It seems like a little thing, posting to this site. And yet sometimes it is hard to find the time. This past week was a prime example of that, with a major event to write about but a complete absence of time to do so.
On Sunday, I got up at 4:00 to fly to Toronto for Esri Canada’s Tech Trek. This is an annual gathering of the technical people in our company to learn and connect with each other, since we are spread across the thousands of kilometers of this country. I say annual, despite the fact that this was the first one since 2008. It was annual, but got axed as a cost-saving measure when the economy went south. It’s back, and the management seems committed to resuming it. For 2012, it was still at the same place, at the Kempenfelt Conference Centre in Barrie, Ontario, but it was shifted from its usual late-August time and it was shorter at three days instead of four and a half.
Personally, I have been arguing for its resumption for the last couple of years, because its absence has definitely been felt by me, being on the extreme West of Canada and separated from my co-workers by distance and time zones. There were 60 new faces (out of about 100) at Tech Trek this year, so a lot of the time was spent meeting people and introducing myself. I had a couple of short presentations to give, one during the plenary session and another later on our development process. Getting up in front of basically everybody is a good way to make yourself recognizable, that’s for sure. There was a running meme on the two i’s in my name. Jim Wickson, the VP of Sales and Professional Services brought it up during his talk on Sunday night when my name was on a slide, and “Simon with two i’s” was oft-repeated during the week. 🙂 That’s okay, because I won $20 on Star Trek trivia during the same talk.
The rest of the week was learning and connecting and music and trying to not overindulge. They had several key people up from Esri Redlands to give talks on Server, Mobile, Geodatabase and Geoprocessing. Music started around the campfire on Sunday night and continued with the Esri Canada choir on Monday night (insert IBM company songs joke here) and karaoke on Tuesday night. Yours truly got up with Matt and performed a decent rendition of “If I had $1,000,000”. 🙂
Avoiding overindulgence was harder. Every meal was a buffet, and the food was very good. I took pictures of my plate at most meals both as a remembrance and because I knew Tammy would see them as they showed up on our Photo Stream. I ate some of what I wanted, just didn’t pile it on my plate… well, except for the carrot cake. I had a pretty big piece of that. But who could blame me?
Traveling home was tiring beyond belief. I was on about 5 hours’ sleep already on Wednesday, and things wrapped up just after three. Then it was on the bus and off to the airport. My flight was supposed to leave at seven, but one of the battery chargers (???) on the plane wasn’t working and they had to fix it. So we sat on the plane for an hour and a half before we even left on our five-hour flight. And I was in a middle seat. 😠So we arrived late in Victoria, and Mark and I missed our connection to Victoria, so we had to wait for the 11:30 flight. I got home just before 1:00 am, which according to my body was really 4:00 am. I got to sleep in to about 7:30 the next day, and got a regular sleep the next night, but last night my body just said “that’s it” and I found myself in bed by 6:30 last night. I feel much better this morning.
So thus ends the saga of Tech Trek. It was worth it.
