Thursday Post

Hmmmm…. It seems like Thursday is “post day” Thursdays are relatively unappreciated days. In fact, back in May, I went searching through the iTunes Music store for all songs that have the day of the week in them and found that Thursday is clearly under-appreciated.

So it’s back at work for the first full day of work for the week. I was on Vacation on Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday were spent in prep and travel for the 2004 UNC-CAUSE conference — where I gave a presentation about the VCL Project that Engineering and ITD are involved in.

It was one of the very rare presentations that I have felt positive about. Which is not terribly bad considering that the epiphany I had about how to structure what I would say came at 8:30pm the night before. That’s an improvement over most of my College presentations though.

There’s something to be said for presentations for the effect on the presenter. My vacation was spent camping with my girlfriend in the Shenandoah mountains in Virginia. Some of the more amazing overlooks are those of Shenandoah valley — you literally get a bird’s eye view of the farms in the valley below, almost like they are a model train set:

Presentations often give you the chance to step back and look at the project that you are involved in, day after day after day, and see it with new eyes. Our next generation Eos project is two years now in the making, and sometimes progress seems to get lost in itself. It’s good to see things from the outside sometimes

But the best part of the day for me came at two points: 1) I had the opportunity to sit in on a presentation from Jason Austin, a web developer over in ITD working on a part-timer tracking application. If Jason is any indication of the future of ITD and Computing Services, it’s in good hands. He had quite the posse of co-workers there for moral support (i.e. good-natured harassment). I had the chance to sit between Susan Klein and Bill Padgett, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit honored and nostalgic to be sitting between the person that hired me into the University community, and the gentlemen that served as both management and mentor for the first several years I was here.

The second came at lunch where I got to sit down with Steven Jones and talk with him about what’s happening in CNR. Steven is a good guy. We talked about technology — but more about the important things like family and people. Also had the chance to meet ITD’s “new guy” — on the hook for the rather challenging LITRE project for the G108 classroom. Greg seems like a good guy too.

I think it reminded me for a moment of something that I hold as a core value — people make the difference in technology. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that in future binarypage posts