Weekend in a really cool town

May 24, 2008

It was a crazy week as I got sick with a cold, no doubt the result of going from 100 degrees to 50 in a few hours, but it never really got a serious hold on me and I even felt good enough to go for a run this morning.

Work has been really hectic: This trip was ostensibly for training but as soon as I started to sniff around in the project stuff I shelved that real quick. The short story is that we have a big meeting June 10 with our French customers to decide if they want to go ahead with this project or not. When I'm finished with them they definitely will want to go forward tee hee. I told my boss that we just need to have so much crap that it becomes impossible for them to say no and he just laughed. He is great, very smart.

We need to provide a bunch of information about how we will integrate French into our product and training. Things haven't changed a bit since I showed up in Europe 29 years ago: everything has to be in French even though they speak English, France is best, we are the greatest, and screw everybody else. OK, works for me, that's why they hired me.

We also have to show our backgrounds and plans for how we will support the customer when we go live. The trickiest part is obviously translating our product and disseminating the info to the key French super users using various training tricks and change management skullduggery, which is my specialty.

I have almost prepared the material and will complete tomorrow so we can review Monday.

The other thing that is weird is day breaks at 5 a.m. and so therefore do I! Same thing at night - night doesn't fall until 930, so not exactly early to bed weather. So it has been easy to work longer days and not feel exhausted.

This morning I woke up at the crack, worked for a few hours, then went for a run along the Sea Wall, which winds all around the downtown area in a park-like setting. This is clearly a people-friendly city, everyone walks everywhere just the way I like it. Lots and lots of water and green everywhere you look.

I went shopping and blew $36 in about two seconds flat. Very expensive here, yikes.

Later today I will to "Eat Vancouver", some sort of food festival.

The babes are right off the hook. Wow. Classic situation that you see in every country: There is always a "best place" - most jobs or culture or best weather or all of these. In Canada, it's Vancouver, hands down. There is not too much winter at all, which is the big one for Canadians. For that reason and all the beauty of the city and area, it's a BABE MAGNET.

More on that later.