Although it is my first visit to the city of Nashville, it’s immediately clear that it’s a Southern city with a bustling nightlife, and a place that takes pride in its heritage. Best known as the hub of country music, Nashville is home to everything from the Country Music Hall of Fame to “Cooters,” a museum dedicated to them “good ol’ boys,” the Dukes of Hazzard.

Although I don’t typically have time to visit many attractions on my trips, I would certainly love to come back and take some time to explore this town. I must say it was fun to eat dinner while listening to some live country music, as well as visit the spectacular Opryland Hotel. Traveling as much as I do, I thought I had seen it all, but this venue is truly spectacular consisting of three huge atriums complete with cascading waterfalls, winding overhead walkways, and a musically-inspired indoor fountain show.

My whistle-stop schedule started with a customer visit on Monday, and continued today with a half-day security workshop. It was another great interactive event, and opened the door to some great questions and numerous conversations regarding how customers are currently approaching the challenge of securing their data. It was fantastic to find that a number of the attendees are already running Powertech solutions to assist them, and fun to give away another box of shirts and a Starbucks gift card!

Last night found me up in front of a full room at the local Nashville user group where I presented a combination session on protecting the IBM i from FTP, ODBC, and Remote Command, along with how to configure auditing controls for IBM i. While the dinner and cheesecake were great, the best part of the evening was the highly interactive audience, and that is very satisfying to me as a speaker. There were a lot of pertinent questions and discussion around the two topics, and good conversation afterwards about security topics in general. I am also getting to enjoy the mass t-shirt distribution, as everyone seems to get a kick out of our “control freaks” t-shirts!

The hotel that hosted the user group also had a Nashville Songwriters event going on afterwards, and presented some of the talent behind hit songs recorded such country legends as Kenny Chesney, George Straight, and Trace Adkins. I am now preparing to head to the airport this morning for a flight to Buffalo, NY, to repeat the same events again in the Niagara Falls and Buffalo area. I will give you an update on that part of my trip next week.

As part of this entry, I thought I would share a funny story. As a Midwesterner, you’d think that I would be prepared for bad winter weather wherever I go, but upon waking here on my first morning in town I was more than a little surprised to see that Nashville was coated in a layer of black ice, topped with a couple of inches of powdery snow. I was dismayed to find that my car windows were frozen solid, and my windshield wipers “super-glued” to the glass. Unfortunately for me, the rental car agency didn’t include the normal obligatory corporate-branded ice scraper, so I had to make do with the edge of the hotel’s plastic room key. Halfway into this finger-numbing exercise, I was approached by a man carrying a can of de-icer and a scraper. While the scraper was making short work of removing the ice, I asked if this was a common event in Tennessee and mentioned that I was impressed that he was so well prepared. While I had assumed I would be leaving the winter weather behind me for a few days, I was definitely amused when he grinned at me and responded “I have no idea. I am just visiting from Illinois!” I should have known it would take a fellow sufferer to carry his own winter lifeline.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 8:13 am and is filed under Other, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.