Musings from the Road

I'm traveling again, this time to Southern California for some face time (did I just say that?) with one of the company's primary vendors and to check out all the cool new stuff HP is releasing for this year. I came down to Long Beach on Sunday and am staying at the Queen Mary. It's been a good time thus far - some laughs, some tears, some cheers... Here's a brief glimpse into what's been happening.

Okay, I'm a cynic and a skeptic. The ship is haunted. Period. The first night, I couldn't sleep and I had the feeling that someone was in the room with me. When I did fall asleep, I had the scariest nightmare of my life. What really made it scary was that it was so real - I didn't really realize I was dreaming until after it was over, and even then, it took hours and repeated mental reinvestigation to convince myself it wasn't real. I love the song "Mad World" (especially the version from the Donnie Darko soundtrack), but I can now honestly debate the validity of the lyric, "the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."

Yesterday was all about relationship building (vendor golf). I was on fire, nailing drives, lasering irons at the pins, just killing it. I had several drives over 280 yards and hit most of my irons within 10-12 feet - three of which were within 3 feet and I nearly holed out from the fairway twice. Our group shot 64 (scramble format) but we left three or four birdies out on the course. After lunch, some of us decided to go back out and play another 18 (I think it was my idea - I am a glutton, after all). The second 18 was more challenging - the wind was up, we were all sunburned and tired, and we played straight up. I played like crap the first couple holes and blew my chances at scoring well - ended up with 47 on the front and two balls in the water on #9. Turned it around on the back and shot 42 with three 3 putts. We made it in right at sunset.

Made it back to the hotel around 9 and really needed some food and sunburn treatment. I put some lotion on - there was no aloe to be found. I figured the next best thing was juniper, so I had some G&Ts with the HP guys in the bar after dinner. Hanging with geeks is really odd. We're sitting around, cackling our asses off, making jokes with punchlines like "oh, you must be a Novell Administrator!!" and "yeah, that's what you get for not properly configuring traverse permissions under NTFS!!" Completely surreal...

Off to the HP show now. I'm sure I'll have more tidbits of errata later.