Road Trip Review

Last Thursday I headed up to Salmon Arm for work, me and J were sent up to do some introduction/training to the people who are actually paying to develop this system we’ve been working on. Their head office is in SA, so we headed up….

• Wednesday
  
  
  
  • 10:30pm-ish – Decide it might be a good idea to pack before it gets too late. Throw clothes, camera, and stack of CDs into my gym bag before realizing that there really isn’t a whole lot needed for one night away.
    
  
  
• Thursday
  
  
  
  • 8:00am – Leave for work
    
  • 9:30am – Get everything set up so that things are ready for the demo. Run through the demo so that everything works nicely. Fix a couple of minor things at the last minute.
    
  • 10:00am – Fill up with gas, check oil, start out on the road.
    
  • Search hoplessly through various MP3 CDs in the car to try to find the one song I knew was there, but couldn’t find.
    
  • Got a call from the Designer-salesdude, with a client that wanted to share an access database over the internet. There are a couple of ways to do this, but it’s a really ugly thing to do I think, especially when you have an existing Unix server with a real database (or at least the option of having real one).
    
  • 1:00pm – Stop at the Wendy’s in Kamloops for lunch. I got my food (well, if you can call it that) quickly, but they forgot about J somehow, and even though I was after him, I was halfway through my fry-like foodstuff before he got to the table. We talked a bit about how to share an access database across the Internet, and he suggested putting it on a Samba share and simply firewalling that so that users open the cough database with Access.
    
  • 2:00pm – Arrive in Salmon Arm
    
  • Head to the head office, talk to people, give a demo, and show how things work.
    
  • 4:30pm – The office shut down around this point, so we wandered to the hotel and checked ourselves in. The place was nice! Fluffy duvets, big TV, lots of pillows, big bathroom…. nothing to complain about here, especially when it’s being paid for by someone else. The only thing was the air conditioning unit, while it had a “Heat” and “High Heat” setting, did nothing but blow cold air.
    
  • 5:00pm – Hockey game starts, we sit and cheer the Canucks.
    
  • 5:30pm – First period ends, head to dinner at the hotels’ eatery, which is a fancy greek place. I had the lamb, which was amazingly tender, and fell apart on my fork.
    
  • 8:00pm – Hockey game ends, we kick ass (of course).
    
  • Following this was mindless TV watching, including Survivor, which I watched and cheered on my swimsuit model girl (who I got in the office survivor pool). She survived for another episode! Go girl go! Next week they look like they are going to try to pull viewers in by showing the women bathing topless in the river. Must be nice being a Survivor cameraman huh?
    
  • 10:30pm – Sleep
    
  
  
• Friday
  
  
  
  • 7:30am – Wake up and head to find breakfast. Nothing better than an ABC wannabe was open though, with about the same (crappy) quality food.
    
  • 8:30am – Go into the office, set up the computer we brought along, and start on the list of changes we were given the other day. The rest of the day was a mix of coding, confering with people on how they wanted things, and answering questions. Poor J had to keep reminding people he wasn’t here, and couldn’t answer their mindless tech support questions.
    
  • 12:00pm – Lunch at Boston Pizza.
    
  • 3:00pm – Pack up and head back. J went to do some snowboarding, I headed back home.
    
  • Had a decent drive back. I wanted to take more picutres, but only took one of the strangest truck I’ve seen in a while. A normal truck, on monster truck wheels, but very thin monster truck wheels, no wider than the truck body. It wasn’t a functioning truck, basically a model/joke outside a used car lot somewhere between Salmon Arm and Kamloops.
    
  • The only note of excitement was a speeding ticket. He got me legit, going 115 in a 90 zone, but it was on the long straightaway heading towards Kamloops, where it’s four lands, perfectly flat, and perfectly straight, and the speed limit should really be about 130 km/h. I knew I was going faster than I should have, but I really figured the speed limit was at least 100 at that point. Oh well, such is life I guess.
    
  • 6:00pm – Ugly ugly dense for at the top of the Coque. Glad there was someone ahead of me so I could follow his lights.
    
  • 8:00pm – Arrive home, glad to be there, sniffing cause my cold had been bugging me the whole way back.