Read part one of this story, Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium). -- 25 years ago, I was consulting for a software company named AnySoft that was actively trying to hire me to document its breakthrough technology. It had figured out a way to intercept the presentation and underlying data in any Windows app with the aim of making all software interoperable without the need for its authors to specifically adopt OLE or whatever other standards of the day. And as it was ramping for release, it asked me to join them in Israel, where it was based, for a week of strategy meetings. It was too good of an opportunity to miss, so that August, I headed off on what was, at the time, my most distant trip. My experience in Israel that week was notable for many reasons. By that point, I had already been working from home for over five years--I was an outlier in this way until COVID normalized WFH, as we now call it, starting in 2020. And when one of the execs called my hotel room on the second morning to tell me that we'd all be heading into the office soon, I jokingly pretended to be confused because I had just gone to the office the previous day. And it was fascinating to swim in the Mediterranean Sea, visit the many historic and religious sites in Jerusalem, and see a part of the world I have yet to return to all these years later. But the most notable part of this experience, perhaps, was the security. Even in the pre-9/11 world, Israel was a fortified island. It was--and is--surrounded by enemies that wish for nothing less than its total annihilation, and it has long lived with the daily threat of that annihilation using strategies that are still unfamiliar to those of us in the rest of the western world, despite the escalation of terrorism worldwide over the intervening wars. Here in the U.S. we saw glimpses of this reality post-9/11, of course, and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings were closer to home than I'd ever wanted for my children. But we have no idea what it means to be under constant threat. We had been briefed about the security protocols before the trip. And as you might expect, we were routinely searched, and sidelined, as we traveled around, at the airport and via regular militarized roadblocks. The most disconcerting of these events, oddly, occurred when we flew home. I was traveling with an American employee of the company, a guy I worked with closely before, during, and after the trip. And the security procedure at the airport was beyond anything we experience to this day in the U.S. We were interviewed in separate rooms by different individuals, each backed by armed security. We had to explain what we had done in Israel and then provide documentation that proved what we said. Among other things, we had to turn on our laptops and then show them what was in whatever folders and documents. It was more than a little intimidating. But it ended, eventually, as all things do. And then the person who interviewed me lef... The post More Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium) appeared first on Thurrott.com.