My week so far
Aug. 13th, 2008 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesthattomFriday: wake up early and fly to airport. Sit in LAX for 10 hours waiting for my flight. I flew in earlier than I had to because if I missed this flight, I’d have to wait 24 hours for the next one. That’s happened to me before, so I took the only flight available that was earlier. Of course, this means that all flights would be on time. Luckily, the airport has WiFi and I have an IPASS account so it gets billed to my employer.
Saturday didn’t exist. I crossed the international date line. The flight was pretty good. I couldn’t sleep as much as I wanted, but the Video On Demand system had classic movies! I got to watch 2 movies I’d never gotten to see before because “i never had time”. Well, locked in an airplane you have time. I watched “Gone with the Wind (1939)” which was fantastic OMG. Then I watched “Giant (1956)” which I had not heard of before, but what couldn’t be great about a movie with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, right? Wow, what an amazing story about a Texas cattle rancher which happens to give an interesting view into the life of the rich of the north east, Texans (and texas history), and the racial/economic discrepancy in our society. It was 3.5 hours long and really had 2 or 3 full movies worth of plot in it. Considering the year it came out, it was pretty progressive for how it handled certain issues (or that it mentioned them at all). I feel like I have a better understanding of modern history because of this movie.
Sunday: landed in Adelaide at around 10am. The taxi driver made racist comments about Indians for nearly the entire ride. Got to the hotel and ran into Geoff and other friends. We hung out then I went and took a shower. Oh god it felt good to shower and shave. I went back to the lobby and Geoff, Elizabeth, Opal and I went to get lunch. While on the way we stopped to buy a SIM for my cell phone since the one my company supplied with me specifically for international travel was not, in fact, set up correctly. At least it is an unlocked phone.
The phone store would have been extremely frustrating if the salesperson wasn’t so friendly. It took 10 minutes to figure out which SIM I could use and explain to me how billing works in Australia. It seems that phone calls cost about $1 per minute and that hasn’t changed forever. However, over time companies have started offer to sell you that $100 worth of phone time for only $16! So after Geoff explained this to me about 4 times (he’s so patient) I ended up buying $300 phone time for $50. I think.
After lunch we went to a Haigh chocolate store. I held back from buying anything.
I was starting to feel a cold coming on and hoping I wasn’t going to be too sick to teach my tutorials.
We agreed to meet back in the lobby for dinner. I went to my room, fell asleep, and woke up the next day.
Monday: I worked remotely for the morning. I had a lot of email to catch up on but at the same time I was feeling sicker and sicker. I asked a local person if they’re called “pharmacies” or “chemists” in this country (it turns out both terms are used) and then asked if he knew where there was one near by.
The pharmacy I went to was wonderful. I was standing in the “cold and flu” section looking confused (many of the products are called something different here) for about 2 minutes before an employee came up to me and did a better job of diagnosing my situation than some doctor’s I’ve been to. She walked me through a logical decision tree and determined that considering my symptoms and my preferences and we decided “sudafed PE”. One pill every 4 hours, no more than 3 times a day. Thus, for the days I teach tutorials I’ll be managing everything in 4-hour timeslots.
In the afternoon I taught “Hiring Great Technical People”. It’s a 3-hour class about how to do better interviewing and wrap it around a great hiring process. It is based on the “hiring” chapter in the second edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration. People liked it. This was the first time I did this tutorial and I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be. There were only 9 students, which is a sign of the economy. However I made the point that when the economy is bad and we aren’t hiring many people it becomes even more critical to hire the absolute best. Afterwords I realized that when the economy is bad people get flooded with resumes, so the tips on how to manage the entire process becomes more important.
The neat thing about this tutorial is that for each section I would read aloud an interview horror-story from TheDailyWTF.com and ask, “What can we learn from this story?” By the end of the class, people were given the tools and techniques to avoid all the major problems described in those stories.
Monday evening I went out to dinner with people from the conference. We had Thai at a place 5-6 blocks away. I hate Thai but I was with a big group. I had the most un-Thai-like thing on the menu and it was ok. (note: because I go out in large groups a lot, I think I eat at a Thai restaurant about once a month; more than any other Thai-food-disliker in the planet, I’m sure)
Tuesday: I taught 2 half-day tutorials, so I was on my feet the entire day. Both classes were PACKED, which was awesome. Full of sudafed and surrounded by tissue boxes, I did my Time Management class in the morning. I think it went really well... I recently re-wrote most of the slides and I’m much happier with the format now. To keep people awake, it has a lot of anecdotes and funny rants.
How ill was I? I was so ill that at the end of the talk I started disconnecting the A/V equipment thinking that the day is over and I was happy to have survived. Then someone pointed out that my afternoon tutorial was going to be in the same room so I could just leave it there and go to lunch. Lunch? The day is only half done? *face plant* Ugh.
Breakfast and lunch at this hotel are always exactly the same. It was only Tuesday and I was getting irritated by this already.
In the afternoon I taught, “Help! Everyone hates our IT department!”. A lot of this class is techniques to use to manage your IT department’s visibility so that you are perceived more accurately (if you don’t manage your visibility, the IT department becomes blamed for everything; if things are done well you are invisible so people assume you don’t do anything; etc. etc.). The techniques are pretty simple but people don’t think about them until its too late. The class also talks about the basic infrastructure you need so that you aren’t running around chasing your tail all day long. For example, if you have a decent process for rolling out each new machine, each new machine won’t be a “panic” of activity trying to get it right. The class has a lot of technical tools that have non-technical (”soft skills” benefits).
I hadn’t taught this in a while and I forgot that a lot of the material overlaps with the time management class. Sadly, 90% of the room had attended my time management class that morning. I tried to cover the repeated material from more of a manager’s perspective (the theory of why you need to do this rather than how). I noticed 4-5 of the eval sheets complained about the overlap in material between the two talks, but I also noticed that when I was repeating content that was nearly the exact same slides I was still getting tons of questions and comments from the audience. I think that shows that these topics are actually important enough to bare repeating. When I found I was repeating material I tried to improvise a new way of explaining it, or a new angle about it, or something. Improvising while this sick is waaay fun.
After classes I worked for a few hours. I’m trying to work 2x hard to make sure that I’m still productive and visible even though I am physically absent and in a timezone that makes it impossible to actually talk with people. Thus, about every few hours I’m checking the time and IM’ing or calling the people that are awake and available. It’s quite odd... when I’m home I know that “mornings = call people in Europe”, “afternoons = call people in West coat”, and “evening = Call people in Australia”. The timezones and my flu are disorienting enough that it always seems to be a surprise who I can call at any given time. However, I think it is working. I’m battling through paperwork related to one big thing, and getting technical details from 4 different teams across as many timezones so that I can summarize it all into “a plan”. It’s amazing how this is all possible thanks to WiFi, the internet, email and IM. This wasn’t possible when my father was alive (and wasn’t imaginable when my grandfather was alive).
Dinner was another group dinner. We walked to a Korean place but when we got menus enough of the group was, ahem, disappointed, that we walked out. We who left found an Indian place that was pretty good.
That night I slept pretty well.
Wednesday: Today and Friday are the only days I don’t have responsibilities to the conference. Thus, it’s sort of been my “day off”. I attended Geoff’s class on Change Management in the morning, but spent the afternoon working (and helping to fix the conference WiFi).
Saturday didn’t exist. I crossed the international date line. The flight was pretty good. I couldn’t sleep as much as I wanted, but the Video On Demand system had classic movies! I got to watch 2 movies I’d never gotten to see before because “i never had time”. Well, locked in an airplane you have time. I watched “Gone with the Wind (1939)” which was fantastic OMG. Then I watched “Giant (1956)” which I had not heard of before, but what couldn’t be great about a movie with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, right? Wow, what an amazing story about a Texas cattle rancher which happens to give an interesting view into the life of the rich of the north east, Texans (and texas history), and the racial/economic discrepancy in our society. It was 3.5 hours long and really had 2 or 3 full movies worth of plot in it. Considering the year it came out, it was pretty progressive for how it handled certain issues (or that it mentioned them at all). I feel like I have a better understanding of modern history because of this movie.
Sunday: landed in Adelaide at around 10am. The taxi driver made racist comments about Indians for nearly the entire ride. Got to the hotel and ran into Geoff and other friends. We hung out then I went and took a shower. Oh god it felt good to shower and shave. I went back to the lobby and Geoff, Elizabeth, Opal and I went to get lunch. While on the way we stopped to buy a SIM for my cell phone since the one my company supplied with me specifically for international travel was not, in fact, set up correctly. At least it is an unlocked phone.
The phone store would have been extremely frustrating if the salesperson wasn’t so friendly. It took 10 minutes to figure out which SIM I could use and explain to me how billing works in Australia. It seems that phone calls cost about $1 per minute and that hasn’t changed forever. However, over time companies have started offer to sell you that $100 worth of phone time for only $16! So after Geoff explained this to me about 4 times (he’s so patient) I ended up buying $300 phone time for $50. I think.
After lunch we went to a Haigh chocolate store. I held back from buying anything.
I was starting to feel a cold coming on and hoping I wasn’t going to be too sick to teach my tutorials.
We agreed to meet back in the lobby for dinner. I went to my room, fell asleep, and woke up the next day.
Monday: I worked remotely for the morning. I had a lot of email to catch up on but at the same time I was feeling sicker and sicker. I asked a local person if they’re called “pharmacies” or “chemists” in this country (it turns out both terms are used) and then asked if he knew where there was one near by.
The pharmacy I went to was wonderful. I was standing in the “cold and flu” section looking confused (many of the products are called something different here) for about 2 minutes before an employee came up to me and did a better job of diagnosing my situation than some doctor’s I’ve been to. She walked me through a logical decision tree and determined that considering my symptoms and my preferences and we decided “sudafed PE”. One pill every 4 hours, no more than 3 times a day. Thus, for the days I teach tutorials I’ll be managing everything in 4-hour timeslots.
In the afternoon I taught “Hiring Great Technical People”. It’s a 3-hour class about how to do better interviewing and wrap it around a great hiring process. It is based on the “hiring” chapter in the second edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration. People liked it. This was the first time I did this tutorial and I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be. There were only 9 students, which is a sign of the economy. However I made the point that when the economy is bad and we aren’t hiring many people it becomes even more critical to hire the absolute best. Afterwords I realized that when the economy is bad people get flooded with resumes, so the tips on how to manage the entire process becomes more important.
The neat thing about this tutorial is that for each section I would read aloud an interview horror-story from TheDailyWTF.com and ask, “What can we learn from this story?” By the end of the class, people were given the tools and techniques to avoid all the major problems described in those stories.
Monday evening I went out to dinner with people from the conference. We had Thai at a place 5-6 blocks away. I hate Thai but I was with a big group. I had the most un-Thai-like thing on the menu and it was ok. (note: because I go out in large groups a lot, I think I eat at a Thai restaurant about once a month; more than any other Thai-food-disliker in the planet, I’m sure)
Tuesday: I taught 2 half-day tutorials, so I was on my feet the entire day. Both classes were PACKED, which was awesome. Full of sudafed and surrounded by tissue boxes, I did my Time Management class in the morning. I think it went really well... I recently re-wrote most of the slides and I’m much happier with the format now. To keep people awake, it has a lot of anecdotes and funny rants.
How ill was I? I was so ill that at the end of the talk I started disconnecting the A/V equipment thinking that the day is over and I was happy to have survived. Then someone pointed out that my afternoon tutorial was going to be in the same room so I could just leave it there and go to lunch. Lunch? The day is only half done? *face plant* Ugh.
Breakfast and lunch at this hotel are always exactly the same. It was only Tuesday and I was getting irritated by this already.
In the afternoon I taught, “Help! Everyone hates our IT department!”. A lot of this class is techniques to use to manage your IT department’s visibility so that you are perceived more accurately (if you don’t manage your visibility, the IT department becomes blamed for everything; if things are done well you are invisible so people assume you don’t do anything; etc. etc.). The techniques are pretty simple but people don’t think about them until its too late. The class also talks about the basic infrastructure you need so that you aren’t running around chasing your tail all day long. For example, if you have a decent process for rolling out each new machine, each new machine won’t be a “panic” of activity trying to get it right. The class has a lot of technical tools that have non-technical (”soft skills” benefits).
I hadn’t taught this in a while and I forgot that a lot of the material overlaps with the time management class. Sadly, 90% of the room had attended my time management class that morning. I tried to cover the repeated material from more of a manager’s perspective (the theory of why you need to do this rather than how). I noticed 4-5 of the eval sheets complained about the overlap in material between the two talks, but I also noticed that when I was repeating content that was nearly the exact same slides I was still getting tons of questions and comments from the audience. I think that shows that these topics are actually important enough to bare repeating. When I found I was repeating material I tried to improvise a new way of explaining it, or a new angle about it, or something. Improvising while this sick is waaay fun.
After classes I worked for a few hours. I’m trying to work 2x hard to make sure that I’m still productive and visible even though I am physically absent and in a timezone that makes it impossible to actually talk with people. Thus, about every few hours I’m checking the time and IM’ing or calling the people that are awake and available. It’s quite odd... when I’m home I know that “mornings = call people in Europe”, “afternoons = call people in West coat”, and “evening = Call people in Australia”. The timezones and my flu are disorienting enough that it always seems to be a surprise who I can call at any given time. However, I think it is working. I’m battling through paperwork related to one big thing, and getting technical details from 4 different teams across as many timezones so that I can summarize it all into “a plan”. It’s amazing how this is all possible thanks to WiFi, the internet, email and IM. This wasn’t possible when my father was alive (and wasn’t imaginable when my grandfather was alive).
Dinner was another group dinner. We walked to a Korean place but when we got menus enough of the group was, ahem, disappointed, that we walked out. We who left found an Indian place that was pretty good.
That night I slept pretty well.
Wednesday: Today and Friday are the only days I don’t have responsibilities to the conference. Thus, it’s sort of been my “day off”. I attended Geoff’s class on Change Management in the morning, but spent the afternoon working (and helping to fix the conference WiFi).
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-13 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-13 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-13 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-13 08:42 pm (UTC)Also, Gone With the Wind gave me a lifelong crush on both Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.