2019-2020 The Rebirth of the Simsbury Bridge Club: Part 1

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Mike

In early May of 2019 my friend and bridge partner, Ken Leopold, agreed to become the manager and director of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). This was shocking news to me. Ken was an extremely busy guy with a demanding and very important (literally life and death) job and a large family to which he was quite devoted. I was not part of the negotiations with the former director Sally Kirtley and the former manager David Rock about the transition. I knew nothing of the details. I still don’t.

The first game that Ken directed took place on May 8, 2019. The results sheet contained many familiar names:

 Wednesday Evening Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 8, 2019
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   36.0      Section  A
 Pair    Pct   Score    Sectn Rank    MPs     
                          A     B  
   7   63.19   45.50  A   1          0.80(A)  Jerry Hirsch - Sally Kirtley
   8   58.33   42.00  B   2     1    0.56(A)  Margaret Garilli - Donna Lyons
   5   57.64   41.50  A   3          0.40(A)  Jeanne Striefler - Susan Glasspiegel
   2   47.22   34.00  A                       Michael Wavada - Kenneth Leopold
   4   45.83   33.00  B         2    0.22(B)  Kathleen Colket - Meredith Colket III
   6   44.44   32.00  B                       Alden Stock - Reba Stock
   3   43.75   31.50  A                       David Rock - Deborah Ouellette
   1   39.58   28.50  B                       Lori Leopold - Rob Stillman

Ken emailed the results to everyone who had been on the mailing list that David and Sally had used. One day later he sent out a second email that contained a hand record for the boards that we had played. Those boards had not been predealt. We shuffled them before the first round, just as we had every week for the previous fifteen years. I replied to Ken with the simple question: “How did you do this?”

Here was Ken’s answer: “I inputed the hands into DealMaster Pro. Took me about 20 minutes.”

At the time I had owned the Dealmaster Pro (DM Pro) software for a few years, and I had been given a class in how to use it by the developer, Ed Marzo¹. I had entered a substantial number of hands for my own purposes. I was thoroughly familiar with the process.

We had played twenty-four boards that night. Ken had to enter thirteen cards for only three of the four players. DM Pro can figure out that the remaining cards are held by the fourth. Still, that is 39 x 24 = 936 cards for which the suit and number must be entered. I doubt that I could have done what he did in less than five minutes per hand, which would be two hours. Who knows? Maybe he is that much faster than I am.

We had never had hand records at the SBC. I am certain that this new feature was greatly appreciated by everyone, especially the newer players. They could go over the hands in detail and determine what they could have done better.

I decided that I could be most useful by helping with the communications. I had a free account on MailChimp that I had used for monthly emails that I did for the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). I converted one of the lists on that account for use by the SBC. It seemed to me that we should be mailing to all players within within reasonable driving distance of Eno Hall. I therefore created a list of nearby zip codes and used MySQL to select players with addresses in those zip codes from the ACBL database. I also sent emails to the “unknown” email addresses on the list that Dave and Sally had used to ask if they wanted to stay on the list. Eventually I came up with an “audience” table that included names, addresses, phone numbers, and other relevant data for all those players. One nice feature was that it was easy for me to update the audience every month, so that new players and ones who recently moved to the area could easily be added.

On Mary 13 I sent an email trough MailChimp to everyone on the list with the subject line “Return of the Simsbury Bridge Club”. It explained how the club would be run under the new regime. The text of that email is posted here. There were three major changes in approach:

I undoubtedly should have given more emphasis to the word “goodies” in the first paragraph. In previous years snacks would sometimes be available when one or more of the players brought them. For example, Jerry Hirsch often brought brownies. The spread at that first game was much more impressive. However, I did not know the source, which was primarily Ken’s wife Lori, and I was not sure that it would continue. It certainly did. For the next ten months there was enough food so that skipping supper in favor of grazing at the club’s goodies table was a viable option.
Ken volunteered to try to find partners for people who lacked one. I was not sure when I composed the message how that would be implemented. I was pretty certain that Ken would not dump me as a partner in favor of waiting around every week to see if someone needed a partner as Paula Beauchamp and Helen Pawlowski had done. It turned out that Lori played an important role in this aspect, too. She was a skilled matchmaker.
I volunteered to give short lessons on competitive bidding before each game. I am no expert, but I have devoted a considerable time and effort to learning about competitive bidding. Most of the important developments in bridge theory in the previous few decades were in that area. I thought that some players would be interested in my perspective.

Ken and I both received a goodly number of positive responses to the email. Only a couple of people unsubscribed.

These photos were taken at Kathy Colket’s Life Master party at the SBC.

The new approach worked. The game on May 22 attracted 14 pairs. We were able to play a Mitchell movement² for the first time that anyone could remember aside from a few Life Master or holiday parties. The attendance continued to be pretty good throughout the summer and autumn. It fell off a little in the winter of course. Many SBC players had homes in the South.

I presented my first lesson on May 29. The game had nine tables, which was equal to the stunning turnout for Moe Walsh’s Life Master party. Everybody was ecstatic.

I did what I could to help maintain the momentum. I spruced up the club’s website that I had developed a decade or so earlier and began to mention it in the emails. I also created a page that contained club-oriented links. It had four columns that contained dated entries: Results, Hand of the Week (an analysis that I provided of one hand each week), Lesson Handouts, and Hand Records. I also provided a link to this page in every email. The SBC website can be seen here. The page with the links is here.

In 2019 the ACBL mandated use of its new Live for Clubs software. Learning how to use it was not easy. Ken struggled with this, but he finally got everything integrated together. The first game that used the Live software was on September 18. The results from that point forward have been available at https://my.acbl.org/club-results/212829.

I missed the game on June 19 because I was at the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. I thought that Ken might want to cancel the game because the HBC was running three games that day. Nevertheless, Ken held the game, and seven pairs attended. Ken gave a lesson on the five approaches to defense in bridge. The club also donated $100 to the ACBL’s Longest Day collection for the Alzheimer’s Association.

Ken and I communicated via email nearly every week. In August he asked if I could produce a list of names and phone number. I did that for him. He kept it in the briefcase that contained supplies. I updated it every month after I downloaded the new roster from the ACBL.

I don’t remember why our six-table game on September 4 was played in the American Legion room. Fred Gagnon played with a guy name Curt Whitaker. I don’t know what darkened his attitude, but he was very obnoxious. Even his partner thought so. Curt announced during the game that he would not be coming back, and, sure enough, he unsubscribed from the mailing list.

On October 23 we held a Life Master party for Kathy Colket. I don’t know where we put everyone, but we had eleven tables!

Many members of the SBC also played regularly at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). The manager of the HBC, Donna Feir, let me know that we could use the club’s Dealer4 dealing machine. Linda Starr created PBN files for us using the Dealer4 software. Here is what I wrote to Ken concerning my second attempt to get the machine to work just before I left for the Harvest Regional tournament in Mansfield, MA, the first week of November:

I spent several hours yesterday filling my plastic boards with decks that I thought were likely to work with the dealing machine. I managed to find 36 decks that were either Bridge Buddy or ACBL. Linda and I spent more than an hour after the game trying to get the dealing machine to work with them, but it kept jamming. Susan Seckinger said that we should get Bridge Buddy cards. The link is http://www.bridgebuddy.net/category-s/116.htm.
For this week’s game Linda said that she will make boards using the HBC’s carriers and get them to you or Lori before Wednesday’s game. I still have the suitcase of steel boards. Let me know what you want me to do with them. I am playing at the HBC tomorrow but not Tuesday.
If you cannot get Live for Clubs to work, send me the results by email, and I will post them from Mansfield on Thursday.
I don’t know what the plan for the following week should be. I will be in Mansfield until Sunday evening.

The SBC needed a new set of decks. Ken found the best cards for use by Dealer4. Unfortunately, they were on backorder. We had to wait for several months to be able to start using the dealing machine.

That’s Ken in the background keying in player names and numbers on our trusty Windows 7 laptop.

Meanwhile Linda made boards for us. She also gave me a short course in the use of the Dealer4 machine, but I still found it difficult. I am just not good at repetitive tasks, especially when they involve use of a machine that is both very sensitive and unforgiving.

I received the following email from Ken on December 9.

The Bridge Buddy has gotten their new shipment of thick cards and I ordered 32 decks.
Linda will be away at least one of the days in January (I think she told me Jan 8). That might be a good time to transition to your making the deals. Hopefully, we’ll then be able to add the deal file to ACBL Live so that the deals will be published with the results (we’d need to be able to export the file from your deal-making program to the Simsbury BC computer so that I can upload it onto ACBL Live along with the results).
How was San Francisco?

The answer to his question about San Francisco can be found here. On December 31 Ken informed me that he had figured out how to include the PBN file created by Dealer4 with the results that he sent to the ACBL. We were cooking!

I made a serious mistake when I created the boards for the game on January 15. Ken discovered it:

Mike, it looks like board 18 didn’t get made so that hand record board 19 and above were placed in boards numbered 1 less (i.e., the board that was played as 18 is board 19 from the hand records, 19 is hand record 20, etc.).

By the end of February I was close to competent at running Dealer4. On February 24 I received this email from Ken:

I will be away March 11 and 18. Sally, can you direct those dates? Mike, will you be around?

My answer was “I can play on 3/11, but I will be in Vienna on 3/18.”

I did play on 3/11; Maria Van Der Ree was my partner. However, I was not in Vienna on 3/18. The reason is explained here.

I still have not been to Vienna, but I harbor hopes of being there in May of 2022.

There was quite a spread of “goodies”. The other table was equally filled with less fattening offerings.

As far as I can tell the following players made their first appearance at the SBC between May 2019 and March 2020:

On May 22 Helene Wade played with Stan Stolarz.
Ann Malone played with her husband Jim Griffin.
Ann and Mike Belzer played together. I knew Mike from the Thursday night games at the HBC. Sue played in at least one team game with them at a tournament.
Donna Simpson played with Max Horton.
On May 29 Lois Labins, a Deadhead I knew from the HBC, played with Rachel Peled.
Annmarie Gagne played with Joe Peled.
Rob Stillman played with Stan Stolarz.
Beverly McKeeman played with Elayne Cree.
Barbara Edelstein played with Maria Van Der Ree.
On June 5 Robert Kendrick played with Frank Thompson.
On June 12 Joel Wolfe played with Tom Joyce. Joel is a very good player who regularly plays at the HBC.
YC Hsu played with Roz Sternberg. I often talked with YC in the back room before morning games at the HBC.
Bruce Meade played with Kathy Fahey.
John Lloyd played with Stan Stolarz.
July 10 was a qualifying game for the NAP. Loretta Levy played with Renee Janow. I knew both of them from the HBC.
Peter Katz played with Tom Joyce. I had played with Peter for many years on Saturday afternoons at the HBC. Highlights from those experiences and others are detailed here.
July 24 was also a qualifying game for the NAP. Xenia Coulter drove all the way from Moodus to play with Nancy Calderbank.
On July 31 Mary Beth Macko played with Lesley Meyers. Dick Benedict once teamed up with Mary Beth and her mother.
Mary Sullivan played with YC Hsu. I played with Mary Sullivan as a mentor, as is described here.
On August 7 Bob and Ann Hughes played together. Eric Vogel and I have played as their teammates a few times.
On September 18 John Willoughby played with Sue Wavada. I have known John for a long time since our days in the Tuesday evening games at the HBC. In 2021 John is the vice-president of the HBC and the chairman of the Planning Committee.
On October 9 Kathie Ferguson played with Sally Kirtley.
On October 23 Frank Blachowski played with Joel Wolfe and finished first. Frank is an excellent player and student of the game who plays regularly at the HBC.
Doug Deacon played with Dan Finn. I have known Doug for a long time from the Tuesday evening games at the HBC. In November of 2021 when we were unable to run games at the SBC I played as his partner twice in that game.
On October 30 Al Gee played with Kathie Ferguson.
On November 6 Mark Smith came up from Florida to play with Joel Wolfe. Not only did he win. He also gave the mini-lesson while I was playing in Mansfield.
On November 13 Sharon Kochen played with Debbie Katz.
On December 18 Helma Strauss played with Betty Nagel. Both of them are long-time regular players at the HBC.
On January 22 Luigi Montefusco and Robert Hastings played together. I had played against both of them many years ago, but I had not seen either one in a very long time. They both live in the Springfield area.
On March 4 Michael and Carol Yachanin played together. I don’t remember them at all.

By my reckoning forty people who had never before attended any games at the SBC played during this ten month period. What an astounding achievement!

1. Ed Marzo lived in Springfield MA. He knew Bob Derrah, and he wanted to help Bob and me with our project of teaching the game of bridge to middle-school students. He gave a copy of DM Pro to both Bob and me. We went over to his house, and he showed us how to use it. Ed died in 2019. His obituary is here. Comments about Ed’s contribution to the bridge community have been collected here.

2. In a Mitchell movement each pair is assigned a permanent designation as East-West or North-South. The latter stay at the same table throughout the session, and the East-West pairs move. It requires a certain number of tables for a reasonable game. The other common movement at club games is a Howell. Most pairs in a Howell play North-South in some rounds and East-West in others. Almost everyone moves after each round. The objective is to allow each pair to play against as many pairs as possible.

2000-2001 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 1

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Mike

Designing our flag and running it up the pole to see if anyone salutes. Continue reading →

By the spring of 2000 Denise Bessette and I had pretty well outlined the steps required to implement TSI’s new Internet product and agreed on the name A^xN (pronounced “A cross N”). It was a clearinghouse for insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) sent from advertisers (A) to newspapers (N). It also managed communications from both sides and allowed the newspapers to confirm the orders online. The process that Denise and I employed, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.

I should note that neither Denise nor I have a background in marketing. Most of our discussions about this project took place during the period shortly after Doug Pease, or marketing person left TSI. We had not yet replaced him.

The first non-technical question that we faced was how to fund the project. We never really thought about setting aside a pot of money, borrowing from a financial institution, or seeking investors. Instead, all of the coding made use of tools that we already had or were available at minimal cost. We knew that the company would eventually need to spend some money on marketing, but we had no idea how to budget for it in advance.

A critically important aspect was deciding how we would bill for the service. The insertion orders always originated with AdDept programs on the AS/400s used by TSI’s clients. However, for various reasons no more than twenty of them regularly produced insertion orders inside AdDept. We were already charging those companies a monthly fee for TSI’s support of the AS/400’s faxing software. How much more could we charge them? Most of them knew the limitations of faxing, but removing them was not a high priorities for any of them.

In 2022 the Tribune Company owns the Courant. The building that I visited has been abandoned.

On the other hand, the companies that used AdDept ran ads in hundreds of newspapers, and for most of those papers the department stores were by far the biggest purchasers of advertising. It was not unheard of tor some of these companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for ads in a single newspaper. In order to assess the situation better I scheduled appointments with executives at the two major papers that were within easy driving distance, the Hartford Courant and the Springfield Union News & Sunday Republican¹.

I explained our proposed approach to an executive at each publication.The lady at the Courant was not very enthusiastic about the idea, but she did say that the paper would consider whatever the customers wanted. She emphasized that the newspapers were already paying third-party services in order to receive the ads electronically.

The guy at the Republican was more engaging. He showed me the process of how his employees laid out an issue of the paper. They did not start by placing the stories in a way that would make the paper more attractive at the newsstand. They began by figuring out where the ads from Filene’s², the May Company’s department store chain that dominated New England, would run. He said that sometimes they did not receive the ads until minutes before press time—or even later. However, they always held the space for every ad that Filene’s had scheduled.

So, both Denise and I concluded that TSI should bill the newspapers for the service and to offer it to the advertisers as an alternative to faxing at the same price, thereby bringing their net costs to zero. The big questions were how much to bill the newspapers and how to frame it. It did not seem right to bill the large newspapers the same amount as the smaller ones. The pricing had to seem both moderate and equitable.

Denise came up with the idea of five or so tiered billing amounts, where the tiers were determined not by a paper’s circulation but by its published column-inch rate. These rates were available in a publication called Standard Rates and Data to which most advertising agencies in those days subscribed. I had seen the huge books lying around at our agency customers. I asked employees at Keiler Advertising if I could have an obsolete copy. They gladly located a fairly recent one and gave it to me. I discovered that the rates³ for newspaper advertising varied wildly. As I remember it, we decided to set the floor value for the top tier of A^xN rates at $150. So, any paper that with a standard rate of $150 or more per column inch would be charged $150 per month. Other papers would be charged proportionately less

This proved to be a rather easy concept to explain to the newspaper. Because the advertiser and the newspaper both benefited, the costs would be split between them. The newspaper rates were proportional to the publicly recognized value of the ads in their paper. Our fee was roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising space. The size of a full-page ad in a broadsheet newspaper was over 120 column inches. TSI’s fee would be a pittance to newspapers, most of which were still thriving financially in the early twenty-first century. If we could present the system as reducing the number of misunderstandings, the cost for the newspaper could easily be justified if even one free make-good were eliminated every few years.

In 2001 I made two trips to locations of AdDept clients to assess the feasibility of A^xN for both the advertisers and the newspapers. The first trip was in January of 2001 to Houston, a city with two large AdDept installations, Stage Stores⁴ and Foley’s⁵. I gave fairly detailed demonstrations to the buyers of newspaper space at both locations. I showed the system to Stage Stores first. Here are some of my notes from that trip.

The AxN presentation went pretty well. Becky (Newman), the production manager, made a point to tell me that she was very interested in it. They also gave me a lot of suggestions as to what they needed, especially in the inserts area.
After the demo Becky showed me the AdDirect⁶ website. It is in many ways similar to ours. They list all of their clients. The only retailers are M&F⁸, L&T₉ (who doesn’t use them), Stage, and Office Depot. The coolest thing about the site is that you can determine which fields are displayed as columns (but not the order of the columns). You can also specify up to three sorting fields. Finally, you can specify a filter to limit the list. Stage would like all of these. They would be less useful to others.
Stage pays AdDirect $10,000 per month. They plan to negotiate the charge down.
… Fort Worth(less) Star Telegram invoice for $500K. Foley’s never indicated that they thought that the papers would be reluctant to pay a little for the IO service. They seemed to think that they would do whatever they told them to do.
Foley’s was under the mistaken impression that all of the other divisions were using AdDirect.

The second trip was to Pittsburgh. I demonstrated the system to the advertising department of Kaufmann’s⁹, the May Company’s division that was based there. I was able to show the newspaper buyers on their own PCs that very little would be different when they began to use the A^xN code that had been added to the AdDept system with which they were familiar. It was really just a matter of flipping a switch for each paper. The system did the rest.

I then signed on to TSI’s AS/400 from one of their PC’s and showed them what orders would look like from their perspective. I showed them in the A^xN Handbook for Newspaper Users (posted here) what the orders looked like when the rep signed on with the newspaper’s credentials. They were very impressed.

After explaining how we planned to bill the newspapers, I asked Mary Ann Brown how difficult she thought that it would be to get the newspapers to cooperate. She said, “They’ll do whatever we tell them to do.”

I had appointments the next day with Pittsburgh’s two newspapers, the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. At the Trib I met with an IT guy. He found what we were doing very interesting. He verified that all the reps had access to the Internet, and he was quite pleased that our approach did not require him to purchase equipment or reconfigure what he had. The lady who was Kaufmann’s rep at the Post was more stand-offish, but she verified Mary Ann Brown’s assessment of their willingness to cooperate.

My third appointment was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I rented a car and drove to Cleveland for an afternoon meeting with Kaufmann’s rep. I soon discovered that we had a common acquaintance. He had just returned from a trip to Albany. He had met there with Fran Lipari, the owner of Communication & Design¹⁰, the agency that handled the Key Bank account. The rep was polite, but he was not a bit enthusiastic about the prospect of paying TSI for handling insertion orders.

I rated my success level at the three newspapers as a win, a loss, and a tie. That was not a great result, but we were still in the ball game. We were just at the stage in which we were ready to roll the product out to the first advertiser when something remarkable happened.

In 2001 TSI received a telephone call from someone at Belk¹¹, a department store chain that was (and still is) based in Charlotte, NC. In the next few months I made many trips to Charlotte to discuss with them the use of the AdDept system. Since Belk already owned several AS/400s, the time between their approval of the AdDept contract with the accompanying design document for proposed enhancements and the beginning of the installation period was much shorter than usual. I remember that at one of those early meetings I was explaining how the AS/400 could automatically fax the insertion orders to the newspapers. Someone asked if it was possible to use the Internet to send the orders.

Guinea pigs love to whistle. Be careful; if you pick one up by its tail, its eyes will fall out.

I swear that I did not plant this question, but if I had thought of it ahead of time, I probably would have. I informed them that TSI had indeed developed just such a product, and we were about to roll it out to our existing customers. After I explained how it worked, Belk eagerly agreed to act as TSI’s guinea pig (sorry; I meant to type “Beta Site”) for A^xN. This was such an ideal situation that I could scarcely believe it.

How TSI persuaded nearly all of the users of AdDept and hundreds of newspapers to sign up for A^xN is explained in Part 2, which is posted here.

1. The name of the paper was changed to Springfield Republican in 2001.

2. Filene’s used AdDept for accounting functions, but only because the May Company insisted. I was never able to persuade the newspaper manager to abandon the elaborate set of spreadsheets that he had developed even though it did not produce insertion orders. The painful story of my attempts to get them to use more of the system have been chronicled here.

3. Most department stores negotiated much lower rates than the published ones. They often had complicated agreements about volume discounts.

4. The “standard rate” was the “open” rate for a black & white ROP ad in a daily edition. It did not include any discounts or premiums. I located a web page that actually included a page in one of the 2005 editions of Standard Rates and Data. It showed the complete rate card for the St. Petersburg Times, which happened to subscribe to A^xN. It is on p.3 of the pdf posted here. SRDS, the company that published the physical book, now allows subscribing advertisers and agencies to view the rates on the Internet.

5. TSI’s long relationship with Stage Stores is recounted here. I do not have vivid memories of Becky Newman. Her LinkedIn page is here.

6. Foley’s was one of the earliest users of AdDept. The details have been posted here.

7. I have only a vague recollection of AdDirect. Apparently it was a way of entering ads for insertion orders online one at a time. The orders could be sent to the newspapers. This might be a reasonable approach for an ad agency, but retailers ran the same ad in many markets. Entering these one at a time would be unduly burdensome. If the $10,000 figure is correct, then the AdDept-A^xN combination saved Stage a heck of a lot of money over the years.

8. M&F is Meier & Frank, the smallest department store division of the May Company. It was based in Portland, OR. Details of the AdDept installation at M&F have been posted here.

9. L&T refers to Lord & Taylor, the May Company division based in New York. The relationship between L&T and TSI is described here.

10. Much more has been posted about the AdDept installation at Kaufmann’s here.

11. Communication & Design (always “&”, never “and”) was one of the first ad agencies to purchase the GrandAd system. My adventures in installing and supporting that system are described here.

12. The details of TSI’s long and productive relationship with Belk are posted here.

2000 January TSI: Mike and Denise at PartnerWorld in San Diego

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Mike

Fun and frustration. Continue reading →

In the late nineties Denise and I had decided that we needed to investigate ways for TSI (or at least the two of us) to develop a new product or service and to modernize, if possible, our work on the AS/400. In late 1999 we learned about PartnerWorld, a convention for IBM’s business partners that was scheduled to be held in San Diego in late January of 2000. We decided to attend. Our objectives were two-fold: 1) to hear about IBM’s approach to the Internet; and 2) to meet other vendors with whom we might team up. I also bought two tickets for the San Diego Opera’s performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Tuesday, January 25. We decided to spend the last day at the zoo.

This must be in SD. Everyone in New England wears a coat in January.

On Sunday, January 23, Denise’s husband Ray drove her to Bradley International. I met them there and took a photo or two. Since we gained three hours en route we probably landed in San Diego in the afternoon. The airport was surprisingly close to Seaworld, Coronado Island, and downtown. I was accustomed to fairly long drives from airports to downtown locations. We boarded our rental car at Avis. The weather was fantastic throughout our stay.

I had booked rooms for us at the Best Western Inn by the sea in La Jolla, which was about a twenty-minute drive from the airport and the conference center. This was an excellent choice. It was a nice hotel that was reasonably priced and within walking distance of La Jolla cove. I seem to remember that Denise and I walked down to the beach as soon as we had gotten settled. There we saw both a beautiful stretch of sand and a large group of seals or maybe sea lions. Both species liked to hang around in the vicinity.

I found no notes about this trip. I found about ten photos that I took with disposable cameras. I must have had two and switched halfway through the trip; there are two different sizes of photos.

I bought a copy of Frommer’s guide to San Diego. I know that I used it to find the hotel because there was a business card marking the page for it. It said the prices were “moderate”, and they included a continental breakfast and free parking. A map was evidently torn out of the back of the book.

The business card was from Yvonne Carl, whose job was “Customer Advocate” at The 400 Group in Dedham, MA. By the time that I wrote this entry in 2023 I had no recollection of her or the group. When I tried its website, I was treated to a large and graphic ad for a combination flashlight and male sex toy.

The conference: On Monday we drove to the gigantic conference center and parked in the basement. When we registered we each received a faux leather black duffel bag, some printed materials, and an orange PartnerWorld tee shirt. Mine, for some reason had “Morpher” on the back. Denise’s had something equally meaningless.

The first event was the “kickoff” in a very large auditorium. I don’t know how many people were there, but the total attendance at the conference was about 4,000. Lou Gerstner, IBM’s celebrated Chairman, did not attend, but he sent a video. His message was that IBM was now all about e-business, by which he seemed to mean using the Internet directly or indirectly for commerce. IBM wanted everyone to use its servers and, more importantly, services. Another big emphasis was on the object-oriented programming called Java¹ and JavaBeans², both of which were developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed to everyone at no charge.

I remember two speakers. A lady who was in charge of marketing claimed that IBM “owned” the term e-business³. This was in reference to an advertising campaign that had associated IBM with the term. The other was Sam Palmisano, the number two guy at IBM, who must have thought that he was addressing the IBM sales force. He was very upset at EMC and Sun Microsystems, who were evidently using former IBM employees—of whom there were a large number—to undercut IBM on some accounts. He used the phrase “kick butts”, which seemed totally out of place for a gathering of people who had worked with IBM for years.

Denise and I usually split up to attend other presentations. In the only one that I remember a panelist said that in hiring you should always get the best person available. This was undoubtedly good advice, but I had learned that it was also crucial to find a way to keep them no matter what happened to your business.

We also visited some exhibits that were sponsored by third parties. At the time we were on the lookout for ways to provide a GUI⁴ front end for AdDept that we could implement without a great deal of work. We did not find anything of interest.

One of our major objectives was to make contact with people from other companies with which we could partner for mutual benefit. We were disappointed in this endeavor. IBM was not interested in helping its partners find partners. It wanted its partners to tell their customers to buy IBM computers and services.

Entertainment: I think that the comedian Sinbad performed on Monday evening. Denise and I attended. He began by telling the audience that he was a Mac guy. At the time Apple was not yet a major player in either servers or the Internet. Its computers were good for designers, but most people in business had little use for them. I was not very impressed with the rest of Sinbad’s routine either. I don’t think that he understood the nature of the audience.

On Tuesday evening we went to the San Diego Opera to see Il Trovatore. I remember being disappointed that the members of the orchestra did not take time to throw a baseball around during the overture. I also remember being very tired. In the last act I had to fight off drowsiness, and I was unable to prevent various Warner Bros. characters such as Sylvester and Bugs Bunny from appearing on the stage.

I remember that Denise and I were very impressed with the soprano who sang Leonora⁵. She rightly judged the arias to be beautiful. I also was surprised. I had listened to the opera several times and had never before been so impressed with these pieces.

On Wednesday Denise and I attended a party in the conference center. The music was supplied by what was left of the Beach Boys. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston were definitely there. Brian Wilson and Al Jardine were not. The other members of the band on the stage were much younger than Love and Johnston, who were both pushing sixty.

You won’t find any pictures of Mike Love without a hat. Bruce Johnston is on the left

There was nowhere to sit. Perhaps they expected people to dance, but this was a group of uber-geeks, predominantly male. Many may not have even heard of the Beach Boys. A few people may have danced, but I never would unless I had at least ten beers. I was at least nine short of that mark.

Two old guys singing about hot rods and surfing seemed weird in the twenty-first century. None of the magic of the performance that I witnessed at the concert at U-M (described here) remained.

Private experiences: I remember having two suppers with Denise. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Old Town one evening. I am pretty sure that we also went to a Chinese restaurant in La Jolla. I don’t remember where we ate lunches or breakfasts. Denise probably skipped some of these meals. When we ate together we almost exclusively discussed what we could do to enhance the business.

I don’t see any ear flaps. They must be seals.

We also spent some time walking up and down the beach and viewing the seals from a safe distance. The entire experience was at once exhilarating and disappointing. We were already starting to focus on using the Internet for insertion orders. We both had moderate confidence that we could make it work, and we were excited about the challenge. It was disheartening that we found nothing of value with regard to modernizing AS/400 applications.

The zoo: We spent the entire last day at the famous San Diego Zoo. We saw a very large number of animals, but the foliage used to establish the settings for the animals and the ambience of the zoo was nearly as stimulating.

I took dozens of photos with disposable cameras. This type of camera was totally inappropriate for a visit to the zoo. It had no ability to zoom or adjust the focus. They were not stored digitally. I had to take photos of the photos with my digital camera. That process lost some of the resolution. However, fuzzy memories are better than none.

I think that these photos are from our second visit to the panda exhibit. There are two photos from the first visit, too, but the panda is almost completely hidden by shrubbery.

The only fairly distinct memories that I have of the experience involved the panda exhibit. We began our visit there, and on that occasion we stood in line for a long time. When we finally got to the viewing area, the panda was very visible. We came back in the afternoon and got a better look.

We went to at least two shows. One of them involved birds that flew around but always returned to the trainer on command. The other featured a couple of big cats.

Here is a selection of the other photos in no particular order.

Two grouses. The dark one is facing left. The light one below it is facing right.

I don’t remember the trip back to Connecticut.

Epilogue: The result of TSI’s search for an Internet product was A^xN. The story of that project begins here. In the spring of 2006 Sue Comparetto and I returned to San Diego for a short vacation. That trip is described here.

1. I had read ten books on Java, and I did all of the exercises in each. I could do what they asked, but I could see no way to do most of what I wanted to do. On the AS/400 (and presumably on other machines as well) a Java Virtual Machine needed to be installed and configured. IBM put all of this stuff under the rubric of Websphere. The implementation on the AS/400 had horrendous performance compared to programs in the native environment.

2. JavaBeans are classes that encapsulate one or more objects into one standardized object (the bean). This standardization allows the beans to be handled in a more generic fashion, allowing easier reuse of code.

3. I liked to tell our clients that TSI was working on an Internet-based system for convents and monasteries. We planned to call it “Monk E-Business”.

4. GUI stands for “graphical user interface”, which means using screens that take advantage of all of the properties of personal computers. AdDept’s screens were still text-based, which made them less attractive but not necessarily less functional for the tasks that they performed. GUI front ends took advantage of the mouse and displayed information using colors, images, and such things as check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, and pull-down windows.

5. We were right to be impressed. I discovered twenty-three and a half years after the fact that Leonora was played by Sondra Radvanovsky. At the time she was an up-and-coming star. Within a decade so she was an international diva recognized both for her singing and her acting ability. She gave several legendary performances at the Metropolitan Opera.

1999 TSI: Transition to East Windsor

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Mike

Moving to 7B. Continue reading →

By 1999 the office in Enfield no longer seemed suitable for TSI. We had been doing more training there than we anticipated. Fortune 500 companies had been sending employees to be trained for three or four days in a converted barn with no training room. My office, which was already also serving as the home of our AS/400s, System/36s, and their system consoles, had to be used for the training sessions, It did not give us a professional appearance.

There were many other reasons that Denise Bessette (introduced here) and I wanted to move. In the first place, since Sue Comparetto was no longer working in the building much (explained here), I felt uncomfortable being in a building owned by her father and shared with his company and Sue’s siblings, all of whom worked for the Slanetz Corporation.

I was sure that Denise would be happy to move into an office that she designed rather than the one that she had shared with Sue. Sue was hardly ever there, but many of her bags, boxes, and piles of her junk were still in evidence.

Behind the office building was a lot that was the home of (literally) tons of discarded equipment and machinery, including a fire truck, a blue school bus, a rusty tractor from before World War II, innumerable tires, and at least twenty fire hydrants. These all belonged to some iteration of the Slanetz Corporation. Personally I did not care if they wanted to have a junkyard there, but as the proprietor of the business, I had to think about what our clients thought. If we ever needed to bring someone really important to the office, we would certainly be embarrassed.

My workspace in Enfield when I had only a “dumb” terminal. The photo on the wall depicts my nieces Cadie and Kelly. The stacked trays held materials for each client. The accordion files on the left contained program listings. The shoes are Stan Smith models.

One important person whom we wanted to contact quickly was someone to manage our marketing. Doug Pease (introduced here) had done an outstanding job working out of what was supposed to be a closet, but we could not expects someone who could acquire contracts with billion dollar corporations to do so.

We also needed to rewire our office to allow easy access to the servers from PCs and to use the Internet. Denise took charge of all of this, and she preferred to do it from scratch rather than to retrofit the scheme onto what we had.

Another neglected priority was the furniture. We had a mishmash of second-hand pieces that we had accumulated over two decades. In general we wanted a more functional and more modern working environment. Jamie Lisella (introduced here), who was doing the administrative and bookkeeping functions, needed a better setup. We also wanted to move Sandy Sant’Angelo (introduced here), who dealt with support calls from clients, an area in which her voice, which really carried, did not disturb the programmers.

A limiting factor was the fact that Denise lived in Stafford, which was already a twenty-minute drive. Most of the available office space would be towards Hartford and therefore farther for her. She was amenable to increasing her commute a little, but she did not relish the prospect of a two-hour round trip.

Kohl’s is the big white building in the upper left. The space that we looked at was the other white building labeled “Blush Med Spa:.

Jamie did most of the research into places looking for tenants. I remember that she found a place in a medical building near Kohl’s. Denise and I went to look at the space, which was on the second floor of a building that had mostly medical tenants. I thought that it was OK, but Denise did not like the fact that it was so close to a shopping center where people might be hanging around in the evening. She sometimes worked by herself and did not leave until it was dark.

A place on Hazard Ave. would have been very convenient, but the only space that was available was disqualified for some reason. I never saw the interior of the place. I think that a chiropractor moved in.

My lobbying to move the operation to North Hollywood, CA, (explained here) was dismissed by the other participants in the search.

I am sure that Jamie located the site in East Windsor. I remember her saying, “I think that I have found TSI’s new home.” It was in Pasco Commons, a group of buildings that were designed to be homes, offices, or both. Building #7¹ was owned by Rene (RAY nee) Dupuis, the owner and operator of Tours of Distinction², a travel agency that specialized in arranging bus tours in New England.

TofD took up the bottom floor, Suite A. Rene wanted to rent TSI the second floor, Suite B. We would be able to add or remove interior walls and shape it the way that we wanted it. There was also a unit in the basement, which he rented as Suite C once or twice.

The red balloon indicates Pasco Drive. Building #7 was a little bit east of the balloon. The river is on the left. The yellow road labeled “S. Main St.” is Route 5.

The location was East Windsor just off of Route 5, a major US highway, and less than a quarter mile from the Connecticut River. The location was quite good. Building 7 had its own parking lot with five or six slots on each side. Two doors opened onto the parking lot, one from Suite A and one from the stairs to Suite B. The rent was not much more than we paid Sue’s father. If the traffic was light I could reach the office in fifteen minutes—my record was twelve.

Preparations: I found some graph paper that we could use to plan where all of the walls and doors would be. We put a conference room, the area for Sandy and the administrative person and the sales office on the south side. The programmers and office equipment were in the middle, and offices for Denise and me were on the north side. The east side had the server room, the kitchen, and the bathrooms. The server room was supposed to be big enough to hold our supplies, too, but somehow we lost a couple of feet of space. Fortunately, Rene allowed us to make a last minute change to wall off an area for supplies and storage.

Denise made most of the arrangements for the transition. The furniture was mostly new, or at least new to us. We got a nice table for the conference room with comfortable chairs and a beautiful bookcase that I claimed when we closed down in 2014. We ordered five phone numbers. The last four digits were 0700-0704, which was convenient. In the entire history of the company no employees—not even Denise and I—ever had personal phone numbers or extensions. I have always thought that that was smart for a company of our size.

The part of the old building used by the Slanetz Corporation had a kitchen, and they let our employees use the small refrigerator. The new kitchen also had a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a table. It also contained a sink, counter, and cabinets, but no stove.

My office in Enfield. My big red mug is visible in front of the window with a photo of W.C. Fields and a Realistic radio from RadioShack. Later I purchased Bose radio to replace it. The big red mug was lost when I left it on the roof of my car one evening.

The big move: We did not take occupancy of 7B immediately. The furniture and the new separation panels arrived at separate times. I must have been involved to some extent in the assembly and placement, but I have no distinct memories. I am pretty sure that I brought the computers from Enfield over the weekend in my car. I probably needed some help with the AS/400.

After all the furniture had been received and the equipment collected we moved in and shortly thereafter we had an open house party. I don’t remember everyone who came, but I do recall that Denise’s mother and at least one of her sisters were there.

Someone brought us two nice plants in large pots. Both of them survived our entire stay of more than fourteen years in East Windsor. By 2014 they were both gigantic. I sold them to someone who probably dumped them somewhere and kept or sold the pots.

Life in East Windsor: Before Pasco Commons existed, Jonathan Pasco’s restaurant was an institution on Route 5. TSI had a couple of outings there, and we occasionally entertained clients or others we were trying to impress. I think that we also went to La Notte, an excellent Italian restaurant in the middle of a nearby industrial park.

On many evenings and weekends I went for runs on the roads around that industrial park and the adjoining Thompson Road. I often did as much as ten miles. I sometimes left my water bottle at the Thompson Road entrance. Once I was approaching that spot having completed my first loop. A police car was surveilling the bottle from across the street. When I approached it the officers accosted me and asked what the “device” was. I told them that it was my water bottle. They asked me to take a drink, and I did. This occurred shortly after 9/11, when half of America was paranoid about terrorist attacks.

On one of my runs I aw a very large snapping turtle on grass besidee Thompson Road. Inside the industrial park I often saw wild turkeys and once spotted a bobcat. I also once observed two hawks “doing it” on the ground.

I usually arrived at work before 6:00 in the morning. I worked for an hour or two and then took a nap on a mattress from a portable cot that Sue had bought for camping and only used once. On a couple of occasions someone was surprised to find me asleep on the floor of the server room.

Every few days I would go to Geissler’s grocery to buy Red Delicious apples and diet cola in two-liter bottles. On one of those occasions I ran my Celica into the side of a Lincoln. I was driving on the exit lane on the right in the photo. The Lincoln was traversing the lane in the foreground.In my hundreds of trips to Geissler’s I had never seen a car using that lane.

The policeman investigating the accident did not give me a ticket. He said that the East Windsor police were called for accidents there every week. Eventually they reconfigured the parking lot to prevent the kind of accident that I was involved in.

Every day I brought my lunch from home or bought a sandwich or salad at Geissler’s. If the weather was good, I generally ate at a picnic table in a small park by the river. I almost always took a nap after lunch, either in my car or in the park on my notorious mattress.

One of the biggest events in the history of East Windsor occurred while we were tenants there. Walmart opened a Super Center a mile or so north of TSI’s headquarters. The first time that I went there I wondered how they had found so many people who looked like they were from Appalachia.

178 N. Maple: TSI left behind some furniture in the Enfield office. Sue continued to go there on occasion. At one point she obtained a great deal of fabric from someone that she knew. She tried to run a small business selling the fabric for a while.

The Slanetz Corporation made an effort to rent out the space at least once, but as of 2023 it is not in use.

1. When I researched this in 2023, I was surprised to discover that Building #7 was for sale as a “new listing”. All of the interior photos are of 7A, and the one exterior photo shows only the door to 7A. It was weird. It was obvious that something (the other door) had been excluded. I found the photo at right at this website.

2. Tours of Distinction has moved to Simsbury. Its website can be viewed here. When I looked there I could find no information about who owned or operated the agency.

1999 TSI: Mike Gets Certified

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Mike

The AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed on and for the AS/400. At the time TSI was an IBM Business Partner for its GrandAd system on the System/36. Earlier TSI had been one of the first software companies to be recognized as an IBM Business Partner for the Datamaster.

Prior to the late nineties the only requirement for a company to become a Business Partner was to have some successful accounts that were using its software or services. At times it was a huge advantage to be an IBM Business Partner. At other times IBM employees treated the partners as competition.

At some point the concept of Value-Added Retailer (VAR) was introduced. VARs were at first allowed to order and sell systems for which their software or services had qualified as adding value to the sale of IBM equipment. Too many bad sales by VARs prompted IBM to take away the ability to take orders from smaller companies such as TSI. Instead they were assigned to a “Super-VAR” who vetted and placed the orders for them. In 1999 TSI was assigned to a company called BPS, which shortly thereafter renamed itself Savoir.

The next, but by no means last, set of restrictions imposed by IBM was to require any company involved in sales of IBM equipment to have at least one employee who had passed proficiency tests for the the equipment. At the outset there were two levels with separate tests, one for sales personnel and one for technical.

My partner Denise Bessette and I judged at the time that it was critical to the future marketing of AdDept and any other future product that we continue to participate in IBM’s partnership program. I knew more about the hardware offerings than she did, and so I was chosen to study up and take the technical test. It made little sense for a different person to study for the sales one, which was reportedly much easier.

I think that I must have taken the exams in the first half of 1999 or late 1998. I have a lot of notes from the second half of 1999, and there is no mention of them.

IBM still publishes Redbooks. I think that WAS was in version 1 in 1999.

IBM published study guides for both exams. One or two Redbooks may have also been on the syllabus. I remember that there was a considerable amount of technical material about several things with which I was not at all familiar. One was the cabling required to connect two AS/400s. The other was setting up partitions on a single AS/400 so that each partition had a separate file system. It was more complicated than it sounds because each device needed to be defined in each partition that used it. I remember practically nothing about either of these topics, but we did encounter partitioning at Dick’s Sporting Goods (introduced here).

I spent as much time as I could bear going over the course material. Hardware and operating systems have never really been my thing. It took a lot of discipline to force myself to understand the details of things that we would never use.

The day arrived on which I was scheduled to take the tests. I drove to an office in Farmington that specialized in administering exams for corporations. I had already consumed one 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke before I arrived, and I brought another with me.

I gave my registration document to the receptionist. She asked me which test I wanted to take first. I selected the sales test. I seem to recall that each test lasted for about ninety minutes. All questions were multiple choice. I was required to enter my answers on a PC.

The sales test was not too difficult; I reported back to the receptionist ten or fifteen minutes before the deadline. She told me that I had passed.

I told her that I wanted to take a break before taking the technical test. I went to the men’s room and sat in the lobby. I drank my second Diet and tried to clear my mind. Then I took the second test.

It was much more difficult than the first. A few questions were beyond my ken. I skipped them. I read all of the others carefully and only answered after I was fairly certain. I used up nearly all of the allotted time. I was pretty relieved when the receptionist assured me that I had passed both tests.

So, I was certified by IBM as knowledgeable about both the sales and technical aspects of the AS/400. If I ever had physical certificates, I certainly have not seen them for a decade. TSI’s Sales Manager Doug Pease told me that his contact at Savoir had told him that almost nobody ever passed the technical exam on the first try.

I am not sure how much good my success did us. I am not sure that TSI sold any new hardware at all in the rest of the time that we were in business. We might have ordered an upgrade or two through our Super-Var.

On the other hand, we did get to go to the PartnerWorld convention in San Diego. That adventure has been described here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

2019-2020 The Rebirth of the Simsbury Bridge Club: Part 1

2000-2001 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 1

2000 January TSI: Mike and Denise at PartnerWorld in San Diego

1999 TSI: Transition to East Windsor

1999 TSI: Mike Gets Certified