Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
I spent Wednesday through Friday hanging out at my sisters house. I got to play allot with my niece and nephew. It was nice, especially since I don’t get to see them as much as I would like. I babysat for them on Wedsnday night since it was my sister and brother in laws anniversary. The rest of the time we just hung out. I had a good time since I don’t get to see everyone that much since they moved.
Unfortunately I caught a cold Thursday night and I feel like crap now.
Wednesday and most of Thursday were taken up by work at one of our companies offices near Lille. It was a massive place. It is weird getting used to going to a place like that when the office I work in only has 90 or so people. Thursday night we ended up heading back to Paris on the TGV and walked around the area by our new hotel until we found a sidewalk cafe to have dinner at.
My boss and I also had to figure out a way to get on a conference call with our team back in NY while at our hotel. The call could have turned into an hour long thing, so mobile phones and hotel phones would have been very expensive. We ended up using my macbook and skype to call our conference bridge. It was an interesting use of the technology we had at hand. The hardest part was getting the high speed connection in the hotel to work. Connecting to Skype worked flawlessly once we were online.
Friday the morning was spent trying to go sight seeing but work took priority so we didn’t get out of the hotel until the afternoon. We hit the Louvre and got lost walking around there for a few hours. Then we walked to the Eiffel Tower. It was crowded so we didn’t go up. The line was really long. I got some decent pictures though.
After that we had a decently hard time finding a cab back to the hotel. We hit dinner near the hotel at another cafe, and then at night meet up with some people from work who were finally in Paris from Lille.
It feels like monday night but it is fact Tuesday night in France. I am in Lille, France. The red eye last night was ok. I took some stuff to help me sleep and it worked a little but not completely. The bose noise canceling headphones also helped but it was still a long flight.
Once we got to Paris, we were able to goto a hotel and get a Day room. It is basically a room you pay for during daylight hours so you can shower, sleep, etc. We landed like 7AM local time but didn’t have meetings until noon so we needed a place to go and relax. That room made all the difference. I was able to take a shower and just lie down for an hour. I didn’t sleep but just able to relax on the bed was all i needed to get through the day and even end up at dinner at 10PM local time.
We had our meeting in Paris after we got a bit lost walking around to find our office. We then toured a data center for a bit and then our host took us to the train station so we can catch the TGV to Lille. The TGV was awesome. We got biz class on that also, but it probably wasn’t needed for the hour long trip. That train is fast, and quiet. I always like trains but this one was really cool.
Once in Lille we hit the hotel and then went out for some dinner. We ended up meeting up with some other people from our office and had dinner together. I didn’t get back to the hotel until late. It is weird when it is like 10PM and there is still some daylight out.
I am off to a much needed sleep in a bed.
I haven’t mentioned it before (or did I, now i don’t remember) but I am going to France today. I have a flight later this evening (a red eye) and then I am there with my boss until Saturday. It is my first trip to France, or mainland Europe for that matter so i am a bit excited.
I don’t like red eye’s since i can’t sleep well, so this flight will be interesting. The bright side is i get to travel business class so hopefully I can sleep when the seat reclines allot but not 180 degrees. More details as the trip unfolds.
Today I left the island of Manhattan and my reliance on the public transit system to go out to Long Island for a data center tour. In theory everything should have been fine even in the rain. My car was late showing up, but I still made it to the site a few minutes early. That should have been a good thing, but apparently there is no reception area at the place I went to so I was standing out in the rain with no way of getting inside.
Thankfully my boss drove to the site so eventually he showed up and I had the dryness of his car. We tried to sort out the whole situation. Apparently there is no one typically onsite at this facility that can greet people or give tours. Some how they messed up the fact that we were showing up for a our so we were out of luck.
Since the tour was a bust we hit a local diner for some early lunch, and then I called a car to take me back home. With the amount of time lost going back and forth to the island, this was the perfect day to work from home. And that is exactly what I did. Once I got home I got online via the wonderful world of VPN and worked the rest of the day from the dry confines of my apartment.
I ended up not going out to meet Danny after work even though we had tentative plans. I was no where near the office, and I was tired and didn’t really want to go out after a crazy wet morning. So laziness kicked in and I hung out at home.
Technorati Tags: car service, data center, datacenter, travel
I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.
I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.
We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.
I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.
The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.
On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.
Technorati Tags: international gsm roaming, iridium, satilite phone
As I write this I am on my way home from several days in Costa Rica, and El Salvador. 3 of us have been visiting several sites in both countries for what would be considered a black box project in my company. If this post is ever read it will be after I leave my current job, so I feel I can write about it.
We are researching outsourcing some of our call center operations. I went along to asses the technical operations of each call center site we visited. I also wanted to get an idea of how each company integrates their systems to ours. From what I saw we can send them calls via our providers voice cloud and do percentage based routing to their system. We would allow access to our applications via a citrix or terminal solution. As of now I am thinking a VDI solution that we have been toying around with for a while.
The trip was hectic, but very informative. We visited 3 sites from 2 companies in 2 countries in 3 days. I just hope that upper management listens to our recommendation to actually try and send some calls off shore. The venture would be profitable and still keep the same level of service. I was amazed that the majority of people in both countries that worked at the call centers spoke excellent english. I am in no way a fan of off shoring call centers to places like India because of constantly poor experiences I have had. Everyone we spoke to spoke very good english at each site. And it wasn’t like the discussions were staged. Just walking around and grabbing some food or hitting a bathroom and saying hi to someone they responded with excellent english. That and the technical feasibility of this project makes me want to try it out. Hopefully we will be given the chance.
For some lucky reason I got an entire row (3 seats) to myself on my return trip back to NYC. I am presently at 39,001 feet and have traveled 2,222 miles (make that 2228 miles between when I saw the display and actually wrote the number since the display updated). I am over Lake Erie near Detroit according to the map. I got another refitted 757 with the setback LCD’s. I realized again that I don’t watch regular tv, and only use my DVR. that is because almost nothing on is worth watching. I have a few hours of TV I watch a week and that is it. 24 channels with nothing on. Go figure.
I had to take a Butabitol again today (yes I spell it differently each time I write it since I can never remember the dam spelling) on the plane. I felt like a head ache was on its way. Normally I would have waited or taken an alive instead, but since I had 4+ hours plus waiting for my bags ahead of me I couldn’t chance getting sick in flight. it probably was a cop out to goto the meds’, but my worst fear in the world is being somewhere so far away from home and not able to get home in time for me to crash with a bad migraine. Being stuck on a plane 2,400 miles from home kind of sets the stage for that potentially happening, so I played it safe. So far, so good. I am a bit hot, but I am surviving for now. I have about an hour or so left on the flight.
I spent most of the day at the airport. I was done with the convention earlier than I thought and I couldn’t get a earlier flight, since the next earlier one would have been too early. since I got an entire row to my own it turned out ok (so far).
I was able to get some work done on my laptop at the Delta lounge on my Verizon Air Card. I had several calls with Jayson reviewing issues. He is stepping up and taking charge of the ops team. It really helps. I am nudging him along but you cannot complain about the results. On the other hand there are others than need to get a bit motivated, but I can’t talk about that right now.
Technorati Tags: 757, delta airlines, migraines, verizon wireless
This weekend I broke out the Verizon Wireless Broadband card I have for my work computer to test it to ensure that it worked for my trip. Turns out it didn’t. I spend about an hour reinstalling the software a few times and troubleshooting as best as I could. I ended up giving up and called Verizon on Monday for help. My knowledge on the subject and my volunteering all that I did got me right escalated to a level 2 guy and then a relatively quick answer for my problem when he was stumped also. It turns out when you actually know as much or more about the system you are calling about you tend to get the tech support guys to get you to someone higher up quick. Something (they didn’t say what) wasn’t provisioned on my account properly even though the card worked a week and a half ago when I used it last.
So far the card has been working for my trip. I do have to say (hopefully I won’t jinx myself) that the coverage and quality of service on Verizon is better than what I had with T-Mobile. I am just personally not a fan of the company and some of the customer service practices. Won’t go into them here, but you get the idea if you read past posts. In general the service is still great though.
I will blog about the details of the trip in other posts to come.
Technorati Tags: mobile broadband, t-mobile, travel, verizon wireless
Technically I started the mission timer at 77 hours and 5 minutes. Yes, I am actually counting down until my departure from LA on Thursday. Also a yes to the fact that the function on my watch calls it “mission clock”. I mean my Omega was designed for NASA, so the name makes sence. hold on, actually the function is CDT or count down time. There is a mission time function but that is just a term to refer to the GMT time function on the watch. My bad. Last year I started counting down trips to our other office or other short trips. Keeps things in perspective. No real reason for it, besides I was bored in the cab on the way to the airport.
LA is hotter than NYC. To be expected, but I was finally getting happy with the cooler weather in NYC and now I spend a few days in hot and sunny land. Lets face it, most of the time in LA will be spent indoors anyway.
Technorati Tags: omega, travel, speedmaster x-33