I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.
Well come Monday morning I had to wake my butt out of bed at 5:30am to get ready for a flight down to Irvine. I had a 7:30 flight on southwest airlines to go visit company headquarters and meet the people I work for. I didn’t get to bed on time as usual, partly because I wanted to get an A seat on the flight, and pre check-in online is available at 12:01 the day of the flight. I checked in at 12:08 and apparently everyone else had that idea, and I was the 11th one to check in. I’ve found that I really don’t sleep well when I have a very fixed deadline in the morning, such as a flight. I’m always afraid that I’ll over sleep and miss what ever it is that I’m supposed to do. I’m just glad I don’t have to do that sort of thing very often.
My flight in Irvine landed about 10 mins early, but my ride was already there to pick me up, only problem was, it was a 2 story loop, one for pickup and one for drop off, and since I didn’t have any luggage checked, I didn’t follow the signs to the baggage claim, and ended up on the top of the loop where people were getting dropped off. I would have gone downstairs but I didn’t know that it was an option. So after a few loops, and talking on the phone, Lacie finally made it to where I was and I had a ride to the office.
It took about 20 mins on ‘the’ 405 to get to the office, and once we were there, I got the ‘grand tour’. But that was interrupted by clients calling for me so I had to sit and do some actual work. For a trip to go check out the main office, I sure did get a lot of remote work done on Monday.
For lunch, much of the company went out together. I don’t remember what the place we went was called, but it was very good, and they had 200+ beer taps sold by the yard or half yard. Needless to say, I went back there for dinner and tried some beers :) I also got this video (plays with QuickTime)
After dinner I took the free shuttle back to my hotel, and watched a movie on HBO called ‘Sometimes in April’
It was a decent movie about the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Covers the basic history and goes into the killings with great detail. Unlike more recent movies ‘Hotel Rwanda’, this movie was shot in Rwanda, and has a mostly Rwandan cast too, they look like Rwandans and sound like them too. It was kind of cool to hear some of their language again, I recognized lots of it. Most of the movie was in English. I can’t wait to see the movie Shooting Dogs which hopefully will come out soon, as I’m in it along with my friends who went to Rwanda with me. I guess I should also go see Hotel Rwanda, which unfortunately was mostly filmed in South Africa, which might be the reason I still have not seen it. Maybe Ill watch that after I see Shooting Dogs to see how they compare.
I had a somewhat bumpy but quick flight back on Tuesday evening, got another A seat, and since it was an evening flight, I didn’t have to check in online at 12:01am. Oh yea, I got a raise while I was down there too, and my new business cards are going to say ‘Sr. Technician’
Shooting Dogs, the movie that my friends and I were in while working in Rwanda will premiere this spring in the stadium in Kigali, Rwanda. Hopefully it will be out here soon after so we can see what bad extra’s we were.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,1424262,00.html
