Saturday, July 14, 2007
All at sea
Today is a sea day, a nautical term meaning succor for the jet-lagged. We have no ports of call and no shore time, and are sailing north from Copenhagen to a point partway up the Norwegian coast by the most direct route. We are out of sight of land and, for the most part, out of reach of GSM towers. It is, in short, a day perfectly suited to putting off both activities and blogging, and just catching up on sleep.
So I will write about yesterday instead, which was much more interesting. Over breakfast at our hotel we were pegged as Prairie Home cruisers by Marcia and Kurt, a very personable and interesting couple from Seattle who had done the cruise before. We decided to share a cab to the ship, and enjoyed their company throughout the ride, the various forms of processing we underwent, embarkation, and lunch. Exploring the ship afterwards we found, among many other things, the nightclub, the casino, the piano bar, the extremely well-stocked library with adjoining espresso bar, the various dining rooms, the tennis courts and assorted pools, and the teens-only themed tropical waterfall grotto with pools, which we envied.
We also toured the spa, which is not merely the onboard purveyor of spalike services but which you must pass throught to reach the gym. Nice bit of marketing, that. We each signed up for membership in the Thermal Suite, a set of rooms with steam, jacuzzi, and as their centerpiece a set of heated tile lounge chairs sort of extruded from the floor in which you basically lounge and melt. The perfect thing after a long day of sightseeing, we figure. We also bought some sessions in a shiny egglike pod which simultaneously warms and gently massages you while spraying you with soothing aromas - the better to relax you while the gently humming white pod clones your body for eventual possession by our alien masters, I imagine. Anyway, half an hour in The Pod is said to substitute for three hours of sleep. Anything that dares make a promise like that has to be tried, however poor the odds.
Dinner companions, randomly assigned and yours for the duration of the voyage, are always a source of trepidation on a cruise like this. Anything can happen from mere uncomfortable silences to the dread People With Whose Political Opinions We Disagree. So we were not merely pleasantly surprise but delighted (and here I wish my blackberry did italics) to make the acquaintance of tablemates Kristi, a mostly-retired opera singer now living in Dublin and reading up on theoretical physics, and Madeline, her 9-year-old daughter who is lovely and charming and everything else that a pretty much idealized 9-year-old can be. There will be many Kristi-and-Madeline stories in days to come, I'm sure.
After our *delightful* dinner we sought seats for the 10pm PHC show itself. What a pleasure. But I'll write about that later, because tonight's show is beginning.
So I will write about yesterday instead, which was much more interesting. Over breakfast at our hotel we were pegged as Prairie Home cruisers by Marcia and Kurt, a very personable and interesting couple from Seattle who had done the cruise before. We decided to share a cab to the ship, and enjoyed their company throughout the ride, the various forms of processing we underwent, embarkation, and lunch. Exploring the ship afterwards we found, among many other things, the nightclub, the casino, the piano bar, the extremely well-stocked library with adjoining espresso bar, the various dining rooms, the tennis courts and assorted pools, and the teens-only themed tropical waterfall grotto with pools, which we envied.
We also toured the spa, which is not merely the onboard purveyor of spalike services but which you must pass throught to reach the gym. Nice bit of marketing, that. We each signed up for membership in the Thermal Suite, a set of rooms with steam, jacuzzi, and as their centerpiece a set of heated tile lounge chairs sort of extruded from the floor in which you basically lounge and melt. The perfect thing after a long day of sightseeing, we figure. We also bought some sessions in a shiny egglike pod which simultaneously warms and gently massages you while spraying you with soothing aromas - the better to relax you while the gently humming white pod clones your body for eventual possession by our alien masters, I imagine. Anyway, half an hour in The Pod is said to substitute for three hours of sleep. Anything that dares make a promise like that has to be tried, however poor the odds.
Dinner companions, randomly assigned and yours for the duration of the voyage, are always a source of trepidation on a cruise like this. Anything can happen from mere uncomfortable silences to the dread People With Whose Political Opinions We Disagree. So we were not merely pleasantly surprise but delighted (and here I wish my blackberry did italics) to make the acquaintance of tablemates Kristi, a mostly-retired opera singer now living in Dublin and reading up on theoretical physics, and Madeline, her 9-year-old daughter who is lovely and charming and everything else that a pretty much idealized 9-year-old can be. There will be many Kristi-and-Madeline stories in days to come, I'm sure.
After our *delightful* dinner we sought seats for the 10pm PHC show itself. What a pleasure. But I'll write about that later, because tonight's show is beginning.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Arrival in Copenhagen and return to consciousness
Copenhagen International Airport is nonsmoking, but you can tell Denmark is a smoking country with your first breath of air when you step inside from the jetway. During the entire walk from the gates (eerily similar to Oslo's in design as if they'd been copied from the same blueprints, but built from metal and linoleum instead of wood) through the very attractive shopping area through passport control, baggage claim and finally the terminal area I saw no smokers, yet the smell hung in the air everywhere.
Both of us were tired to the point of catalepsy during the short flight from London, so instead of the highly recommended quick and inexpensive public transit we took a cab to our hotel, the smallish but very pleasant Copenhagen Strand. One side of our room faces the water of the Inderhavnen canal, one of the large waterways that cuts through the city (if it were Venice, this would be the Grand Canal), and the other overlooks a little courtyard and back street. completely charming. Through our window little whiffs of the Jazz Festival drifted in, but we couldn't hear or see from where.
After freshening up a little it was about Fpm local time so we decided to put off the need for sleep just a little while and wander a little first. We walked two blocks up the waterside to Nyhavn, the short canalside street of outdoor cafes end to end that you can see in every guidebook and on the cover of ours. On the way to Nyhavn Kristiana thought she could hear jazz coming from several directions including across the channel (the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is HUGE), but once we turned on to Nyhavn the New Orleans style saxophone band at the far end of the street drowned all the others out.
Kristiana and I took different sides of the canal - she wanted the best vantage points for photos and I wanted to wander among the cafes themselves - and as I passed the bandstand I saw police arriving to divert traffic. Shortly some kind of march, perhaps 500-1000 people (I have no special skill at estimating crowds, but at the end of a day of international travel including a layover at Heathrow my sense was that it was a good three large superjets worth). The crowd was mostly though not uniformly young, and very passionate in their cause, though the loud synchronized chanting was all in Danish so I could not at this point tell you what that cause was. The procession was followed by a sort of mobile DJ van emblazoned "SUMMER OF 69 FOR A NON PROFIT KICK ASS CULTURE," and as it drew up to a point behind the bandstand it stopped and over its speakders boomed several minutes of speech - again in Danish so again I can't say what it was, but I got a couple minutes of video which I will try to post if I get a real connection later (I'm writing this on my Blackberry). At the end the chants resumedan and they moved on.
My need for sleep was now overwhelming so I went back to the hotel. Before I could finish texting Kristiana, she walked in the door as well. she was hungry but hadn't yet found anything that appealed to her, the plate-of-clams-and-a-pint-of-Carlsen cuisine of Nyhavn not really meeting her definition of jet-lag recovery food.
I napped briefly - less than the length of the album playing on my iPod (Wendy Luck's The Ancient Key, if you're interested), and awoke to the smells of Indian food that Kristiana had materialized from somewhere and had already eaten her fill of. (Note to Kristiana: how'd you do that - did you just rez it out of inventory or something? Do we have Build privileges here?)
Now it's morning, both local time and body time. Kristiana has gone out to shoot pictures in the morning light while I blog. As soon as I post this, I'm heading out to find her and get an espresso.
Both of us were tired to the point of catalepsy during the short flight from London, so instead of the highly recommended quick and inexpensive public transit we took a cab to our hotel, the smallish but very pleasant Copenhagen Strand. One side of our room faces the water of the Inderhavnen canal, one of the large waterways that cuts through the city (if it were Venice, this would be the Grand Canal), and the other overlooks a little courtyard and back street. completely charming. Through our window little whiffs of the Jazz Festival drifted in, but we couldn't hear or see from where.
After freshening up a little it was about Fpm local time so we decided to put off the need for sleep just a little while and wander a little first. We walked two blocks up the waterside to Nyhavn, the short canalside street of outdoor cafes end to end that you can see in every guidebook and on the cover of ours. On the way to Nyhavn Kristiana thought she could hear jazz coming from several directions including across the channel (the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is HUGE), but once we turned on to Nyhavn the New Orleans style saxophone band at the far end of the street drowned all the others out.
Kristiana and I took different sides of the canal - she wanted the best vantage points for photos and I wanted to wander among the cafes themselves - and as I passed the bandstand I saw police arriving to divert traffic. Shortly some kind of march, perhaps 500-1000 people (I have no special skill at estimating crowds, but at the end of a day of international travel including a layover at Heathrow my sense was that it was a good three large superjets worth). The crowd was mostly though not uniformly young, and very passionate in their cause, though the loud synchronized chanting was all in Danish so I could not at this point tell you what that cause was. The procession was followed by a sort of mobile DJ van emblazoned "SUMMER OF 69 FOR A NON PROFIT KICK ASS CULTURE," and as it drew up to a point behind the bandstand it stopped and over its speakders boomed several minutes of speech - again in Danish so again I can't say what it was, but I got a couple minutes of video which I will try to post if I get a real connection later (I'm writing this on my Blackberry). At the end the chants resumedan and they moved on.
My need for sleep was now overwhelming so I went back to the hotel. Before I could finish texting Kristiana, she walked in the door as well. she was hungry but hadn't yet found anything that appealed to her, the plate-of-clams-and-a-pint-of-Carlsen cuisine of Nyhavn not really meeting her definition of jet-lag recovery food.
I napped briefly - less than the length of the album playing on my iPod (Wendy Luck's The Ancient Key, if you're interested), and awoke to the smells of Indian food that Kristiana had materialized from somewhere and had already eaten her fill of. (Note to Kristiana: how'd you do that - did you just rez it out of inventory or something? Do we have Build privileges here?)
Now it's morning, both local time and body time. Kristiana has gone out to shoot pictures in the morning light while I blog. As soon as I post this, I'm heading out to find her and get an espresso.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Just the luck, Part II
We're in the departure lounge @SFO. Kristiana just got word that a delivery has arrived in her cube at work. It's from Samsonite. Lovely. It's the suitcase she ordered weeks ago, which was delayed in shipping, which she cancelled unshipped over a week ago and has since replaced.
In other words it's a bloody damn nuisance that we'll have to do something about when we get back. Unless Josh, the friend/coworker who alerted us, follows through on his plan to pack himself up and check on as luggage to come along on our trip.
In other words it's a bloody damn nuisance that we'll have to do something about when we get back. Unless Josh, the friend/coworker who alerted us, follows through on his plan to pack himself up and check on as luggage to come along on our trip.
Just the luck
We leave in about, yikes, four hours. And after weeks of our being more or less complete social shut-ins, in the last 18 hours I've been pinged by three different friends that I haven't talked to in…well, far too long. Naturally I've been too frantic to really give any of them the level of attention they deserve. If you're reading this, I'm sorry I was so rushed, and I look forward to talking more when we get back.
I also definitely have come down with a flu. It's not a really bad case, but besides making me generally headachey, cranky and sweaty (all just lovely on a long flight), it's giving me those little mental lapses that slow down packing by 2x or 3x. Where's that phone charger I just had in my hand? Did I just put the bluetooth headset in the packed-in-luggage pouch instead of the carry-on pouch? Better open both up and see. Etc.
Our ride comes for us at 1:30.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Last-minute shopping
the iPhone's headphone jack has too little clearance for standard headphones. There's an adaptor, but it sold out quickly. On a whim I called the Apple store this morning to see if they had gotten more. After the surreal experience of hearing Kristiana answer the call (she subbed for the regular autoattendant voice talent during the iPhone launch), I got through to a store employee who confirmed that yes, they were back in stock. Hooray - Kristiana will be able to listen on her favorite (Sony EX71SL) earphones during our flight.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Frequently Asked Questions, round 1
Thanks to Hollis and Stacey.
Do you just fly directly to Norway, or what?
We fly to London (insert rant about Heathrow here) then from there to Copenhagen. We have one night in Copenhagen (during its jazz festival but unfortunately a day too late to see Eliane Elias), then board the ship in Copenhagen the next day. The ship cruises up the coast of Norway and back, then returns us to Copenhagen, where we spend a little more time before flying back to London.
Do you have a picture of the ship?
There's a good one on the Cruise Norway main page.
How many people will be on it?
It's a 1,200-passenger liner, and the Prairie Home cruise has bought out the entire ship.
Have you been on a cruise before?
The most I've ever cruised was three days on the Hurtigruten freight/passenger liner up the coast of Norway. Besides that, just an overnight from Miami to Bahamas, and a couple nights on the Queen Mary (the ship that's now a hotel docked in Long Beach) with a view of the parking lot from my porthole. What can I say, my parents are airline people and I was raised on flight. Kristiana has been on "real" cruises before, and has opinions about the best lines. And the worst. I don't know if she's been on Holland America before.
What's the Prairie Home part of the cruise?
OK, you caught me. It's all on the website, and I haven't studied it. I know the general idea is that Prairie Home personages and guests are the on-ship entertainment for the cruise as well as setting the general tone and agenda, and I know there are lectures on writing and so forth, but I have been a bad boy about studying the details.
Will the food be Norwegian-themed? Will you drink Aquavit?
I can't imagine there won't be Norwegian-themed food, and I can't imagine there will only be Norwegian-themed food. I expect salmon, fiskeboller, and undoubtedly cod. Garrison is quoted as having uncomplimentary things to say about lutefisk, so I don't expect any except for humor value. I don't expect reindeer meat, which I think (I could be wrong here) is too precious to be wasted on the uninitiated or unappreciative. I will be curious to see whether our Norwegian seaman's meal from our last three-hour-tour, steamed shrimp on bread with mayonnaise and lemon juice, will be presented, and how it will go over.
As for Aquavit, sure, a little, why not? I've never developed a real taste for it, but I don't dislike it one bit.
Do you just fly directly to Norway, or what?
We fly to London (insert rant about Heathrow here) then from there to Copenhagen. We have one night in Copenhagen (during its jazz festival but unfortunately a day too late to see Eliane Elias), then board the ship in Copenhagen the next day. The ship cruises up the coast of Norway and back, then returns us to Copenhagen, where we spend a little more time before flying back to London.
Do you have a picture of the ship?
There's a good one on the Cruise Norway main page.
How many people will be on it?
It's a 1,200-passenger liner, and the Prairie Home cruise has bought out the entire ship.
Have you been on a cruise before?
The most I've ever cruised was three days on the Hurtigruten freight/passenger liner up the coast of Norway. Besides that, just an overnight from Miami to Bahamas, and a couple nights on the Queen Mary (the ship that's now a hotel docked in Long Beach) with a view of the parking lot from my porthole. What can I say, my parents are airline people and I was raised on flight. Kristiana has been on "real" cruises before, and has opinions about the best lines. And the worst. I don't know if she's been on Holland America before.
What's the Prairie Home part of the cruise?
OK, you caught me. It's all on the website, and I haven't studied it. I know the general idea is that Prairie Home personages and guests are the on-ship entertainment for the cruise as well as setting the general tone and agenda, and I know there are lectures on writing and so forth, but I have been a bad boy about studying the details.
Will the food be Norwegian-themed? Will you drink Aquavit?
I can't imagine there won't be Norwegian-themed food, and I can't imagine there will only be Norwegian-themed food. I expect salmon, fiskeboller, and undoubtedly cod. Garrison is quoted as having uncomplimentary things to say about lutefisk, so I don't expect any except for humor value. I don't expect reindeer meat, which I think (I could be wrong here) is too precious to be wasted on the uninitiated or unappreciative. I will be curious to see whether our Norwegian seaman's meal from our last three-hour-tour, steamed shrimp on bread with mayonnaise and lemon juice, will be presented, and how it will go over.
As for Aquavit, sure, a little, why not? I've never developed a real taste for it, but I don't dislike it one bit.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
It turns out that Stat class is really paced for the benefit of the non-quants. Once the professor got going (slowly), the non-quants in my group were apparently mouthing to each other across the room, "I like him!" The slow pace is really the right thing for the class as a whole, but it drove me (and Max, a fellow Silicon Valley tech type in my class) bananas. I'll just have to come to future classes armed with things I can be discreetly working on in a corner of my screen.
Class ended at four, but somehow it took until quarter to five to get our study group herded into our breakout room on the other side of the hall. We had a lot of discussing/organizing to to, so I had to move my 6:30 flight home back to 8:30. I was completely exhausted by the time I got home, but first it was time for my tour of the changes Kristiana had made to the house while I was gone: a better kitchen layout, some wonderful hand-me-down glassware from my grandmother, some plans to replace the current wine storage / bar nook, and lastly the piece de resistance, the new curtains in the bedroom. The curtains are terrific! There's a floral-patterned thin privacy layer and a heavy green blackout layer, and the overall effect is just great. Perfect for someone with a lot of sleep to catch up on, too.
School and team news: Camille is off to France for a week and a half (her mother owns a manor once owned by Collette, good grief), then is meeting with the president of Chiat/Day on the way back to pitch some ideas. Wow. Meanwhile, homework is actually kind of light during this cycle since we have a guest lecturer for Marketing next time and our Leadership reading has been downsized by about two thirds. Don is our group leader (in other words, whip-cracker) for the next two weeks, and Christina is aggregating orders for the Doctor Nagpal Team Logo Store to save shipping charges (we all want to have some team spirit logo gear in time for the Leadership ropes course in November). As for me, I don't have a lot of specific duties this time around, but I'm leading a Stats case due in a few weeks: Freemark Abbey winery.
Class ended at four, but somehow it took until quarter to five to get our study group herded into our breakout room on the other side of the hall. We had a lot of discussing/organizing to to, so I had to move my 6:30 flight home back to 8:30. I was completely exhausted by the time I got home, but first it was time for my tour of the changes Kristiana had made to the house while I was gone: a better kitchen layout, some wonderful hand-me-down glassware from my grandmother, some plans to replace the current wine storage / bar nook, and lastly the piece de resistance, the new curtains in the bedroom. The curtains are terrific! There's a floral-patterned thin privacy layer and a heavy green blackout layer, and the overall effect is just great. Perfect for someone with a lot of sleep to catch up on, too.
School and team news: Camille is off to France for a week and a half (her mother owns a manor once owned by Collette, good grief), then is meeting with the president of Chiat/Day on the way back to pitch some ideas. Wow. Meanwhile, homework is actually kind of light during this cycle since we have a guest lecturer for Marketing next time and our Leadership reading has been downsized by about two thirds. Don is our group leader (in other words, whip-cracker) for the next two weeks, and Christina is aggregating orders for the Doctor Nagpal Team Logo Store to save shipping charges (we all want to have some team spirit logo gear in time for the Leadership ropes course in November). As for me, I don't have a lot of specific duties this time around, but I'm leading a Stats case due in a few weeks: Freemark Abbey winery.
Saturday, September 07, 2002
Confession #1: I haven't blogged since Ojai. It's been a busy time.
Confession #2: I'm typing this in class.
Erratum: Jon is a rocket scientist, but he doesn't know how to use Pivot Tables. Not yet.
OK, let's catch up since Ojai first: it was a great experience, and I came home and spent the Sunday afterwards sort of zoned out and resting. I didn't get started on schoolwork until the evening, then I read all the syllabi, figured out what we'd have to do for our first class sessions, sent out emails to the class, and got started working on the assignments. I also bought a domain name for our study group and set up some custom email aliases and a mailing list to support it, and uploaded our study group logo artwork to cafepress.com so we could buy team logo totebags and coffee mugs - nothing like team solidarity.
Um, I think that about covers Sunday. For the rest of the week it was a regular (read: fairly dull) work week, and just about all my evening hours went into doing the reading and casework for school. Thursday night we did a conference call, but otherwise we were sort of all over the place, each working on our own things without the amount of coordination we intended, and coordinating by email. Dave set us up on eProject.com, which helped a lot.
Over the 3-day holiday weekend I tried to finish up everything I could, since I'd be out of town on a business trip all week. I got most of the way there, but when I took off for D.C. on Tuesday morning there were still several articles I hadn't read, and a couple chapters in the Stat book. I'm not much good at doing that stuff on a plane - I mostly read fun stuff and watched movies instead.
Arriving in D.C. Tuesday night was fun. I stayed in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, where I lived for a few months a few years ago, and it was fun to be back there. The point of the trip was a series of two meetings with Headquarters personnel on Wednesday morning. They went well, if I'm any judge, but I'm told the intricacies of Postal politics are beyond reliable prediction by anyone. We were done by early afternoon, so I visited Georgetown before settling down to a movie and an early night.
Thursday morning I flew back to California, arriving in Long Beach where my extremely generous father-in-law picked me up and took me to school (he's a UCLA grad, so it was a nice excuse for him to visit the place). I arrived before noon, so I had time to walk down to Westwood and take a nap before study group started on Thursday night.
Once class got started, it was all pretty much a blur - until this afternoon. Today's Stat class is really just re-covering the material we read, so I have a little time to catch up. It's a good thing, too, since I'm tired enough that I probably couldn't keep up if he were covering new material.
Confession #2: I'm typing this in class.
Erratum: Jon is a rocket scientist, but he doesn't know how to use Pivot Tables. Not yet.
OK, let's catch up since Ojai first: it was a great experience, and I came home and spent the Sunday afterwards sort of zoned out and resting. I didn't get started on schoolwork until the evening, then I read all the syllabi, figured out what we'd have to do for our first class sessions, sent out emails to the class, and got started working on the assignments. I also bought a domain name for our study group and set up some custom email aliases and a mailing list to support it, and uploaded our study group logo artwork to cafepress.com so we could buy team logo totebags and coffee mugs - nothing like team solidarity.
Um, I think that about covers Sunday. For the rest of the week it was a regular (read: fairly dull) work week, and just about all my evening hours went into doing the reading and casework for school. Thursday night we did a conference call, but otherwise we were sort of all over the place, each working on our own things without the amount of coordination we intended, and coordinating by email. Dave set us up on eProject.com, which helped a lot.
Over the 3-day holiday weekend I tried to finish up everything I could, since I'd be out of town on a business trip all week. I got most of the way there, but when I took off for D.C. on Tuesday morning there were still several articles I hadn't read, and a couple chapters in the Stat book. I'm not much good at doing that stuff on a plane - I mostly read fun stuff and watched movies instead.
Arriving in D.C. Tuesday night was fun. I stayed in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, where I lived for a few months a few years ago, and it was fun to be back there. The point of the trip was a series of two meetings with Headquarters personnel on Wednesday morning. They went well, if I'm any judge, but I'm told the intricacies of Postal politics are beyond reliable prediction by anyone. We were done by early afternoon, so I visited Georgetown before settling down to a movie and an early night.
Thursday morning I flew back to California, arriving in Long Beach where my extremely generous father-in-law picked me up and took me to school (he's a UCLA grad, so it was a nice excuse for him to visit the place). I arrived before noon, so I had time to walk down to Westwood and take a nap before study group started on Thursday night.
Once class got started, it was all pretty much a blur - until this afternoon. Today's Stat class is really just re-covering the material we read, so I have a little time to catch up. It's a good thing, too, since I'm tired enough that I probably couldn't keep up if he were covering new material.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Success!
I've found my study group! It's a great group and I'm delighted. Unfortunately, Outlook Express ate* the two posts I had prepared about today's experiences, so you're going to have to make do with a summary.
The team-forming exercise began with a milling-around period, followed by a direction to sort of gravitate towards tables that had been set up around the room. I was gratified to see that I had actually done a good job of getting acquainted with potential group members over the last couple of days - quite a change from my younger, shyer self. I found a clot of people I'd met and liked moving towards a table, joined them, and that was it. While we were sharing backgrounds and life stories, other groups were still forming. Every so often we'd ask the facilitating professor what we should do now, and each time he said, "sit tight. We're working some things out" with reference to the other groups. Finally an hour or so later it was done.
What we mainly had in common, we established, was that we'd all sought a group rich in diversity. I think we got it. We are:
It's going to be a good year. And now I can sleep well knowing the team issue has been successfully put to rest.
* this applies even if you don't "send" the message, since leaving it in the Drafts folder is considered equivalent to "sending."
** Camille, you know I mean this affectionately.
I've found my study group! It's a great group and I'm delighted. Unfortunately, Outlook Express ate* the two posts I had prepared about today's experiences, so you're going to have to make do with a summary.
The team-forming exercise began with a milling-around period, followed by a direction to sort of gravitate towards tables that had been set up around the room. I was gratified to see that I had actually done a good job of getting acquainted with potential group members over the last couple of days - quite a change from my younger, shyer self. I found a clot of people I'd met and liked moving towards a table, joined them, and that was it. While we were sharing backgrounds and life stories, other groups were still forming. Every so often we'd ask the facilitating professor what we should do now, and each time he said, "sit tight. We're working some things out" with reference to the other groups. Finally an hour or so later it was done.
What we mainly had in common, we established, was that we'd all sought a group rich in diversity. I think we got it. We are:
- Neeraj, software consultant.
He has strong entrepreneurial leanings, much like me. - Dave, housing developer.
"DON'T BLAME ME. I don't create the demand, I just try to satisfy it." - Don, satellite systems program manager.
"I just got certified in sailing and I'm renting a yacht Sunday. Who wants to come?" - Heather, entertainment executive.
Unfortunately I don't have a telling quote from Heather, but I think the first question she asked me was whether I'd seen a certain Cary Grant / Irene Dunne comedy. (I hadn't, but I'd seen their other one.) - Lee, medical researcher and UCLA professor.
"I don't know accounting, but when the team needs to inject cancer into mice they can count on me." - Camille, author of What They Don't Teach You in Film School.
"Oh! I have to tell a story!" (Repeat every 15 minutes . . . unless the story is longer.**) - Christina, business advisor, accountant, ex- research chemist.
"My chemistry professor said I was crazy." - Jon, rocket scientist (literally).
"I can do pivot tables." (And he owns horses too.) - ...and me.
It's going to be a good year. And now I can sleep well knowing the team issue has been successfully put to rest.
* this applies even if you don't "send" the message, since leaving it in the Drafts folder is considered equivalent to "sending."
** Camille, you know I mean this affectionately.
Monday, August 19, 2002
Only Monday, and already exhausted
This is worrying - it's only Monday, and already I feel like I'm having trouble hanging on. I woke up at 5am (typical for me) feeling kind of sore all over: too much sitting, I'm sure. I spent about 45 minutes stretching, made some tea, wrote the morning's blog entry, dressed, showered, and got over to breakfast about 7:00. I was the first one there. By the time I finished a handful of other people had shown up and perhaps I should have stayed to be sociable but instead I went back to my room to study for as long as I could before class began.
When class started, our group was chosen as one of the two that would present our findings from the case we'd studied Monday night. We did OK, but the other group knocked it out of the park. Great organization, superior PowerPoint, excellent presentation skills. Whoa.
This is worrying - it's only Monday, and already I feel like I'm having trouble hanging on. I woke up at 5am (typical for me) feeling kind of sore all over: too much sitting, I'm sure. I spent about 45 minutes stretching, made some tea, wrote the morning's blog entry, dressed, showered, and got over to breakfast about 7:00. I was the first one there. By the time I finished a handful of other people had shown up and perhaps I should have stayed to be sociable but instead I went back to my room to study for as long as I could before class began.
When class started, our group was chosen as one of the two that would present our findings from the case we'd studied Monday night. We did OK, but the other group knocked it out of the park. Great organization, superior PowerPoint, excellent presentation skills. Whoa.
One long day
I got to Ojai, parked, registered and found that I was early, so I went walking around and the first person I ran into was Ben, the one person I'd met previously since we sat together at the "technology session" in LA a few weeks ago (I arrived late and sat on the very end of the row). Ben's a nice guy who works for Hughes Satellite, is married with children, and has a mixed combination engineering/business background. We get along well. He picked up his books and we went exploring the grounds until the conference center opened.
The Ojai Valley Inn and Spa is very nice -- looks a lot like the Sonoma Mission Inn in style, and apparently dates from the same era -- but the layout's a little weird. We found that getting from building to building often took you off of sidewalk or pathway and instead onto a road used by golf carts and maintenance vehicles. (Later, after I checked in, I found that the main route to my room was to enter the building from up the hill on the 4th floor and then take a small elevator down to the 2nd floor -- which is the bottom level but lacks an exit.)
Wandering done, we wound up back at the conference center where we collected our badges and introduced ourselves to the various program personnel that we hadn't met yet. Other people started arriving, and it was mingling time. It was basically the freshman week dynamic all over again, 20 years later: walking up to people with a big smile, introducing yourself, figuring out what you had in common and trying to guess who will wind up being your friend and who will be a problem.
I had a secondary goal other than general schmoozing: I was trying to find the other Bay Area people, since we might want to form a study group together, coordinate Southwest "Friends Fly Free" opportunities, or just hang out. I didn't find any until later in the day, but by day's end I'd located all of them.
We started with lunch (sandwiches and salad, nothing fancy) outdoors on the patio. I wound up sitting with the dean and his fiancee, and we were soon joined by Rich, an ex-Navy guy I'd met during the mingling, and another fellow who confided that he hadn't done the reading and had thought that the week would be a long orientation session rather than actual classwork. I mentally marked Rich as a potential study group member, and the other one as not.
The first class was a program overview led by the dean, followed by a brief break (coffee and cookies available in the conference lobby, if you hurried) and then an exercise called "the Management Jungle." We were shown a list of animals and, without discussion, sent to another room filled with large circular tables marked for the animals; we were to pick the animal we thought best reflected our management style, establish with the rest of the group the traits that we thought we had in common, and make a presentation to the class.
I was an Owl; we're wise, observant, and watch and think before acting. The Tigers were fast and decisive, but territorial and didn't work well with other Tigers. Horses declared themselves hardworking and great team players. Giraffes are peaceful and have long-range vision. Bears are friendly and pleasant - think Yogi Bear and Gentle Ben - and, so they say, are so efficient that they can get a year's work done in eight months and sleep the rest of the time. Beavers are industrious long-range planners who think the Eagles are uppity, upppity, uppity. Eagles claim both long-range vision and close attention to detail. Nobody likes the Foxes - sly and sneaky - who claim that they are victims of bad PR and are merely fast-moving and quick-thinking.
Among the Owls I quickly identified a few people I thought I could work with, one who was a maybe - smart and charismatic but potentially manipulative, too soon to tell - and one person trying to establish a people-who-matter vs.people-who-don't dynamic within the group. I crossed that one off my list of potential study-group-mates.
Back in class for a bit, then a break to move our luggage into our rooms, then more school, then break for reception and dinner, then back to class again, then breakout into small groups where we analyzed one of our case studies according to one of out authors' analytical frameworks for two hours. Then, at 10:30, back to our rooms and done with class at last.
I got to Ojai, parked, registered and found that I was early, so I went walking around and the first person I ran into was Ben, the one person I'd met previously since we sat together at the "technology session" in LA a few weeks ago (I arrived late and sat on the very end of the row). Ben's a nice guy who works for Hughes Satellite, is married with children, and has a mixed combination engineering/business background. We get along well. He picked up his books and we went exploring the grounds until the conference center opened.
The Ojai Valley Inn and Spa is very nice -- looks a lot like the Sonoma Mission Inn in style, and apparently dates from the same era -- but the layout's a little weird. We found that getting from building to building often took you off of sidewalk or pathway and instead onto a road used by golf carts and maintenance vehicles. (Later, after I checked in, I found that the main route to my room was to enter the building from up the hill on the 4th floor and then take a small elevator down to the 2nd floor -- which is the bottom level but lacks an exit.)
Wandering done, we wound up back at the conference center where we collected our badges and introduced ourselves to the various program personnel that we hadn't met yet. Other people started arriving, and it was mingling time. It was basically the freshman week dynamic all over again, 20 years later: walking up to people with a big smile, introducing yourself, figuring out what you had in common and trying to guess who will wind up being your friend and who will be a problem.
I had a secondary goal other than general schmoozing: I was trying to find the other Bay Area people, since we might want to form a study group together, coordinate Southwest "Friends Fly Free" opportunities, or just hang out. I didn't find any until later in the day, but by day's end I'd located all of them.
We started with lunch (sandwiches and salad, nothing fancy) outdoors on the patio. I wound up sitting with the dean and his fiancee, and we were soon joined by Rich, an ex-Navy guy I'd met during the mingling, and another fellow who confided that he hadn't done the reading and had thought that the week would be a long orientation session rather than actual classwork. I mentally marked Rich as a potential study group member, and the other one as not.
The first class was a program overview led by the dean, followed by a brief break (coffee and cookies available in the conference lobby, if you hurried) and then an exercise called "the Management Jungle." We were shown a list of animals and, without discussion, sent to another room filled with large circular tables marked for the animals; we were to pick the animal we thought best reflected our management style, establish with the rest of the group the traits that we thought we had in common, and make a presentation to the class.
I was an Owl; we're wise, observant, and watch and think before acting. The Tigers were fast and decisive, but territorial and didn't work well with other Tigers. Horses declared themselves hardworking and great team players. Giraffes are peaceful and have long-range vision. Bears are friendly and pleasant - think Yogi Bear and Gentle Ben - and, so they say, are so efficient that they can get a year's work done in eight months and sleep the rest of the time. Beavers are industrious long-range planners who think the Eagles are uppity, upppity, uppity. Eagles claim both long-range vision and close attention to detail. Nobody likes the Foxes - sly and sneaky - who claim that they are victims of bad PR and are merely fast-moving and quick-thinking.
Among the Owls I quickly identified a few people I thought I could work with, one who was a maybe - smart and charismatic but potentially manipulative, too soon to tell - and one person trying to establish a people-who-matter vs.people-who-don't dynamic within the group. I crossed that one off my list of potential study-group-mates.
Back in class for a bit, then a break to move our luggage into our rooms, then more school, then break for reception and dinner, then back to class again, then breakout into small groups where we analyzed one of our case studies according to one of out authors' analytical frameworks for two hours. Then, at 10:30, back to our rooms and done with class at last.
Sunday, August 18, 2002
Can't sleep
I can't sleep. This is not good, because the schedule today goes until 10pm. I've been feeling calm and well-prepared up until now, and now I'm awake wondering what preparatory material I forgot to read, what I haven't absorbed, and how I'm going to manage to meet everyone and find a simpatico study group to work with. It's freshman anxiety all over again, and I wasn't expecting it.
Tonight I'm staying at my friend Martha's house in Sherman Oaks - just a few minutes away from UCLA, in fact, though it's Ojai, not UCLA, where I need to be later this morning. I had planned to start driving Friday night or early Saturday morning to get to Ojai by Sunday, and hadn't bothered to make any room reservations because my fantasy of the open road involved dawdling here and there and then getting a room whereever I happened to find myself at the end of the day on Saturday. This was based on an extremely naive assumption: that there'd be rooms available. On a Saturday night in August, just about everything from Buellton and Solvang down to Ventura is sold out. I'm sure that with sufficient persistence I could have found something, somewhere, but after a fair amount of searching and phoning for motels I called Martha on the off chance that she'd be home and available to take in strays. She was, and an hour later I was at her door.
As long as I'm up, I guess I'll try to take notes on some of the case studies we're discussing this week.
I can't sleep. This is not good, because the schedule today goes until 10pm. I've been feeling calm and well-prepared up until now, and now I'm awake wondering what preparatory material I forgot to read, what I haven't absorbed, and how I'm going to manage to meet everyone and find a simpatico study group to work with. It's freshman anxiety all over again, and I wasn't expecting it.
Tonight I'm staying at my friend Martha's house in Sherman Oaks - just a few minutes away from UCLA, in fact, though it's Ojai, not UCLA, where I need to be later this morning. I had planned to start driving Friday night or early Saturday morning to get to Ojai by Sunday, and hadn't bothered to make any room reservations because my fantasy of the open road involved dawdling here and there and then getting a room whereever I happened to find myself at the end of the day on Saturday. This was based on an extremely naive assumption: that there'd be rooms available. On a Saturday night in August, just about everything from Buellton and Solvang down to Ventura is sold out. I'm sure that with sufficient persistence I could have found something, somewhere, but after a fair amount of searching and phoning for motels I called Martha on the off chance that she'd be home and available to take in strays. She was, and an hour later I was at her door.
As long as I'm up, I guess I'll try to take notes on some of the case studies we're discussing this week.
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