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Spence thought it was the multiple cold remedies he was taking or the dismal New England weather playing tricks on his mind when he read that Larry Ellison had retrieved San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds 660th and 661st home run balls from McCovey Cove outside SBC Park. A Katt crony politely pointed out that the Ellison in question was a retired firefighter and Giants fanatic, not the bon vivant of Redwood Shores—although both share a fondness for boating. While it may not have been the CEO paddling around the bay, the Furball did hear that Oracle is sailing ahead to enable Oracle Standard Edition One database software to be sold as part of Dells PowerEdge 2600 and 2650 servers for Windows and Linux.
A pal told the Puss that if anyone dreams of adding Ellison to their Friendster list, they should not try to drop the Oracle boss a note via his new bride Melanie Crafts home page. The site, which touts the new Mrs. Larrys romance novels, says “melaniecraft.com regretfully cannot forward mail or requests to Larry Ellison.”
Spence was starting to realize that downing three bottles of NyQuil to battle his head cold was turning out to be as ineffective as a packet-filtering firewall against an application layer attack, when a security-minded maven IMed the pertussoid Puss with news. According to the crony, Nokia may be trying to buy Fortinet, which makes a line of integrated security appliances that handle anti-virus, firewall and VPN chores. Since Nokia parted ways from a partnership with Internet Security Systems after ISS began rolling out branded appliances, Fortinet seems a likely way for the company to get back into the game. The security source also said Network Associates may have finally picked up vulnerability management player Foundstone but has yet to make the news public.
The Kitty tried to blast away his blues by cranking up his new Aerosmith CD, which came with a tiny key-chain harmonica. “Online music services, take note,” laughed the Lynx. “You cant download a free tchotchke.”
Almost unconscious on over-the-counter meds, the congested Kitten left the office and retreated to his litter box, where he fielded a penguin pals call. The avian acquaintance pointed the Puss to Der Spiegels German Web site, which says SCO Vice President Gregory Blepp has, in a briefcase somewhere in Deutschland, more than a million lines of code that prove SCOs case. “It sounds like a wacky 1960s movie,” cackled the Kitty. “I see folks chasing Blepp around a fountain to get the briefcase.” As the pharmaceuticals finally helped Spence sleep, he mumbled a mantra from his subconscious. It came from a poster hed spied in the lobby of Microsoft Building 34 in Redmond, the site of Steve Ballmers office. The sign read: “Youre Professional. Intuitive. Clean. Approachable. [heart sign] Longhorn.”