Hot Time in the Ole town…

Last weekend I and RB went to the wedding of a couple of friends of mine. I met them while partying down at Gustavus College when I would visit MQ. It’s funny a lot of mine good friends I met not at the school that I graduated at but where one of buds from high school went. The difference is that I probably spent too much time doing other things, like working, when I wasn’t in class – the second time I went to the U. This kept me from getting into a lot of trouble. And let’s face it, some times you make really good friends while misbehaving, if not when you are dealing with the aftermath the day after!

The wedding was nice, it was held in a pretty liberal Catholic church in Bloomington. I was told this by my wonderful GF. The church doesn’t have kneelers so it is pretty progressive. The ceremony was presided over by deacon not a priest who was nice enough, even if – to me – he rambled a little bit. The bride of course looked beautiful and the groom did seem nervous at all. Not a hint that he what he really wanted was to take off running. Of course I kid…. I Kid… The whole service was not to long, nice, and pretty nice all around. But the good part of a wedding is not in my opinion the service but the reception.

The reception was held at the Embassy Suites and was very fun. There was a DJ; always a good choice in my opinion there should always be dancing. True to their roots as partiers there was an open bar including not just kegs but also full drink services. The dinner was nice. It was a very good party. A lot of people I haven’t seen, or don’t see enough, showed up and everyone was having a good time. We even met LJ’s GF for the first time. She is pretty cool. He should have brought her around to meet everyone a long time ago.

Unfortunately there was a little bit of unwanted excitement. One of the Usher’s car caught on fire in the parking lot! Of all the bad luck to have your car catch on fire, and at you friends wedding in which you are part of the wedding party. No one knows what happen. A couple guys went out to smoke (I still am in love with the new no smoking laws) and they looked over and saw a car smoking. Then one of them said..”Hey that looks like my car”. And it was. The fire department showed up and hosed his car down putting out the fire. The car was basically a loss.

Believe it or not the owner didn’t seem to care much at all. His dad is an executive of the insurance company he uses and they already had an adjuster on the way and a rental car lined up. On top of it the hotel took pity on him and gave him a free room sweet. I’d like to say this was surprising but this guy always seems to go into a stinky situation and come out smelling like a rose. So at least he is going to make out on the deal. It was crazy though. All in all though I think it was a good night for everyone who showed up to the wedding

System Down

If you hadn’t noticed my website was down for about two weeks. The hardware was working and I could access the site locally so I just went on thinking it was ok. MQ even wrote me an e-mail saying “Why can’t I get to your site”, I simply responded that it was working fine. Then I flew out of town again and tried to access it remotely… Huh sure enough it was down. What a pain in the @$$.

Well I won’t get into to much detail but here is basically what was wrong. My ISP changed my address with out telling me. Because of this all the name servers sent the traffic to the wrong IP address. This is really not a big deal. It was a 10 minute fix once I found the problem. If only I had a heads up it would have been a non-issue. This is actually the second time this has happened so I may look into changing services again. Anyway it is back up and now I think I need to get some new posts online. Therefore there may be a bunch of re-dated (to when they should have been posted) entries in the next week or so.

For example this blog is actually being posted in early May but the outage occurred in mid April.

Softball

Seeing as I have been in Dayton for going on 7 months we (by we I include myself Michael and SA from Pittsburg, and Akhil a consultant from Boston though the statement is probably true for the whole project team) have seen about everything there is to see in the area. As the project is getting dragged out – mostly due to client resource issues – we are trying to find more activities to keep us entertained. Due to the delays the amount of work to do has leveled off and we are more regularly finishing for the day around 6:00 to 6:30, which is nice. But now we have to figure out what to do with ourselves.

The first this we found is the driving range. We have been going about once a week for a month or so. The range is one of the craziest places I’ve seen. It’s called Utters and Putters and it is located in Yellow Springs, OH. Just as aside Dave Cheppel lives on a farm in Yellow Springs, though we have not run into him yet. Utters and Putters is located on Young’s Dairy Farm. No kidding an actually farm that has been turned into an entertainment establishment. They have 2 restaurants, a picnic area, a driving range, mini golf, and home made ice cream parlor. The driving range is a lot of fun. The heated stalls are literally in a barn that they cut the side open on for driving. The targets for the wedge are old farm tires and a couple of old grain trailers! The mini golf is also very farm themed. The prices aren’t bad either. Michael is looking into hosting a mini golf tournament for the client and the project team.

We also signed up to play on the client softball team. Now I haven’t played softball since 2001/2002 when I played on my dad’s church league. However, I can still through, catch, and hit. Which is more than I can say for a lot of the team, a lot of them are first timers. The league is coed and you must have an equal number of men and women on the field at any given time. I have to say though the women from the client staff are far and away better than the men. The consultants aren’t bad. Michael and I get by, by knowing the fundamentals, and Akhil is just naturally athletic. There is one superstar on the team but he is the husband of client staff. The coach is pretty good as well. She is a manager that is working with me on the reporting team. We only had one practice but it was a lot of fun. We may not get to play again though because they keep change the day of the week on us. If it is on Thursday (as of the last e-mail I received) we can’t play.

So if softball doesn’t work out, then our next venture is racquet ball. Unfortunately the only court we can find in town is 20 minutes away. Crazy, I am really surprised it is so hard to find a place to play racquet ball. Though; I haven’t played racquet ball since I was a teenager. We shall see.

Hung over and taking over the world.

Last Friday as we all know was good old Saint Patty’s day. I time when people claim to be Irish, dress up in ridiculous outfits, maybe watch a parade, but generally drink into excess. According to the History channel it was always this way, St. Patty’s day was originally a sober day where the Irish conscripts in the British army stationed in New York marched to show there solidarity for the plight of their brothers back on the green isle. However that is no longer the case. Every city in America, most in Ireland, and apparently now in Australia have parades, parties, and drunken mobs celebrating the Saint that brought Catholicism to Ireland.

Now I am part Irish. How much, well I really am unsure of that, but my grandfather was fond of claiming he was black Irish so that is good enough for me. This year I went with a group of people on a party bus. I only knew 3 of the 40 or soon the bus but that was fine with me. It was a fund raiser of sorts which I actually just find amusing (the money for the bus went to charity). KS and myself met up with ML and his GF – RB was working an overnight and could not come – at Bennegan’s in St. Louis Park and caught the bus there. Most people had had a couple and the ride was quite fun as there where plenty of adult beverages floating around. The bus only took us to two stops; a couple of bars in St. Paul.

I don’t remember the first bars name. It looked very small from the outside but the building had been added onto several times so it went much further back than you could have guessed from the street. It was absolutely packed. There must have been 3 to 4 hundred people in the bar. They really were only selling beer so that is all we drank. It was a lot of fun. I forgot how funny a large group of people consuming can be. The atmosphere was very similar to that at a rock show, just a lot of positive energy. The second bar was Gabe’s by the park. We actually walked there because we didn’t want to leave when the bus did and it was only four blocks. By the time we got to Gabe’s the party was winding down so we actually just had some water, hung out for 40 minutes or so, and got back on the bus.

Even though I didn’t think I had had that much I was a little hung over the next day. That morning I drove down to Apple Valley to get a haircut, stopped by the office to pick up a few odds and ends, then just went home to vedge-out. For the first time in I don’t know how many years just felt like playing video games. So I did, for like 5 hours. I few weeks ago to make plane time more passable I found one of my old favorites, Sid Meyer’s Civilization. It’s a very basic game graphically and the logic is fairly simple but it was one of the first to really have a good strategy setup. By comparison to today’s games there isn’t a lot going on. You are the ruler of a country and have to lead that country through history. You win by either taking over the world or being so far advanced that you can send people to colonize another world.

The way I always play is to sit around low with out causing a lot of trouble and building several well supported cities and really hammer out the knowledge base. Then when I am a hundred years ahead of the rest of the world I build battleships, transports, and mechanized units and take over most of the world. I say most because I leave one other city, surrounded by my troops so they can’t get out. Then build my ship and send it to colonize another planet to win the game. Simple strategy but it seems to always work. The game is pretty simple but pretty addicting, kind of like the original simcity. So that is how I killed a day. If no one could tell my GF was working all weekend!

Ha I’m that Old!

So there are more websites on the internet than can really be counted. This is due to the a. just the shear number of sites along with b. the fact they are constantly popping up and being taken down. Many of the sites out there are run by corporations such as Sony, Ford, or Coden that simply provide information on their products and possibly new software drivers and support. Others such as NWA offer you a portal to their services such as online check in and reservations. My favorite websites however are the ones that give you a survey, tell you some BS, and try to sell you something. Most of the time, these sites are just plain fun.

An example of such a site is eMode. A site that offers you IQ test, personality test, and just random junk like “What kind of rock star are you” and so on. At the end of the test the site tells you how smart you are, what your personality is, or that you are most like Steven Tyler from Aerosmith! Then they try to sell something. eMode isn’t bad they just try to get you to buy more in-depth tests or go to sponsored links. Other sites a lot of times will not give you the results of the exercise with out providing an eMail address (most likely so they can spam you, or at least sell you address to a spammer) or other personal information such as a contact number or address. Giving this information is definitely not worth the hassle of being solicited later on.

One of my favorite sites however is www.realage.com. They are trying to sell you stuff. But at least they are front about it and don’t spam you. They are trying to sell diet pills, supplements, and other age defying drugs. But for fun you can find out how old you are in terms of you health. They take factors such as how often you work out, what kinds of food you eat, if your over weight, if you smoke, and so on with your age and calculate how old your actually are. It’s about a 5 or 6 page survey and I thought it was pretty fun; especially because I don’t do any of the high risk activities such as smoking.

So how old am I? Well my calculated REAL age was 5.8 years younger than my actual age! According to the test (when I took some months ago) I am only 22.1 years old! The funniest results I saw were from a guy who does all of the high risk activities, though he was only 24 his REAL age was over 40. Ha. Well if your board and want to burn up some time on the internet I would suggest taking the test yourself. Let me know how old you are.

Level of Goodness?

Well to put this story into context I have to explain my travel woes from Monday morning. However because half of my travel is not smooth I will not dwell on the issue as I think I have complained enough in my blog. Well I new I was probably in trouble from the start. With 12 inches of wet heavy snow the night before, I did not see the cab waiting for me out front as I expected at 4:30a. Well as I had requested early because of the snow the night before I was pretty calm. When it had not showed up by 4:45 I was a little worried. So I called my car service. They told me they were running 30 min behind. Well I pretty much knew then I was screwed; they showed up at 5:20a and my flight was at 6:00a.

To sum up the day, I missed my 1^st flight by 10 minutes. Actually they shut the doors early because they released the seats (I found out later from someone who was on the flight) to a lot – say 15 or more – NWA employee’s. I made it before the scheduled push back, but they had already locked up. So I was put on standby – in a middle seat mind you – for the 6:50a flight. Well I got on. But it had not been through it’s safety inspection so it pushed back 25 minutes late and by that time they closed the airport due to heavy snow (we would have made it if the plane was ready on time strike two for NWA that day). So I sat in a middle seat for 2 hours waiting…. Waiting…

After an hour they had let people get off of the plane. Unfortunately, when the snow stopped snowing only a third of us were still on the plane. Instead of taking off NWA decided to back fill the seats with people from canceled flights. It took 40 minutes to reboard the plane. By that time the snow started again and we had to wait again. NWA let people off the plane again. 1 and ½ hours later the snow stopped, took another 40 minutes to reboard again, and then got off the ground around 12:30… I was originally on the 6:00a flight. Ok so yadda, yadda I got into Detroit at 2:30, no more flight to Dayton, was rebooked to Columbus, that flight was canceled, the next was delayed, got into Columbus at 9:30p, drove to Dayton, and was finally at the hotel at 11:00p. What a day.

OK, so while I was stuck in the Detroit airport I ran into another consultant from my local office. He had actually been stuck on the same flight and after talking briefly about our travel woes we started talking about the various projects we were on. Two interesting points cam out of this conversation from his assignments. The first was his last role, after being in consulting for more than a decade he actually was on a project in which the role was to reduce head count. This work sounded similar to that of the consultants in Office Space. Can anyone say ‘So what is it that you actually do here?’ He mentioned how hard it was to work with the very people you were sent in to eliminate and how hostile they could be. There is a surprise the people you want to fire have no interest in helping you eliminate their jobs! I honestly hope I don’t have to work in that type of environment. From time to time SAP causes reduction in head count but that is not the goal of putting in the system just one of it’s effects; but if the company wants to grow it is actually helpful because those people can be reassigned to more meaningful tasks rather than being let go.

The second role he was talking about was that of working on an S&O assignment. S&O stands for Strategy and Operations. This is a non-technical, business strategy role in which our company gives advice on policy, company direction, and so on. This consultant I was talking to normally works on technical projects so this was something new for him. The funny thing was is he wasn’t really sure how we are judged by clients in this situation. Normally if you implementation goes in on time, on budget, and works the way it was sold to the client you have several metrics to measure success. When you give advice how do you know if you were successful? He wondered if there was a level of goodness for the advice provided. Like that was very good advice it gets a level of 8 or that was poor advice it only gets a level 3. I found this to be an amusing idea.

I believe success is gauged by the outcome. If the company takes your advice and it creates a benefit those benefits can be attributed to you. If they don’t take your advice and fail it could be said they failed because you gave them sound advice and they did not take it. The good news is with strategy work you can always claim the later for failure because the client only gets advice. They don’t get complete plans and the decisions are always let to the client in the end. So no matter what the level of goodness provided by the advice, the firm always gets paid and can claim success. This certainly explains many companies success in Strategy consulting.

Just a Few Things…

Well work is getting hectic and keeping up with my blogging has been harder than before; I keep having ideas – then no time – then I forget the idea, so I thought I would write a few informative bits of information about what is going on while I am sitting here stranded at the Cleveland Airport.

First off I’m stranded for the second week in a row at the Cleveland Airport. For the last two weeks I took a Continental flight and both of those flights have been delayed long enough to miss my connection. So a little travel tip from Matt: If you can’t take a direct you need to have at least an hour and twenty minutes between flights or expect to waste two to three hours when you miss your connection.

Second item is the fact that after several years of being uninsured I finally went to the dentist. Not completely by choice – more due to breaking my tooth – but at least I now plan on going on a regular basis. I don’t know how people with out insurance could be expected to pay for this kind of work; I will have to go 4 more times this year and it’s going to cost over $400, if I didn’t have insurance it would be more than 5 times that amount. Wow. So if you haven’t been for a while I would seriously suggest getting in there before it gets worse.

Third when is spring coming? I don’t know about anyone else out there but I would be happy to put away the winter coats. I keep watching the weather forecast and still no temperatures in the 50’s or higher. I think we had warmer weather in January this year than March so far. Oh well, what can you do? I guess soon enough. I will have to get out more this year, maybe go camping a couple of weekends.

There is probably a forth or fifth but nothing really that compelling I will write more later I think.