Going Home...

Greetings:

Quite a long time ago, there was an old spiritual song called "Going Home." Sometimes I think of that and realize that I don't really have a home. Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if I had ever been outside of the state of Texas - probably because I'm constantly promoting West Texas as THE place to live and work. For curiosity's sake I listed for him the places that I have worked or lived for at least two weeks (most for several months) in my brief life: The list contained 45 different cities, about 8 countries and did not count the few vacation spots. Home for me is where I hang my hats (about 10 of them) and set up my computers (about 7 or 8). Out of all those places and towns, I made the conscious decision to choose West Texas as my home. If there were a number two or three selection it probably would be either San Francisco, CA, or Paris, France.

Anyway, this is not a blog on where I've lived nor how many hat I have nor even the number of computers that I use for various types of research. Rather, it's about returning to the AI family of Neuron Data / Blaze Software / Fair Isaac / FICO. Beginning tomorrow morning (25 Jan 2010) I will be, once again, working with FICO in Product Management - mostly working on Blaze Advisor but, hopefully, branching out into business optimization software such as analytics and forecasting. After all, my master's degree was focused in Quantitative Analysis and Forecasting and I wrote my first white papers (part of my thesis back then) on rulebased systems as used to do early analysis of statistical data for proper analysis.

So, what about the benchmarking programs and things of that nature that I have been doing at KBSC all these years? Again, I'm calling on my old friend in Sweetwater, Texas, Yaakov Kohen, former CTO of KBSC and present-day horse-wrangler, to step in and do that. I will be giving all of my material over to him, along with the spreadsheets, to keep up to date. So, if you have any questions, please contact him at mailto:yaakov@kbsc.com in the future. Don't expect a quick reply since he is just a bit over 70 and still has the ranch to manage in addition to doing benchmarks, writing white papers and doing forecasting programs.

I suppose that Yaakov might be able to wrangle an article or two in InfoWorld should the editors there see past his advanced years and consider only that he is one of the brightest minds in the industry, one of my few mentors, and fairly forthright (non-diplomatic) in his opinions. Also, he is an excellent shot (sniper level) with both rifle and pistol. You HAVE to be to live in Sweetwater - it's the home of the annual Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup every year. An shooting pesky coyotes that tend to bring down a whole cow for just a snack on the open range calls for shots of about 1K yards or more.

October Rules Fest will be turned over to one of several person who have expressed an interest in the masochism of conference leadership. We have a 3:00 p.m. conference call tomorrow to kick that off for 2010 and, if you would like to be part of that, just send me your Skype ID and I'll see if I can get it on the list before the call starts.

All in all, I'm looking forward to returning to work with some good friends and moving Blaze Advisor to even greater heights. I'm not sure that this blog will continue - maybe FICO will let me start one with a FICO address like some other folks there.

SDG

jco