageWare. This was pretty cool: I got to see some nifty Mission Impossible type stuff, like an iris scanner. ImageWare had sent a salesman named Bill to set up and run the demo. Bill is the kind of person who talks compulsively about his private life with complete strangers. Over the course of two days, I learned:

1) that ImageWare makes the most robust biometrics suite on the market,
2) that Bill doesn't much like Bush and will vote for McCain in 2008, and
3) the names, personalities, life histories, and sexual characteristics of every woman Bill has been involved with recently.

It's more women than you might think, incidentally. I'm glad that Bill was there, because his non-stop girl-stories made the time go by. Good luck this weekend, Bill, wherever you are!

There was also another representative from Unisys who was there during some of the conference. Pete is a pretty high ranking executive and seems to know virtually everyone in the intelligence community. He's the kind of person who can tell you how George Tenet's personality changed after 9-11. And, unlike a lot of the other people (from various other companies) whom I talked with, Pete really seemed to know his shit. I like Pete even more now, because today he sent me an email praising my work during the conference, and he CCed my boss and the head of my department.

In other news, it now seems that I won't be going overseas until the second of June (roughly). The plus side is that I'll get to attend my sister's college graduation.