Work: Consulting
I just returned home from my first week consulting. I went to the northern part of Alabama and didn't have much of a connection (phone or data) most of the time.
From my perspective it was a rousing success. Now I just need to wait and see if the client approved of my work.
I chose to drive as it was semi-last minute (last Thursday I found out) and I haven't had a good road trip in years. I promise it wasn't a fear of flying.
On the way I picked up the guy I would be working with at the Atlanta airport. We had only (briefly) communicated through email and one "get up to speed" phone call. I think it's safe to say that we got along pretty well. After a couple of hours with the client the following day, they asked how long we had been working together and were absolutely shocked to learn that we had just met.
As to the work, I got to rekindle some of my OBIEE administration skills, specifically the rpd (or metadata). It was fun to get back into it as I had been prepping for this the past couple of weeks. By day 2 I was in a zone (adding physical tables, replacing logical table data sources, etc).
My colleague's expertise was in Answers, so I got to see some pretty cool stuff. I'm trying to talk him into blogging and offered him a guest slot to see if he likes it.
The clients were great and easy to work with...overall an A+.
Google Latitude
As I have a new blackberry (couldn't afford the droid yet), I managed to download my Google Contacts, GMail and most importantly, Google Maps...which ties in with Google Latitude.
I could see myself driving up I-75 and even better, I could expose my location to my wife and parents (I am an only child...the center of their universe :). I even tried to use it to find my phone which I had misplaced this afternoon (it had fallen under my seat) to no avail. Basically, I believe it uses the cell towers to approximate your location, the closest I saw it was within 800 meters.
Amusingly, as we're driving to Atlanta this afternoon and my father calls...WTF? he says. "I'm taking my colleague to the airport"
"Are you going back?"
"No, I'm headed home"
I had neglected to tell him that I would be there through Thursday...he of course thought the worse.
I have 2 pretty cool guest posts on the way. Mr. Meyers has one and Mr. Piwowar finally got to Part 3 of his EBS install guide. :) I'll post those next week so they don't get lost in the weekend down time.
Welcome back, ACE. You've got ANSWERS, I've got questions :)
ReplyDeleteWhat blackberry do you have. If it has GPS (Curve 83XX series does for sure), to get Google Maps to use GPS. you need to first acquire satellites. I've only ever been able to do this when using Blackberry Maps first to find my location, wait for 1-30 minutes, and then Google maps (and latitude) uses GPS.
Glad you had fun in Alabama, hope you didn't have to drive home in too much rain though! It's been crazy wet in Atlanta these last few days.
ReplyDeleteBTW your guest blogger idea is pretty cool..
-Jeff
The Art Of Tech Blog
@jeff
ReplyDeleteYou should definitely do a guest blog...maybe some different exposure will help out?
I saw your tweets the other day about "The" 285 and "The" 20...I was in your area...I should have gotten in touch with you. I ended up in Gadsden, AL via ATL...
Beautiful up there...reminds me why I miss the "north" sometimes...there's an actual change in season, even if you don't get snow very often.
@jeff: The guest blogger idea is pretty cool, *and* Chet's guests themselves are pretty cool. ;-)
ReplyDelete@chet: Glad you put north in quotes, or I would've given you some grief. That said, aren't parts of Florida getting snow now?
John,
ReplyDeleteI have no idea if it's snowing anywhere in Florida...I'm not traveling now which means I don't leave the house nor do I interact with actual human beings (family is gone, though it's iffy if you could classify children as human beings...monsters, yes, humans...)
You don't live in the "north" anymore. You live in Canada. Go Steelers!