Skip to main content

Considerably smaller than Texas...

Well, after jonron's nagging, I figured I better post something!

It's weird - being so far away from home and in such a strange foreign place - you'd think that I'd have all kinds of things to say, but in truth most of the time I'm either so busy with work that I don't have time to post, or so lonely that I don't want to burden you all with my misery... (sob!)



Anyway - I'm currently posting from the Best Western Hotel in Corpus Christi, Texas. (We have a TRIM Customer here who needs some help with configuring their records management system, so Simon and I have been helping out. ) I'm not sure that I'd ever want to stay at the Worst Western. Or even the Average Western, but no matter...

Texas has been a pretty entertaining place to visit. Our efforts at finding a place to park ended in a church parking lot where the sign said "Clergy Only - Sinners Will be Prosecuted (and towed)" When we finally found the office, there was another giant sign on the door that informed us that
"under no circumstances were we allowed to bring out weapons indoors", and the green scrolling display in the elevator welcomed us to the building for June 28th, 1907 (the only functioning y2k crisis I've ever seen!).

We eventually found a pay parking place where you had to poke rolled up dollar bills through a miniscule hole into a giant tin box that matched the number of the position you parked in. Again, the sign said - "Use a key, stick or the official stuffer to insert bills"...

But the people here are wonderfully friendly, and I figured out why so many of them are all so fat! We had the most delicious enormous cheeseburgers and fries for about 4.95 - and with beer being 2$ a Pint, and 32 varieties on tap, there was plenty of indulging to be done...It was open mic night at the Corpus Executive Surf Club, and the talent on display was really pretty amazing. I guess for every hugely talented American musician, there are about 3 hundred pretty talented amateurs.

(Corpus Christi seems pretty proud of their 'surf''. I didn't have the heart to tell them how sad it was. There were some pretty stoked surfers around- hey, it's hurricane season!)

Early morning starts make me ever so weary - I got up at 3:30 to do the Dulles to Dallas flight, so It's time to retire. But I'll try to post more adventures soon!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going West vs Going to Sleep

Phew! That was one busy adventure to the other side of this wide brown land (It is wide, and brown, but mainly wide) TUF 2005 in Perth was the launching ground for our new product, ice. Stilly and I were presenting the keynote, which was based around showing off ice, and talking about collaboration and other reasons why a bunch of customers might want to buy it. In a stroke of genius\insanity, we decided to let the audience pick the demonstration platform based on random outcomes - we built a giant cardboard die with various operating systems and platforms written on each side - then we'd let a volunteer from the audience roll the dice(die?) to determine which platform we should do our demo on. ice (the italics belong to the marketing department) works on any platform, so we were pretty confident that we would be okay. But, what I hadn't counted on (those italics are mine), was my crummy laptop (which was acting as the server) deciding that it would be a good idea to hibernat...
2 comments
Read more

Still Crazy

When I started with TOWER Software four years ago, I was keen to get on with the job. You know, new project manager guy and all, trying to figure out what was what, and who was who. As part of this breaking-in process, I went around and asked each developer what they were working on, and how long they estimated that their current project would take. I'll admit that I had a secret agenda - it's important to find out who are the overly optimistic guys, and who are the more seasoned realists, because you're supposed to adjust your project schedules accordingly.. Anyway, I collected all this data and feed it into a secret Gantt chart I had somewhere. Most of the team were working on features that were being shipped in the next few months, and I got the broad range of overly positive responses, which is pretty common. I know I'm a terribly optimistic estimator. (Incidentally, if you're like me, my advice is to always multiply your estimate by the value of pi in order to ...
2 comments
Read more

The height of Retro cool?

Like Rory , I grew up with a lame arse PC. I too was bitterly jealous of those amiga owners. With their fancy fandanlged-hand-holding-a-floppy-disk bios, and versions of Marble Madness that looked just like the arcade, they had no idea how lucky they were. But, I'm not so sure that the grey box which evaporated my childhood, (while I'm very fond of it) was actually the height of eighties cool. In fact, the computer I owned was far, far worse than the virtual boy of PCs - something that made those poor betamax owners laugh themselves into hysterical coniptions as to what a loser of a product this thing actually was, and they paid 450 dollars for a flashing digital clock. My dad bought us a genuine, IBM PC-JX. The IBM PC-Jr is widely regarded as one of IBM's dumbest decisions. What very few know, is that after the IBM PC-Jr flopped dismally in the US, IBM was left with a bunch of leftover hardware that nobody wanted. I can hear the meetings now: shimmery dissolve in "Jo...
2 comments
Read more