Travel

Family Travels

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My sister and niece are going on a two week trip to Hong Kong on Tuesday. One of her best friends moved there about two years ago with her family and my sister is going to visit. Her friends twin daughters are also friends of my niece, so she is excited to go visit. While they are away my nephew will spend a week with my mom, since Michael could only be home 1 week, since he had to work the next one. My mom is taking him to Florida for the week to play in the sand, and do what other 18 month olds do.

Recently Zachary has become attached to Elmo. He is the first kid in my family to finally like the red muppet. I am a fan of Elmo, so I have been trying to get all the little cousins in my family to like him, but none have been as attached to him as Zach seems to be. I am trying to find him an appropriately sized Elmo doll for him to take on his trip. The one I ordered seems to have gotten lost in shipping.

And the farthest I am going for my vacation next week is to Manhattan for a hair cut.

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Dam Cold

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Either I am getting sick again (2nd time in 2 months) or the humidity or something messed me up on my trip to Atlanta this weekend. I am now feeling how I get right before I get a cold. I also get this feeling when I am allergic to something in the air. My gut is saying it is a cold. I need to get to the Cold Ez, or that ZiCam that Michael got me into when I got sick at his place in December. Either way when I get home I am going to take something. I am on the plane now, and it is not very comfortable feeling this way in the air. I have a bad feeling that my ear’s are going to not react well when we land. I used to have horrible problems flying when i was a kid and a teenager. As an adult it has been allot better, but every so often I fly and have issues. Fingers crossed that this landing my ears are ok!

Traveling Again

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This weekend I had a quick trip down to Atlanta. All in all the trip was not eventful. The biggest thing that happened was I forgot the suction device that holds my Dad’s GPS to the windshield in the rental car. i remember taking it off the wind shield, but must have forgotten to put it in my bag because I cannot find it.

As much as I am still pissed at Delta for my trip to nowhere (see previous posts), they were not bad this trip. We actually departed on time both directions. I also cannot complain when I get into the Crown Room Club free (gotta love Amex Platinum Card).

I need to remember this weekend since I will most likely not remember the last time I drove until I remember that I drove this weekend. Before this week, I cannot honestly remember the last time I drove a car. I think it was the week I stayed at my parents place in August but then again I might not have even used one then. That is one of the sad things about living right by public transit (in this case the subway) you don’t need to drive. That is good and bad I guess.

Visiting The Kids

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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.

France Trip Recap

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Very Long Day

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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.

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Ready To Go

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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.

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The Wet Mini Road Trip

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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.

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My Mistery Trip

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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.

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Black Box Project

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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.