Warsaw

I landed in Brussels early this morning. I don't know exactly when because I'm purposely ignoring the time. If I don't mentally acknowledge the time difference, then there isn't a time difference, right?

From Brussels, I flew to Warsaw. Strangely enough, my trip - the whole trip not just the Warsaw part - is already half way over. I'm doing a miles run (you're welcome, United), and I only have two full days in Warsaw.

I spent the day wandering through the old town. I - surprise surprise - managed to take a photo or two. I'll see about posting some soon. Till then, here's a brief video of the Royal Castle. Anyone know what the carol is? I assume it's in Polish. Anyone?

Yo Hablo Español

Many years ago, I studied Spanish in junior high and in high school. Though I have far more opportunities to practice my Spanish here in California than I did during my childhood days spent in Kansas, I have to admit I rarely make use of what little Spanish I remember - aside from "taco", "burrito", and the like.

Somewhere in my busy schedule I apparently managed to find time to bust out my rusty language skills, dust them off, and do this video in Spanish. Here's the original video in case you missed it when it was first released. My accent is muy bueno, don't you think?

In high school, I switched from Spanish to German. Here's a German video. I have to say that the pitch of my voice is a bit higher than usual.

And I even dabbled a little in French at community college one summer during high school. Here's a French video.

My memory must be fading with age. I don't recall learning to speak Mandarin, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese, but apparently I did. The proof is right there on the Internet, and we all know that everything on the Internet is true.

Okay, so the speakers in those videos are obviously not me. But I have to say that it's cool to see (and hear) that my work (not exactly War and Peace I admit) has been translated into numerous languages. [ Full disclosure: Some of the slides in videos were created by my talented co-workers. ]

For me, being translated is especially cool because one of my majors in college was Linguistics. I've long been fascinated by languages and enjoy the opportunities I get to practice (a.k.a. "mangle") them when I travel. I don't speak any language (with the possible exception of English) particularly well, but I've always felt that the locals give me credit for trying (a.k.a. "butchering").

My other major in college was Computer & Information Science. CIS + Linguistics is a big factor behind the languages that I do "speak" well:

C, Bourne shell, Korn shell, BASH, Csh, Perl (Tk and DBI), PHP, CGI, HTML, Java, ASP,
SQL, TCL, Expect, sed, awk, Visual Basic, PowerShell, PowerCLI, Orchestrator, Javascript, ActionScript,
SwishScript, and x86 assembly.

Time to pick up one more language: Polish. I'm doing a mileage to Warsaw run in December. :-)

First video for my work blog!

After months and months of getting bumped by higher priorities, I finally posted the first of what I expect to be many training videos on my work blog.

You can see the first video now. Why wait?

For those who are interested (and some have already asked), I used the following:

• iPhone 4S (yep, iPhone 4S)
• Camtasia 2 for Mac
• PowerPoint 2010

The final result isn't perfect, but I think it is pretty good.

File under "P" for "procrastination"

Does this count as procrastination?

If not, this certainly does.

My VVork blog

I spent the last few days of my recent break setting up a new blog. After all, what more sensible thing could a guy do who already struggles to post as often as he would like to his first blog?

Why another blog? If you want the long answer, take a look here. The short answer is that I have been wanting to post some work-related stuff online, but I didn't want to tangle my personal opinions with my work life.

Take a look if you would like, but unless you're into geeky stuff, don't plan on staying there long. ;-)

Taking a look is easy. Just click on one of the numerous links I've embedded in this post - like this one, and this one, and this one or any of the links above.

Why so many links? Because I know that if I give the URL (which, BTW, is http://www.vvork.info) many of you are going to type http://www.work.info). While typing the latter would be a totally understandable mistake, it would be a mistake nonetheless.

If you want to know why I would intentionally pick such an easy domain name to mistake, take a look here.

R & R

Returned to the lake for a little R&R this week. That's rest and relaxation, not rock 'n roll.

The break was very welcome after last week's 12+ hour/day ICW in Boston.

Didn't totally go off the grid. I prepared for some upcoming videos for work, attended a few conference calls, drummed up business for a vCO delivery in Florida, and registered a new domain for a vvork related blog. What's the domain name? That's under wraps for now. (Hint: This post refers to the domain name.)

It wasn't all work by any means.

I have enjoyed floating on the lake on the floating patio...

... And I enjoyed rowing around the lake this afternoon...

Additionally I got to see my dad, Lena, my sister Pam, my brother John, and my nephews Connor, Ethan, Ryan, and Brett.

But in hindsight, I think I spent the most time with Penny, Dad and Lena's dog. We just met, but we quickly bonded.

She follows me everywhere and continually wants to play.

Now if I could just get her to bond another part of her anatomy with my head.

Salt Ponds

My flight home from Boston took me over the salt ponds yesterday. I won't pretend to understand the cycles they go through. Sometimes they're dull looking, and other times they bloom in glorious colors.

I love it when the salt ponds put on a show like yesterday.