When I “retired” fifteen months ago after 35 years at IBM, my friends and colleagues held an “e-tirement” party. I’ll never forget it. What is “e-tirement? Not sure there is a formal definition — I guess it is mostly continuing to do what I have been doing for quite a few years — writing about, speaking about and participating in the world of Internet technology. I don’t play golf or tennis and I never had any thoughts about heading to “the beach”. I have been fortunate to be able to take a couple of nice trips (more on those in another post) but overall e-tirement have been busier than ever. patrickWeb has a section listing recent press coverage and my upcoming presentations. This posting contains some of the highlights. 

Right now I am in West Palm Beach to give a talk at a board meeting of the Enterprise Solutions Division of the Information Technology Association of America. The meeting is at the PGA National Resort & Spa. Too bad I don’t play golf! Next week I’ll be speaking, along with Howard Morgan of Idealabs, at the City of Yonkers 2003 Business Week Conference in Yonkers, New York. In both cases, I will be talking about “The Future Of The Internet” and will focus on WiFi, web services, e-business on demand and the state of e-business. Later in the month I’ll be at the Federal Trade Commission conference on spam where I will be speaking on a panel about legislation. As you know from my prior postings on this subject, I am not in favor of legislation — it just can’t work. Technology can. May will be a busy month for e-tirement too and I will post some comments about that later.

On the press side, there has been a lot of interest in what I have had to say about the impact of WiFi on the information technology and telecommunications industries. I spent some time talking about this with Matthew Miller, Special Projects Editor at EDN and CommVerge which is part of the Reed Electronics Group.He did a very thorough job of exploring WiFi and it’s potential. The title of Michael’s story is “Wave propagation“. Mark Langlois at the Danbury News-Times visited my home office and wrote a story called “Net guru John Patrick hot for ‘Wi-Fi’“.