I love those foam #1 fingers you can buy from your favorite sports teams. You know the ones you slip on over your hand that makes it look like a cartoon character paw has suddenly grown out of your arm? They’ve been around forever and we’ve had our Washington Redskins foam finger for at least the past five years. So when our new puppy tore it to shreds, it seemed a fitting departure – after all, the ‘Skins have been horrendous for ten years. Maybe this little bit of canine-demolition will end the bad mojo the ‘Skins have been under. It’s been a tough ten years to be a fan. Especially after last year’s Monday night game when they tried a fake field goal – twice in a row – on national television, and failed badly. As my friend Perry from Dallas Cowboy-land said “Tim, that just ain’t right.”

So, the Redskins clean house. And maybe with the owner letting football guys run the football team, we have a prayer to be competitive again.

Football guys running football. What a concept. Cue the segue.

I’ve looked at the trade show space here in our industry a year after the Great Upheaval and the deployment of the new Cable Connects Spring and Fall shows. Us media types are always taking the pulse of the exhibitors at the show and it seems that the cable guys running cable did a pretty darn good job. I know a lot of scrambling was done, especially for the associations who had to cancel convention hall contracts, re-book space, advise exhibitors, re-sell the space, find room blocks, heck – even find a new CITY – and get it all to work in about half the time. (I especially throw kudos to Lori Bower and team at SCTE who moved a 10,000-attendee show four months and managed to execute the show in 20 inches of snow and STILL got a decent turnout.)

I’ll admit, I was against it at first. I really felt CTAM, the SCTE’s Emerging Technologies Conference and the Cable-Tec EXPO, and NCTA’s Cable Show all had viable reasons to stand alone. And while I don’t know if the numbers were equitable when co-located as far as attendees, my guess is that if they weren’t last year, they will be this year. Did the shows at the tail end of the week suffer or benefit? Dunno. But as an attendee at both of Spring and Fall, I was expecting “chaos” – and I got “calm.” I’m sure behind the scenes it was a bit more frantic.  The only thing I’d ask is that the operator community encourage more manager-level employees to make the time to go. There was a lot of technology that needed to be seen. I certainly got an eyeful.

Nice job cable. Seems like when it comes to trade shows, you have your mojo working.