Adventures in the Real World: How I Spent my Fall

Before I jump back into technical blog posts, I thought I’d share a little about my adventures of the last few months as it’s been hectic but quite a lot of fun.

As noted in the previous post, things got started back in September with the FOSS4G conference. That post sums things up pretty well, so I’ll just move the story forward from there… up up and away!

Orlando

The following week I was in Orlando doing some work with a client. While DTS is headquartered in Orlando, our offices are in Avalon Park, which is well outside the city itself. But, this client is downtown, and this gave me a chance to check out another area of the city. I do enough business travel that staying in yet another cookie cutter hotel has long lost it’s appeal, so when I can, I step out and stay at non-chain places – like the OE Inn. Great little place, right on Lake Eola Park (photo below), half a block to the client’s office, a Panera Bread on the main floor, and a great sushi place around the block. Since this was right after FOSS4G, and I had my evenings free, node hacking was in order (more on this in the next post!).

Next Stop… Kentucky

From time to time we have internal meetings – usually in Orlando, and usually out at Avalon Park. This was getting kinda boring, so Dave Buckley (our VP of GIS and Wildfire dude) suggested we do something different… like tie the meetings in with some caving in Kentucky. And so it was that 8 of the DTS core team met up at Mammoth Cave National Park for a mix of meetings, burbon and caving.

This was the easy walking-on-the-path Crystal Cave. While the iPhone 4 can take good photos, low-light conditions are not it’s forte.

This is from the “Wild Cave Tour” which had a few “tight spots” and a fair amount of crawling around. A great way to spend 4 hours, and get photos of the DTS core team looking like convicts…

Colorado River Trip

From Kentucky it was back home to Fort Collins, and then off to Fruita to float the Ruby Horse Thief section of the Colorado river. For the last 3 years we’ve been doing this family river trip with a group of friends. This year the dates got moved around a bunch due to my travel schedule so it was a smaller group, but still a ton of fun for all involved.

I’m not much of a “water” person, and this is perfect – no real whitewater, but still a lot of fun camping and being out in the desert.

Off to Europe

I was at home for a few weeks and then headed out to Europe for a 10 day whirlwind tour of sorts. The basic plan was to go do a few presentations at the Esri European User Conference, which was held in Madrid. Our Spanish partner in the Wildfire business, Joaquin Ramirez / Technosylva, has come over to the US for the last two Esri User Conferences in San Diego, so it only seemed fair that we come over there since it was in Spain. And since we were going over to Europe, why not tack on some meetings in Zurich and Geneva?

Zurich

We got micro rooms at non-micro rates right near the lake and downtown. I managed to get out and walk about (with a side-trip to the Apple store to get a USB-Cat5 dongle/adapter). Stunning place.

Off to Madrid

When dealing with airlines, nothing is straight forward, so while it would make sense to fly from Geneva (we drove down from Zurich) directly to Madrid, that particular flight was gonna cost most than the rest of the trip combined. So, we hop from Geneva, back to Frankfurt and then down to Madrid… much farther, but through the miracle of airline math, less than 10% of the price of the direct flight. Go figure. Of note – Spanair really crams the seats onto their planes. If you are 6’ or taller, you’re gonna have a leg-room issue. I think there were 8 additional rows of seats on this plane as compared to the Lufthansa flight… in the exact same model of aircraft. Ok, back to it.

Ah Jack. Whenever possible, I always make his plenary sessions. Sure I’ve heard the content before, but as someone who does a lot of speaking, there is a lot I can learn from Jack’s style and how he presents his vision, and structures the talk in general. Some people call this kool-aid, I call it a great speaker. Moving on… the conference was fun, and our talks went really well – packed rooms for all of them (special thanks to Ismael Chivite who I believe corralled a mess of people into my talk about deploying apps to the cloud!). But the real fun is after hours! We went to the Mercado San Miguel and liked it so much we want back the next night. This place is how WholeFoods would do a tapas / wine bar / open space. Awesome fun.

And apparently you can’t eat in Spain without consuming Jamon. Nom Nom Nom!

Seville

So the conference wrapped up and we jumped on a train with Joaquin, and headed to Seville for a few days of “strategic planning” for DTSWildfire. And by strategic we mean…

and…

and…

Somewhere along the line we did talk about wildfire products and markets and marketing and general strategy, but in a very civilized manner.

Back Home

I have a 5 year old, which means that Halloween is big deal. Thanks to the magic of jet travel I was able to get from Madrid to Fort Collins (via Frankfurt… of course) in a single (very long) day, arriving just in time to go trick or treating. In keeping with the general frenzy of the fall, the next day my wife went to New York to visit her sister and our new nephew, so I was a solo parent for about a week. This was actually really good, because it was perfectly acceptable for me to go to sleep at 7:30 when my son goes to bed. And it’s always nice to get outside and have a picnic in Lory State Park…

That was supposed to be it for travel. Note the “supposed” part. But with our acquisition of VueWorks earlier this year, we also acquired their annual user conference. And since I’m helping define some major changes in the product, I had to pop over to Orlando for a few days of strategic meetings (see how that comes up so often?) and then do a talk on the vision for the product line.

(Note: the vision does not involve “pivoting to monetize crowd sourced photos of giant dump trucks” – I’ll leave that up to you.)

In contrast to my previous trip to Orland, this time I was staying at the Disney Coronado Springs – the very epitome of corporate lodging. Don’t get me wrong, it was all fine, but just a little to homogenized for my liking.

And that about winds up the last few months. Thanks for slogging through this – hope it was a fun diversion from the usual tech-centric posts. With all that travel out of the way, I’ll be working on some posts about real-time collaboration, discussing two research apps we built – one using node and socket.io and the other using ASP.NET MVC and SignalR.