Sheep Guarding Llama

I was in the office again today.  It is going to be a crazy day as we learn more about the project that we might be on, continue building the team and sit around wondering if we are going to be heading down to Houston to go to the airport to head off to Saudi Arabia or not.  Far from a normal day.

Some of the guys from SpiceCorps met me at Redneck for lunch.  They brought back some phones that I had lent to them to demo.  I also got to hear the horror stories from their office.  They are no longer getting paid and the company is going under but hasn’t laid people off yet.  Not a good situation.  They are really stressed out.

We got a little more information on the project this afternoon, but not very much.  Information is trickling in but we really wont know anything solid until Monday.

After work I ran up to Plano with Chris and Andrew to meet up with Andrew’s friend Kara for beers at a specialty beer place up there.  We had a good time and hung out for a while. I spent quite a bit of time on the phone dealing with logistics for Saudi Arabia.  We have nearly a full team ready to go at this point.

After beers we drove back and went to Redneck for late night drinks before going home.  We are sitting waiting to head to Saudi Arabia at any moment, or not at all.  No idea what is going on.

Some of the guys on the team work with a datacenter in Dallas that is aware of there having been a major security breach over there and is wondering if we might be being sent over in conjunction with that issue.  Interesting, but it seems unlikely.

It is going to be a long weekend wondering what is going on.

This morning I found out that there is a project going on in the middle east, no details yet, for which I need to assemble a team of eight generalists who, together, can handle just about anything that can be thrown at them, which is critical because no one knows what is going to be thrown at them.  And I have to do it today.  So this is fun.

I spent much of the day trying to figure out who might be available.  There was a lot of time spent standing outside in the blistering Texas heat talking on the phone.  What a sweaty day.

By mid-afternoon we had a team assembled with enough people committed or nearly committed that we were able to give a go-ahead to the project.  We don’t have any details and projects like this always fall apart, especially when all of the details are not readily available.  So we will see where this goes.  But it makes for an exciting day.

We will know a whole lot more tomorrow.  As for now, I really don’t know anything and it is going to be an interesting weekend, most likely.

We were really exhausted today after being up so late last night.  It was closer to three thirty or even four in the morning before Dominica and I were able to get off to sleep.  The SpiceCorps group didn’t leave until after three.  Then we did a little bit of cleanup as there was food and stuff all over, pizza to put in the fridge, things to pick up.  It was a good event, though, lots of people.  Really happy with the turnout.

I was in the office today, but sure didn’t want to be.  Chris and I had lunch at Redneck today.

Not a lot going on today.  Got to get the house cleaned up a bit, though, because we only have nine days before the next SpiceCorps event is going on here.  No time to sit back and relax for us.

Today is our second attempt at holding SpiceCorps DFW at Dominica and my house.  The last one was just before we left for Europe and that went pretty well.  I had some stuff that I needed to do in the office this morning so I went in and worked until lunch time and then came home to spend the afternoon helping Dominica get ready for tonight’s event as much as possible.  There is a crazy amount of work that goes into having this many people over for an event at your house.

Over the last week we have bought a new Optoma 1080p projector to use for our presentations and last night we ran out to get a pop-up presentation screen at Fry’s.  We are pretty well prepared for this stuff now.

It was a crazy afternoon trying to get the house ready and trying to get the presentation ready and, of course, people started arriving more than an hour before the event so we were busing “hosting” while still trying to just get the basics set up.

The meeting tonight was, I feel, quite a success.  We had a large turnout of forty-six people which sets the all time SpiceCorps record and does so with a completely “normal” meeting, nothing particularly special about this meeting whatsoever.  It seems that we have a really healthy group getting together now.

The house was completely packed with all of those people in it.  We were crammed in like sardines almost.  We had Alt-N, the software company from over in Gradevine, come in and demonstrate their MDaemon email product.  Plantronics came in and showed off some of their stuff, mostly bluetooth headsets.  One of the SpiceWorks developers gave the presentation on the new features of SpiceWorks 6.0.  I gave a presentation on SMB IT Architectural Patterns.  The recording is not the best and it got chopped off at the end because the battery died.  Really need to get someone to run the AV stuff for the next time as we are just not getting usable recordings of anything no matter how much work we put into it.  Once we get down to the actual event there is just zero time to do anything whatsoever.

We ended up hanging out until just after three in the morning.  I am going to be quite exhausted tomorrow.

I’m in the office today.  We are on the home stretch in our current office in Las Colinas before moving.  Rumour is that we will be moving (but only a few miles away towards the airport) to new offices there.  Not too surprising as these rumours have been flying around since even before we moved into our current offices.  We’ve been under a constant swirl of “moving” rumors for three full years now and we have not moved a single time in all that time.  In fact, at my current job where I have been for over six year and have moved approximately nine times, I have been at this one particular desk for not that much less than half of my entire time with the company.  So, that means that I am moving only about one sixth as often as I did when we were not constantly under “moving” rumours.  Weird, I know.  The more that we hear that we are going to move the less likely it is that it will actually happen.

This afternoon I had to run to the UPS store around the corner from the office to drop off the package of the Netgear ProSecure UTM 10 firewall and the Netgear ProSafe fifty-two port switch which need to ship up to Danielle in New York for her office renovations.  They have the office nearly done up there with the new walls, new desks, all new colour scheme, coffee station, Otis Spunkmeyer oven, under-desk rack for networking gear and now all they need is this networking gear so that we can get them up and running.  They are hosting SpiceCorps Upstate NY up there very soon and they want all of this in place before then so that everything will look all nice and neat.

After hitting the UPS store I went next door with Dan to Sweet Frog, the new frozen yoghurt place that has just opened up there, to see how it was.  It was okay but not as good as the place that Dominica and I normally use up on Frankford.

Got home this evening and all that we did was work on getting ready for SpiceCorps DFW which is being held at our house tomorrow.  There is so much work to do for that.  We were working on that a bit this past weekend as well.  We are currently looking at sixty RSVPs, which we will not get, but it does imply that we are going to get a very large number of people at our house and we need to be ready.  Should be a really good meeting tomorrow, I am excited (and a bit overwhelmed.)