Higher hopes forlorn and forgotten

I had hoped to take a vacation after the marathon, but two factors kept me hanging around the Bay area. I am dieing to learn what Pammy wants after Rob the bartender said she stopped in asking for me, and I am still too sore for long days on the Harley. Pammy, oh Pammy, where art thou?

Hewlett-Packard is giving a leave of absence — so to speak — to storage, despite higher hopes it may have once held. HP called a mole at 8 o’clock one evening last week and fired him on the phone. Pretty nice, eh? My good man was a storage specialist, and his Midwest regional manager told him that HP wasn’t going to spend any more money trying to sell storage. “If customers want to buy it, they can have it,” the manager commented. In character, HP’s financial folks did some fancy math to calculate that two weeks of severance pay per year for six years of service amounted to nine weeks for the forlorn and forgotten. And I thought the HP Way meant treating people with dignity?

Meanwhile, AppForge is keeping a dirty little secret of its own from current customers and future prospects: The company no longer supports the Palm OS but continues to advertise that it does, reports one of my undercover agents. “AppForge has completely ignored support for Palm OS v5.x and yet continues to obfuscate when confronted with direct questions about AppForge’s intentions regarding continued support for the Palm OS,” my agent says. Palm OS v6.0 is already in beta testing and, as of last week, AppForge still does not support Palm OS v5.x. My developer agent, sore at AppForge, said that he can no longer recommend the software to anyone because of the unethical actions of the company, and he has already begun switching Palm OS development to Basic and native C code.

My sore muscles didn’t stop me from riding for hours atop a stool in the pub. When Pammy walked in, it was a reminder of my pre-Amber life. We exchanged pleasantries. She noted how impressed she was with my commitment to running the marathon amid the chaos of the past few months. “Listen, Robert X., why don’t you jog on by my place Saturday evening? I’m hosting a fun little insider shindig. You’ll never know what you might learn,” she said.