Ramblings

I just have to start out by saying, the weather was awesome! Yes, this is seriously overdue, but I’ve been sick and the last thing I have wanted to do was sit in front of my computer just to give you an update. I already posted a little about my trip out to San Diego and I was hoping that what I mentioned would be the worst of it all. Well, as it turned out, there was going to be more to tell.

First, let me give you an overview of everyone’s travel arrangements. There were a total of five of us out there, Mike Schnoebelen (my supervisor), Elaine (sp?) who is Mike’s wife, Denise Welch from Financial Aid, Cindy Powell from IT and myself. The five of us traveled in three separate groups. Mike and Elaine drove all the way from Longview to San Diego, Denise flew out of Shreveport, and Cindy and I flew out of DFW.

I already told you a little about how our flight from Denver to San Diego was delayed. Nothing really special there other than it wasted some time and was a bit annoying. Our luggage followed us just fine and we were able to grab it fairly quickly once we arrived in San Diego. Denise flew from Shreveport to DFW on a little puddle hopper then DFW to San Diego on a real plane. Unfortunately, her luggage didn’t make the switch to the next leg properly. It ended up halfway across the country (Chicago I think) and all she had were a few necessities in her carry-on bag. This prompted a late evening (20:30 PST) run to a local mall where she bought some clothes to last until her luggage showed up. Thankfully it did show up … at midnight. So all in all, it wasn’t too bad, although they did want her to list a few items in the bag (not including clothes) that could be used to verify she was the rightful owner. The hitch there was that there weren’t that many unique items other than clothes in the bag, but they gave it to her anyways.

The conference went well the rest of the week. Registration for the event wasn’t until 17:00 PST on Tuesday, so we had roughly a day to bum around some before we had to get to work. I didn’t do much Tuesday morning like I should have, but all in all it was a nice day. I met the keynote speaker during the registration time (which was really just a check-in and chat time) and learned that she knew a fair bit about LeTourneau. Apparently her husband had looked closely at going to LU at some point in the past, and she had even been interested … this back when the school was still almost 100% male. Wednesday began the actual conference …

And it was also the day of the two presentations given by LeTourneau. Cindy and I had our “Using CX with Authorize.net” presentation (my PowerPoint slides) at 1:15, the session right after lunch, and Denise and Mike had their presentation at 2:45, the session right after ours. I must say that I was a bit nervous about the whole deal. Judging by the attendance at the two earlier sessions that I had attended, I was only expecting 10 – 15 people to show up for ours, especially since the room we had been assigned sat maybe 40 – 45 at the most. The earlier sessions I had gone to had been held in large (150 – 200 seats) rooms and had a maximum attendance of about 10. Those rooms were, how should I say it, roomy. Fifteen minutes before ours was set to start, people started showing up. Thankfully I had gotten there about 30 minutes early so I could make sure that I had the video projector and computer all figured out before anyone showed up. I hate it when the presenter is sitting there fiddling with the hardware while people are coming in … or even worse, after the session was supposed to have started. So, as people were coming in, one or two at a time over about 15 minutes, I greeted them and engaged a few in small talk before we were supposed to start. When about 10 people had entered, I made some comment like “Well, we’ve already exceeded my wildest expectations for attendance.” This earned me a few chuckles since some of those in the room had been to sessions like mine that morning where almost no one turned up.

Just a few minutes before the session was slated to begin there was a sudden influx of people. We’re talking lots of people. By the time came that I should start the session it was standing room only. Mike did a rough count for me while I was talking and he told me later that there were at least 50 people, more like 55, in the room. Wow!

Just to show how nervous I was, I’d intended to do a quick survey of the room to find out what kind of people were sitting in. Where they Student Accounts people, Financial Aid, IT, what? Well, I forgot to even do that. Thankfully, Cindy worked it in a little later before we got to stuff where that information really mattered. So I let everyone know that it was perfectly acceptable to stop me and ask questions throughout the presentation and then launched into my part of the presentation with gusto. In hind sight I should have ordered the presentation a little differently. As presented, I pretty much took a chronological approach and described what we did and why. I should have started out letting everyone know that we didn’t use any of Jenzabar’s code and had written everything in house. The group figured that out as we went along through questions and clues that were in the rest of the presentation, but I should have laid that out from the beginning. The full hour passed before I realized it. I glanced down at my watch and saw that it was time to let them out just as I finished that last slide, so our timing worked out pretty well. I had initially been concerned that we didn’t have enough material to fill the hour, but as it turned out, many of the other presentations didn’t even last 30 – 45 minutes (with some as short as 15).

I fielded some more questions in the room after we officially let out, but that was fairly short as we needed to clear the room so the next presenter could prepare. I headed out into the lobby after we left the room and still got cornered for questions up until the next session was slated to start. This happened on and off all week. Someone would recognize me from the session and stop me to talk about it or some related topic for a while. It was kind of nice to see a little better what the other school’s were up to. It seemed very few of them had any sort of e-commerce solution in place. What was even more confusing to me was how many schools outsourced their payment plans to a third party.

There was another session I wanted to sit in on during Mike and Denise’s presentation, so I didn’t get to see theirs, but I definitely heard about it all week in other sessions. Their session was on using Microsoft Access to supplement the reporting capabilities (and to do some basic scripting) that are built into the product (CX). There were a few IT director types there during the week, and this one in particular who gave a few presentations I sat in on, who were … um … extremely paranoid. It was those types that had the biggest problem with the information the Mike and Denise shared. They saw it only as a bad thing without really thinking it through at all (read only ODBC drivers really limit the ability of users to destroy your data when all they needed were some reports).

I dressed up nicely for our presentation, and had planned to dress pretty much the same the rest of the week. However, I quickly realized that if I continued to dress like that, I would be about the only one. So I dropped back to the good ‘ole blue jeans with nice shirts, which was still a notch above some who were wearing shorts and sandals.

The rest of the week (really just Thursday and Friday) went pretty smooth. There were a few sessions that had looked interesting, but turned out to be not that engaging or thought provoking. On the flip side of that, there were a few sessions that I sat in on because I had nothing else to do that turned out to be fairly good sessions. So it all evened out to a fair grade.

Thursday afternoon was the San Diego Zoo. I’d never been to San Diego, and that means I hadn’t been to the Zoo there either. I heard from about 10 people that the San Diego Zoo was incredible, but of course that was *always* second hand information. No one I talked to had actually ever been there themselves. We walked around for a few hours in the sun and shade checking out the various exhibits. I mention the sun because it was the first day that we had seen even a hint of the sun. So much for sunny San Diego. We saw all sorts of cool animals, most of which I have pictures of that will be posted eventually. The pandas were cool! The zoo closed to normal visitors at 6, at which time we had a private animal show. The show was cool … I was a little skeptical at first thinking that it was one of those things that I would have enjoyed more 15 years ago, but it turned out to be really fun. After the show they had a catered dinner available as well as free rides on the gondola system. There were a few complaints about how the dinner was handled, but it wasn’t too bad. Basically, there were several types of food available, but no signs to indicate which of the long lines you should wait in to get the type you were interested in. Chances were not very good that you would get what you wanted. Oh well.

Friday afternoon (about 4:00 or so) Cindy and I (who were the only two from LU still there) decided to do a little walking around and sightseeing. We were both a little interested in getting to the actual beach (on the other side of Coronado Island) and I was interested in getting aboard the USS Midway (a museum aircraft carrier). The beach was a little too far without a vehicle so we pretty much gave up that option and headed for the Midway. It turns out that the Midway is open until 5PM, but the last boarding time is at 4:00. If you remember, we didn’t even leave the hotel until 4. I guess that’s for the best since we were later told that to do the tour justice you need about 2.5 – 3.0 hours. There was a place near the museum ships (more than just the Midway) where we could buy tickets for a bay tour. That sounded like a nice compromise and Cindy was up for it, so we bought a couple of tickets for the next tour which was about 45 minutes later. Cindy was looking for some shirts or something for her kids, so we hit a few of the gift shops and standalone shops in the area while we waited. The tour was great. We saw all kinds of stuff that I would have totally missed had we stayed on foot and the breeze was great. I really like being out on the water like that when the weather is nice. I have a ton of photos from the tour that I’ll post eventually.

After the bay tour, which lasted for an hour, we headed back to the hotel to clean up a bit and then headed to a Joe’s Crabshack near the hotel for dinner. We were told that it would be 90 minutes before we could get a seat! 90 minutes, are you nuts? I convinced Cindy, who still wanted to get to the mall to try and find something for her kids before 9PM, to wait it out some and see if it’ll actually be an hour and a half. It turned out to be just about 30 – 35 minutes, not 90. In fact, we had been seated, got our food, and ready to leave before the 90 minutes had elapsed. Even getting out of there when we did, we didn’t quite have enough time to go by the mall, so we settled for the gift shop in the hotel.

After that, I finished up all the packing that I could do before the morning (there are always a few things that you can’t pack until the morning) and went to bed. Let me tell you, all that crap they give you at the conference is a pain to fit into an already overstuffed bag. Plus I got this one bag for giving a presentation that had a cooler thingy attached on the bottom, so it couldn’t compress and go into my main bag. Our flight was supposed to leave at 7:50AM, so that meant we needed to be in the airport no later than 6:00. If it weren’t for those stupid self-check in terminals I would have gone nuts. The line, should we have been forced to stand in it, had at least 200 people waiting impatiently. Anyways, we got our boarding passes pretty quickly and then got in an even longer line to get through security.

The line moved reasonably well, I guess. They had a second line for people who were going to miss their flights if they didn’t jump ahead some, so that was a little disheartening to see, but the line did continue to move. This time I was prepared, so I had my shoes off already and my laptop out of the bag. I guess the laptop obscures the view of the bag when it is being x-rayed, well, at least that’s my guess as to why I have to pull it out. No issues … got cleared by security and moved on towards our assigned gate with about 15 minutes to first boarding call. The plane boarded on time and it was all fairly uneventful. It was so uneventful, in fact, that I missed that we had been sitting on the plane at the gate for about 45 minutes, 15 minutes longer than we were supposed to.

Long, long, long story not so long … the co-pilot hopped on the intercom after we were about 30 minutes late leaving to tell us that they were having some hardware issues with one of the auto-pilot computers and needed to ‘power cycle’ the airplane, which involved interrupting power to those lucky first class passengers that were using it. After the reset, during which we sat without air circulation, they co-pilot got back on the intercom to tell us that the power cycle hadn’t helped and that he didn’t think it would be a problem that should keep us on the ground, but that they had to check with maintenance anyways (I don’t know how much to believe this guy at this point as all pilots have a better understanding of the regs than that, or should at least). It turned out to be a problem that we could not fly with and so a maintenance person was dispatched to see if they could correct the problem. Several more power cycles, part of the movie Robots, and a lot of time pass before we are told that there is no way this plane will be taking us to Denver. By this point many of the other passengers had no chance of catching their connecting flights out of Denver (and the airline had been doing its best to reschedule those passengers as the deadlines past). If we were stuck in San Diego for more than about another 30 minutes, there was no way we were going to make our connecting flight (and we were supposed to have a 2 hour layover in Denver, ha!).

They told us all to get off the plane and wait in the gate area where we would receive instructions as to what to do next. So begins the mass exodus. People are surprisingly absent minded when something like this happens. Anyways, after getting out into the terminal and waiting in line at the little boarding pass/ticket desk at the gate for about 15 minutes they hop on the intercom and tell us to all just go to the front ticket counters and that they would work with us there. Say what!?! What about our luggage, where is it? What’s going on? Errr ….

So, we all sprint/dash/run to the ticket counters only to form another long line that took about an hour an a half to get through just to talk to someone! The whole time we are fretting about our luggage and connecting flights, etc. When Cindy and I finally get to the counter things looked a little less bleak. The lady that was dealing with us was not the most, um, friendly person we had encountered. I wasn’t sure that we had the ticket stubs for our luggage (which we found out had been dropped off in some back room while we were waiting in line) and that really pissed off the ticket lady. She was like, “Well how am I supposed to find them then?”. Moron.

I turned out that all of United’s flights to DFW (by this point it was worthless to plan on just getting to Denver) were booked full already for the day, so she checked on the other airlines. American Airlines had several flights (direct at that) to DFW that afternoon starting about 1:30. The 1:30 was supposedly booked, along with the 3:00 one, but there was a 4:00 that had a couple of seats available. We got ourselves some paperwork indicating that we had seats reserved for that flight, our luggage, and directions to Terminal 2. Oh joy! My bag weighs a whopping 42 pounds (I’ll tell you about that later) and has no wheels. Fun, fun, fun.

The people over at the American ticket counters were so much nicer and the lines so much shorter. We got tickets for the 4:00 flight after talking with the ticket agent a bit. It sounded like there were over 20 people on standby for the 1:30 and the 3:00 flights, so there was no hope for leaving any earlier, or so we thought. I didn’t realize it at the time, but thanks to all the switching around at the last (well, after actually) minute we got flagged for all the “special” treatment. This started when we checked our luggage, as we had to wait with it until it cleared the inspection while other people were simply able to drop theirs off. As soon as that was done we stopped and grabbed some lunch as it was right at noon already … four hours after our flight was supposed to have left.

After a healthy *cough* lunch at a McDonalds (Cindy actually got some food from some mexican place) we headed for the security line, which didn’t look too bad. In fact, we were in line for only about 10 minutes, which I consider pretty good after some of my experiences earlier that day. When the lady manning the boxes at the x-ray machine pulled red ones down for Cindy and I everything clicked into place. Great, now all the detailed searching begins. Whatever, I pass all my stuff through, walk through the metal detector, and get told to have a seat and wait for one of the TSA people to come get me. When that does happen and he starts telling me what’s going on (which any idiot has already figured out) I reply with something about us being on a flight that got canceled. He was like, “How many people were on that plane?” … “Um, I don’t know. It was a full 737.” … “Great, I’m glad my shift ends soon.” Ya, he and I both knew that everyone getting off that flight was going to get the special treatment.

I plopped myself down at our gate and settled in for a three hour wait. At least the seats were comfortable. Cindy had a few things that she wanted to do (hit the gift shops, make a few calls, etc) so I watched one of her bags while she did that. Unfortunately half the stuff she wanted to do required going back out past security. She returned about 2:00 and wanted to know if we should try to put our names on the standby list for the flight that was about to leave. She had checked with them and they had indicated that we should be able to get on, even though we had been told there was no hope. We decided to wait since our luggage wasn’t going to leave until 4:00, so we’d have to wait somewhere. So we decided to try to grab the 3:00 flight since we still had time to shift our luggage around for it. So, out past security again for Cindy (thanks for that) to move our bags onto the 3:00 flight so that no matter which flight we got, our luggage would be there. Then she stopped over at the gate and got our names on the standby list. No sooner than she had come back over to where I was, sat down and told me that it was all taken care of, they called our names. Sweet! Good timing Cindy! So, we boarded the 3:00 flight direct to DFW and landed about 8:00 CST.

All said and done, it was right at 11:00PM CST before she dropped me off at my apartment … and she still had another 30 minutes or so to get to her place.