Interesting news + Cigar questions

So as some of you may or may not know, I work as a consultant focusing on implementation of budgeting and forecasting software solutions. Well, we chose to use a tool called Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 as or package of choice. It was a good tool, lots of cool features and it seemed to compete well with the big guys out there (Oracle, SAP, and IBM). So we are just getting our sales team going on this, and we had created some packaged deals that they could sell. We also were getting interested clients on the phone and doing may demos! Life is great for our little group.

Well, yesterday, I am tooling around a PerformancePoint Blog, and what do I see, "PerformancePoint: Dead, Microsoft kills planning product". WHAT! Oh crap, ten months into this job and this is the second time something like this has happened. So the President of the company catches wind of this, and now there are three options, 1) go back to selling old product (IBM Cognos), 2) wait on SAP to release a better priced version of there tool, or 3) just dump the budgeting and planning idea all together.

Well, needless to day option #3 is not something that I would really be looking forward to. With the economy the way it is right now this makes me worried. At least I have other skills that the company sees as valuable, and I have gotten 2 certifications in the 10 months I've been here, one in PerformancePoint, and the other in a dashboarding tool. All in all I think I am safe, but the downside is this is not really what I want to do with my job. Of course I will keep working as there are not many good jobs out there now, and I am currently able to support my family 100%, but it seems I would need to look elsewhere in the future to reach my career goals. But than again maybe not. This was all just a horrible shock to the system yesterday, and I am still trying to wrap my head around it.

In other news, I smoked a Pepin Firecracker the other night (it was cold so the little guy was perfect). It was really great little powerful smoke. The spicy was there and it was a great 30min cigar! I would love to get my hands on more of them, but for a 3 inch cigar, I would have a hard time buying them.

So I have 3 Cigar questions, and feel free to answer them in the comment section.

1) Name the best cigar that no one has ever heard of.
2) what is the best flavor you get from your cigars.
3) what is the best Internet site that is cigar centric.

All in all, things will work out. I have no real control over the situation, so we shall have to just wait and see what happens. I am right now upset at Microsoft, and the situation there, but again, that just makes me mad and solves nothing. Everything will work out in the end, I just need to give it some time. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future.