I was pretty exhausted when the alarm went off at five thirty this morning. I did not want to get out of bed at all. I slowly got up and took a shower. Then I napped on the floor for fifteen minutes before actually dragging myself out the door. I had tried logging in to the office from home but there was some problem with my workstation so I was unable to get in. I had some info that I needed before getting on to the road so I drove over to the office and logged in there and worked for a little bit, restarted my workstation and printed out the info that I needed. Then it was on to the road to drive down to Austin.
I discovered just about immediately that my work BlackBerry was not working so I was not able to send or receive any emails. Great. So much for working from the road. I also had a long conference call this morning but they never opened the conference bridge so that was a waste as well. I had expected to have been able to have worked from the car while driving for that call since really I am just listening in and not actually participating in any significant way.
The drive down went fine until I needed the GPS in North Austin. The BMW GPS, which is pretty useless at the best of times, is completely worthless in Austin. It never knew what road I was on and kept trying to turn me into businesses rather than on roads. It kept confusing the highway with the side roads and often would send me into nowhere. We are so not impressed with BMW’s ability to make a guidance system.
It was around ten when I arrived at the SpiceWorks offices on the northwest side of Austin. The party officially was to start at noon so I was a bit early. The plan was that I was going to set up and work from the offices there. I had my laptop and everything. But the guest wireless system was not set up so I was really screwed – no computer, no BlackBerry and, just to make things worse, no cell service. I knew that there was no phone service – we learned that the last time that we were here and Dominica was not able to reach us all afternoon.
So that was not a good start to the day at all. Now I am out of commission all day and I need to get both my desktop and my BlackBerry fixed on Monday. Argh.
The party was a lot of fun. There was tons of food and I got interviewed on the live webcast. Several people emailed me within seconds of seeing me on the webcast. It was just a quick five minute interview about having won the Innovator of the Year award last year and what it meant to hit one million users, etc. I also got interviewed by the camera crew for a documentary that they are doing. No idea when that will be produced. That was pretty cool. That was like a real television shoot, more or less. Lots of ligths, real cameras, a director, an interviewer, I was mic’d, etc.
I left Austin around six and drove back up to Irving. I was after nine when I finally got back home. I logged in to the office and worked until after midnight. Getting done what I could. At least I get to sleep in tomorrow so it isn’t so bad. I’m going to be doing a lot of work over the weekend to make up for having lost so much time today.
Dominica, Francesca and the kids arrived in Frankfort around five. The drive went pretty well for them today. They are very tired now.