Guess who came to dinner…and left! (pt. 1)

So guess who *WE* had dinner with?

You guessed it, DA MAN!

But before I get into all that, lemme first apologize for the lateness of this post. I had wanted to wait until I was able to formally announce our new and unusual financing plans (re: our new jobby-jobs) before finally rendering our harrowing adventures with the Military-Industrial Complex. Sadly, it’s has taken this long for those plans to finally firm up.

But now the wait is over, and it’s official - APPLESEED IS RELOCATING!!!!

We’re relocating our servers, handsets, offices, home-stuffs and our pretty lil’ selves to the glorious climes of San-Fran-cisco, Cal-i-for-ni-A.

Feel me now, people! The Chili Peppers will be singin’ our theme song soon.

More on that when we’ve actually started at the new jobby, but for now, just know that Desi, our intrepid CTO, and I, the hapless teller of these yarns, have accepted an invitation to become a part of a newly-formed Technology Innovation team at a publicly-traded concern.

Don’t even try to guess who, ’cause I guarantee you’ll be wrong.

Anyway, now for the good stuff…dinner…a nice dinner…with DA MAN…

So it all began with an email: a rather sinister sounding email, addressed to the nice lady who heads our Incubator. The email asked for a formal introduction to the principals of AppleSeed Networks - at least that’s they way we’ll tell it to the VCs who will eventually want to know about it.

In actuality, the email asked for a “capabilities briefing” about AppleSeed…and you know they did that deliberately…scaring us…

So of course, we had a thorough freak-out, thinking the NSA was going to take us out, steal our software, hardware and souls, and put us in a bunker beneath a mountain in the Dakotas or something. Immediately, we hit the batphones, contacting everyone we knew who may have had any experience with DA MAN, and his stealthy, undercover mechanations.

The feedback we got was legion: thank you very much peeps. We were told not to fret: that a “capabilities briefing” is just four-star-military-lingo for a meet-and-greet, and that there was little liklihood that we’d see our babies and bodies sold into total right-wing evilness with a first meeting.

We were warned, however, that because of the obvious benefits to some three-letter-acronym’d agencies, and the new 800lb. gorilla on the block, Homeland Security, that there was the possibility, however slight, that an undue interest might be taken in our work. Undue interest can quickly become something pretty darn scary, getting our work declared a “munition,” or a “matter of national security.”

In such a event, AppleSeed could be legally seized by one or more of those aforementioned agencies, and me, Desi, and the Nerditude would be forced to get security clearances to in order to continue our darn project.

If I told you no one slept a wink that night, would you believe me?

But, there was a silver lining…

As it happens, it would very likely be in Uncle Sam’s best interest to allow us to continue our efforts with as few obstacles as possible. Even the government knows that an unhappy engineer is an unproductive engineer - and unproductive engineers don’t build spy weapons so good…

So, we were assured, that we’d probably be kept pretty happy, but would likely have to produce, not one, but two kinds of AppleSeed Networks - one for the powerful, and one for the rest of us.

You know, I should be careful with language like that — they may be watching. The above should have read: “One for law enforcement and capital “I”, intelligence, and the other for commercial purposes.” Remember, we strive for inclusiveness in the Nerditude.

So, after much procrastinating, and Googling, and sweating, and conniving, we sent a reply to DA MAN…

As far as you need be concerned, it said, “blah blah blah, blah blah blah, would welcome the opportunity to introduce you to AppleSeed Networks…blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah…”

Then, we waited. Two days we waited. Was our email being analyzed as some kind of encrypted terrorist “chatter” or some thinly-veiled threat? Would NSA stormtroopers, or some black-clad, Gargoyle-wearing, X-Files-thought-police be kicking in the door of our beloved HQ? Was DA MAN testing us?

No chance, DA MAN was just busy. I guess he has to scare the bejesus out of more folks than just us in a given week.

Eventually, he reached out via a polite phone call to introduce himself. And guess what? DA MAN ain’t nothing like you’d think. He’s not Michael Ironside in “The Falcon and the Snowman”, or the guy who played “Cancer Man” on the X-Files.

You know what he’s like?

Remember the cat who played DA MAN in E.T.? I do, ’cause it was the first time I remember seeing Peter Coyote do his thang on the big screen. DA MAN is like that: chill, but determined - and soft spoken in a way that almost makes you think he’s not capable of total right-wing evilness.

So, DA MAN called us on the phone, and explained in a very mellow, chilled-out way that he was a retired navy guy, who was now working for a gigundus government contractor. The contractor was actively seeking small businesses that might be interested in partnering with them on an SBIR project or two, and our work seemed to impresses them.

You can follow the link to understand more about the SBIRs, but in a nutshell, for a company like AppleSeed, it can mean up to $1Million in government grants to solve problems that we’re probably already solving. That’s grants, not loans - you don’t have to pay them back.

So, without any additional fan-fare or explanation (who needs an explanation when someone is waving $1 Million in your face?), we invited him to our offices, agreeing, like we would do with any kind of commercial interest, to sign a mutual NDA, and then hold a reasonably open conversation.

Now, a little something should be said about this NDA. But I’ve gone too long on this already, and I owe you guys a second post this month anyway, so I’ll stop here, and pick it up from here next time.

So, until then, Merry, Happy, Holy Holidays from the Nerditude. Be good, and if you can’t be, then at least don’t piss off DA MAN!