Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy was I dragging when I woke up to the alarm this morning.  Another night with just three hours of sleep.  Ouch.  I am getting run down very quickly.  I am rather thankful that there is nothing planned for tomorrow.

I got to SpiceWorld just after eight.  This morning’s breakfast was pastries and very yummy.  I ate outside with some friends.  Then it was time to head into the theater where I was going to be presenting my breakout session.  It was nine in the morning and my presentation started at ten.  I had not even started my slidedeck for my presentation!  Nothing like leaving everything for the last minute.

I worked from the front of the theater while they were setting up my laptop to the projector putting my slides together.  I actually find that doing my slides at the very last minute works really well because it allows me to get into the groove and be all prepared for the talk in a way that just reviewing does not do at all.

The presentation went really well, I think.  It is really impossible as the presenter to really know how it goes. Even when you get formal feedback you really do not have a very good idea of what people really thought.

This is a stub… more to come eventually…

I was pretty tired when the alarm went off this morning. I dragged myself out of bed, checked email and all of that stuff then jumped into the shower.  I was ready in good time and out the door a few minutes before eight.  So roughly three hours of sleep.  Probably not a wise way to start the week.

I stepped out of the hotel into a surprisingly brisk, yet very sunny, morning.  I am not quite sure what to expect from Austin weather.  So far, so good.

The drive to SoCo and the Alamo Drafthouse Theater was fairly easy although the GPS was extremely confused and really wanted to slam me into the side of a ramp.

I arrived a little late for breakfast but there was still plenty to eat and plenty of time to eat it.  The breakfast burritos that they had were really good and there were plenty of vegetarian options too, which is always a concern in Texas.  While eating breakfast I ran into someone that I knew from the SpiceWorks community and we ate breakfast together.  It turned out that we were also on some email correspondence with each other separately and had not realized that we were talking to the same people in three different locations.  That is one of the awesome things about SpiceWorks (and SpiceCorps too) – getting to meet people in person and making those connections that you had not imagined were there previously.

After breakfast I can into the keynote.  I was quite late but Dave and Justin had saved me a seat right in the middle of the front row which was awesome.  This keynote ended up being the only single session that I was able to completely attend all week, which was very unfortunate.

After the keynote I got to stay in the same theatre for the “coffee talk with the founders” as the four founders of SpiceWorks discussed the state of the company and the software and the market.  Then it was time for Dave and my panel discussion: “How to Do More with Less & Be Indispensible in a Down Economy” which was quite fun. Michael Coté from Redmonk was our moderator.  Michael is a bit of an IT celebrity and a really great moderator.  It was a lot of fun being on his panel.  I also, apparently, publicly coined the term “residential datacenter” during the panel discussion.  I was told that throughout the week people would be heard to be discussing “residential datacenters.”  We’ve been using the term for a long time.  I’d forgotten that it was an internal term and not a general one.  Well, it’s general now!

After the panel discussion there was too much office work to be done and my laptop was running low on charge so I set up shop at the “power station” in the hallway of the conference and worked from there.  There was open WiFi at the show and that worked great so I was able to just work away in the hallway.  Several people, like Dave, Grey, Maggie, Justin, Jen, etc., came over and hung out at the power station so I was never lonely.  Actually being there rather than in sessions was probably the best way for me to get to meet a lot of people.  It ended up working out really well.

Lunch was awesome.  It was a big BBQ so the carnivores definitely make out but the salad and grilled veggie sandwiches were awesome for us veggies.  Definitely plenty of food for everyone.

I spent the afternoon in the hallway still.  There was a lot of work to do and I just did not have the option of being pulled away from my laptop.  I am very thankful for my new HP laptop.  It was really important for me to have a powerful workstation that I could use this week rather than working from one of the smaller, older laptops that we have been using.  I am really going to appreciate this machine when we are in Walt Disney World in November.  What a difference it is going to make then!

After the show was done for the day they had buses come and take us to Maggie Mae’s in downtown Austin near sixth.  Avaya was sponsoring tonight and had a special SpiceWorks cocktail made just for the occasion but it was a bit of a girly drink (cranberry vodka martini like thing… um, no) so most everyone avoided it.  We went for the beer instead.

I ended up never making it really into the party but was at the bar, right near the entrance, for the entire evening.  The night out at Maggie Mae’s was great, though, because I really got a chance to meet tons of people that I really did not get to see at SpiceWorld itself.  It was a very nice party. I do wish that I had had a chance to head outside onto the terrace and see the action out there too but there was a lot of great conversation going on by the bar so I am glad that I was around for that most definitely.  It has been an entire day of meeting awesome people.  I am most definitely coming back to SpiceWorld Austin next year.  I am very sad that I am not able to schedule it to make it to SpiceWorld London but that is just four days after Dominica, Liesl and I returned from ten days in Florida so there is no way that I could make that.

While we were at Maggie Mae’s I met Jarrad who introduced himself to me and told me that he reads Sheep Guarding Llama semi regularly!  That is always one of the most surprising things to hear, especially when you are very far from home.  I am not quite so surprised when I hear it from family and friends or even from neighbours with whom I share a lot of things (driveways, UPS drivers, etc.) but when I am over halfway across the country (and a very large country it is) and you find out that someone knows all about you because they read your blog it is very weird indeed!  It isn’t like SGL is a tech journal.  This is me just rambling on about nothing in particular.

After the party at Maggie Mae’s wrapped up a handful of us decided that it was time to head out for the real after party.  It ended up being just five of us, Darren, Jarrad, Dave, Ted and myself heading out to Sixth Street, right around the corner, to experience Austin.  Three Austinites and two out of towners (Ft. Lauderdale and New York) out for the serious SpiceWorld after event.

We ended up at a little place called Touche’s.  The Sixth Street stretch would really remind you of the bar district of Montreal for those who are used to the north’s party towns rather that the south west’s.  I got a chance to experience the apparently Austin classic, a Flaming Dr. Pepper.  From reading the description on Wikipedia it sounds pretty tame.  But when you get it in a tiny bar in Austin and the barmaid lights her hands on fire and breaths fire from the bar to the back wall setting your drinks and the bar itself on fire it seems a lot more impressive.

We had a really good time out at Touche’s.  It was tempting to go pub crawling but I have to speak tomorrow and everyone needs to get up quite early to get to the conference.  So we called it a night around two, I think.  It was around three in the morning when I finally got to bed.  Plenty of time to get three more hours of sleep before getting up tomorrow.  It was nice getting a chance to see the “real Austin” that Austin is famous for – the UT party district.

This morning Dominica and I took the girls out to Waffle House for a late breakfast.  I had been up early working today before anyone else got up, other than Francesca who was up while it was still dark and was off to the hospital.

Not much to report today.  Pretty much I just worked all day from the house.  Then, in the middle of the afternoon, I had to get onto the road to drive out to Austin.  Just a little while before I left for the day Bennie got home from the hospital.  He was feeling pretty good.  They were not able to find anything wrong with him so they really do not have a clear idea, it appears, of exactly what happened.

My drive out to Austin was uneventful.  It takes a little over three hours to go from Houston to Austin.  It was overcast and rained a bit of my way there.  It was an interesting drive for me only because I have never driven through the south west side of Houston, through Sugarland, on the Sam Houston Tollway so there was some new stuff to see there and once I was out on 290 heading northwest up to Austin that was all completely new to me.

I always enjoy driving in new places.  Texas has so much reputation that I am always amazed when driving around it just how much different it is than how you expect it to be.  You always think of it as being so much more dry than it really is.  In reality Houston is a lot like central Florida and the trip towards Austin is a lot like the Carolinas in many ways as far as the slowly rolling open farmland.

I got into Austin just in time to rush to my hotel, get checked in but not actually go into the room at the Comfort Suites on St. Elmo.  I ordered a cab immediately and ran across the street in the ran to hit an ATM.  The taxi came so quickly that I was still at the ATM when they arrived at the hotel.  The desk clerk told them were I was and they picked me up in the street helping to keep me slightly drier than I might have been otherwise.

Tonight is the kickoff to SpiceWorks’ SpiceWorld 2009 in Austin.  The meet and greet event tonight is at the Cedar Door right in Austin.  This is my first time really being in the city at all.  I was in Ausin a few months ago but only drove around the city on the expressway and went to the SpiceWorks offices on the northwest side but never got anywhere near downtown so this was nice to get the see the city that we plan to call home in the very near future.

I walked in and immediately knew several people there.  Paul from SpiceCorps NY and Ashley from SpiceWorks were the first people that I recognized without even needing to sneak in past the front doors.  Almost immediately, Dave Scammell came in being the very next person after me to arrive and I recognized him right away.  Dave and I were actually already planning to see each other in Florida in just a few weeks when we are down in Disney World at the end of November.  It is just coincidence that we both happened to be ending up here in Austin for SpiceWorld this week.  I also met Justin Dorfman for the first time although he and I have also, like many people here, been speaking via email and the SpiceWorks community for some time now.

The meet and greet party was really nice.  Great food and a nice kickoff to the week.  It was nice to get to meet a lot of people and to get to see the SpiceWorks folks that I met a few months ago again.  The event was only supposed to be for about two hours but several of us decided that we wanted to stay later so we ordered whiskeys (and then scotch) and hung out for another hour or two.  Paul was awesome and gave me a ride back to my hotel so that I would not have to pay for a cab.  This week is going to be expensive enough.  Luckily he is staying at the Clarion just a few blocks away from me.

It was around midnight when I got back to the hotel.  I got into the room itself and set up the laptop and verified that I was, in fact, able to get online and do work.  I ended up actually working until around three in the morning.  Dominica and I spoke over email at around two.  Then it was off to bed.  The actual SpiceWorld convention begins tomorrow morning at eight at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in SoCo.  So I need to get sleep, get dressed and find my way there in just five total hours.

Just before leaving on Monday I learned that I had been scheduled to speak on a panel discussion tomorrow morning along with Dave.  I had known that Dave was going to be speaking on the panel but did not know that I was until the last minute.  It should be fun.  This is my first time speaking on a panel in front of a live audience.  I have done an online panel before but that is not the same.  This should be a lot of fun.  I am really looking forward to it.

It was super early this morning when the alarm went off.  About four thirty!  We got up, packed up the hotel room, showered and got out the door.  It was still completely dark when the hotel shuttle picked us up and took us off to the airport which is just around the corner.  Albany is such a convenient place from which to fly.  Large enough to have what you need but small enough to not be a hassle at all.

We were at the airport nice and early.  Like around a quarter till seven in the morning.  Still dark up here in Albany.  It was a rather brisk morning too.  So we are looking forward to the anticipated weather that will greet us when we arrive at Houston Hobby.

Today is Liesl’s first time in an airport, let alone flying.  It is also our first time taking a baby through security.

We got into the airport and got our tickets sorted right away.  That bit was easy.  Going through security proved to be the real challenge.  We had not really thought through just how hard this would be to do while carrying a baby.  It is hard enough to take off your shoes, pull apart your carryons  and get everything through the X-ray machine and the metal detector under the best of conditions.  Add in Liesl and all of her paraphernalia and you have rather a significant challenge on your hands.

We are rough travelers to begin with.  We have my laptop, loads of BlackBerrys and, of course, my CPAP which always has to be swabbed down and checked thoroughly because it is an air filtration device and impossible to see clearly in the X-ray machine.  With Liesl we also have to have one of us carry Liesl through the entire process, get her stroller through the X-ray and have her formula bottles checked just like my CPAP.  It is nearly impossible to do all of this with only two adults to guide the process.  I have no idea how one adult or two adults with two or more small children could possibly do this.  We are very thankful that we were doing this at Albany and not JFK or some other crazily busy airport.

Once we were through security we had enough time to get a quick breakfast and eat in the terminal.

The first leg of our flight was very short, Albany to Baltimore-Washington.  Liesl’s first time in the air!  We were really nervous flying with her.  We had no idea how she would react to the entire process.  Fortunately she fell completely asleep the instant that we headed down the runway.  We could not have asked for a better behaved baby.  She slept the entire flight to BWI.  As easy as could be.  She woke up when we disembarked to make our connecting flight.

We did not, apparently, allow enough time to make our connecting flight considering Liesl.  Getting off of the plane took longer than expected.  Then we had to get the stroller and get to the next gate.  Then Dominica had to take Liesl for a diaper change before getting onto the next plane but they started boarding families with small children before she even made it to the restrooms!  Talk about cutting it close.  We ended up being the next to last people to get onto the plane and, since it is SouthWest, we did not have assigned seats so we were not able to get seats together.  Yet again, why I don’t like SouthWest.  As much as people say that boarding is orderly it really is a race and a free-for-all and they do allow families to board together early but if you are coming from a connecting flight that may not be possible, like in this case.  Plus boarding is just so confusing and stressful unnecessarily.  Fortunately a wonderful man gave up his aisle seat allowing us to sit next to each other with Liesl rather than us each having a middle seat and needing to only have one of us able to take care of Liesl the entire time (she rode on our laps!)  It would have been nearly impossible to do it had someone not moved.

Liesl was awake for almost all of this leg of the flight but she still did really well.  She was pretty tired of being stuck in such a tiny space by the time that we arrived but she never cried or screamed the whole way.  She is such a good baby.  She made friends with everyone on the flight and would talk to people as they passed.  The flight crew made her a flight certificate and they all signed it.  It was really cute.  We will have to mount that on her nursery wall when we get a chance.

While on the final approach to Houston Hobby, a guy in the row behind us – which was the very last row in the plane, was asking the guy sitting next to him with some help installed Windows XP onto his brand new Fujitsu tablet PC.  His company had bought him the new unit as he left town, handed him the XP Pro install discs and told him to deal with it himself.  The restore process from Fujitsu was horribly complicated and unnecessarily difficult.  Dramatically more difficult than having a standard XP disc from Microsoft, in fact.  So I volunteered to help since we had to pick up our luggage anyway and that was going to take some time.  So after we got off of the plane he waited for us in the lounge area of the gate and I did a really quick XP install for him to get him up and running.

Francesca called Dominica right after we had landed and said that she had news and that a lot had been going on since we had started traveling but that she would fill us in once we had our luggage and rental car and were on the road.  So we were incredibly curious as to what was going on.

It took quite a bit of work to find the rental car place.  There was no one working the desk and we had to schlep it way out to a bus pickup point to get taken out to the car rental office.  Normally this would have been easy but with this much luggage plus Liesl it was nearly impossible.  I had to go everywhere with her carseat on my back!

We got out to the car rental place and the woman offered me a deal on an upgrade to a minivan because they had one available.  Normally I would not have considered it but I looked at all of the luggage and decided that maybe it was not such a bad idea.  There was a lot of logistical needs this week and it might make sense.  So I sprung for it.  Once we started loading all of our luggage into it we decided that it was probably a good idea.  Boy did we have a lot of luggage!

We got on the road and Dominica called Francesca to find out what was going on.  Francesca told us that she was at the hospital and that Bennie, her husband and our brother in law, had had a minor stroke last night and that he was in the hospital but doing okay for now.  It had happened last night just minutes after Francesca and Dominica had gotten off of the phone with each other just before we arrived in Albany.  We had so much traveling to do today and no way to help with anything until we arrived in Houston that she had decided that it would be best for us to not know until now so that we would not be worrying while on the flight while not being able to do anything.

We diverted to McDonald’s as neither of us had had any real food since breakfast, and that was really early this morning, and we ate at the Grice’s house while we waited for people to get to the house.  Joe got there a while before anyone else did so was the first to really be able to fill us in on what was and had been going on.  I had emailed into the office to let them know that I would work when I could but that I might be needed here so would not be able to guarantee availability.  One of the major benefits of working for a larger company and having a great team is that there are people able to and willing to cover for each other when things happen.  It really makes life a lot easier.

Unfortunately tonight was the SpiceCorps Houston meeting, our second, and I had been scheduled not just to attend but to speak there as well.  I posted to the group’s message board as early as I could to let them know that I would not be able to make it out tonight.  That was really too bad as it was a major reason why we had coordinated to come down to Houston with the timing that we did and the meeting had been scheduled tonight specifically so that I would be able to make it.  It could not be helped, though.

The evening was just spent at the house.  Family came and went to some degree.  Bennie, we were told, was doing rather well but they wanted to keep him in the hospital for observation and some additional testing tomorrow so he would not be coming home tonight.  Francesca came home for just a little while but was really exhausted so we barely got a chance to see her.

Joe, Brit, Dominica, the kids (Madeline, Emily, Garrett and Liesl) all went out to Cracker Barrel for dinner which is pretty close to the house.  Joe and Brit then took Garrett with them and Dominica and I took all of the girls and went back to the Grice’s house for the evening.  It turns out that having the minivan was actually rather important.  Madeline and Emily decided that the minivan was great fun and that they wanted one of these for themselves rather than the Toyota Sequoia.

Madeline put on The Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie for me that they had recorded on DVR.  I have been wanting to watch this made for television movie and it is not available, to the best of my knowledge, on Netflix so this was my chance to see it.  I really like the television show and that is Madeline and my thing to do together – watching silly Disney Channel shows.  So we all, Dominica, Madeline, Emily and I, sat down and watched the movie after Liesl went to bed.  The movie was pretty good, I thought.  Very much a movie version of the show.  It seemed to stay true to the feeling of the show while expanding it into a longer format.

Tomorrow I have to be out in Austin in the evening so it is going to be a very busy day.

Today is our final day to get ready to head out to Texas.  We are leaving for Albany tomorrow as soon as work is done so that we can meet Dominica’s parents in Albany.  They are taking Oreo for the week while we are in Texas. We will be staying in Albany tomorrow night and then flying out first thing in the morning to Houston.  Doing the park and ride makes life a lot easier.

I had to work all day.  No surprise there.  It is Sunday so it is my normal shift.