Wales

Beyond the smelly trains, the Welsh country-side that I saw was quite pretty. Unfortunately this was one of those work trips where I trained 5 hours, ate, slept, started work at 8am, worked until my train left and am now spending 5 hours training back home.

That said, I don't feel compelled to ever come back to Wales. Yes, I've heard it's got miles of lovely beaches and gorgeous hills and natural landscapes. But, a) next year I will probably be living in coastal Spain or Greece (for those that didn't know this - surprise!!) and b) I'm from Canada. If I cared about hills and trees I would have bothered to go look at some in the 22 years I lived there.

I Rock at Work

I spent the day consulting with a high tech manufacturing company based in Newtown Powys. They were a fascinating company who's basically hit the nirvana for a high tech company who's revenue is based on speed of innovation and time-to-market. They basically make one really great product and they ship it with a lot of different hardware and software attachments that allow them to service tonnes of markets, applications, and price points.

Mech-Eng (Mechanical Engineering) companies are on an endless quest to re-create the greatest innovative Mech-End design stroke of genius of all time: the great day when some Engineer took a radio and stuck an alarm clock in it. Suddenly you're out to market with a "revolutionary" product that addresses more of your customer's needs with less expense and overhead, and everyone floods to your retailers with their orders so fast that the competition are left wiping their tears off their schematics. Ta-da, market dominance!

This company knocked this concept out of the park. They do 300 million a year in global business with 1200 staff and ONE PRODUCT + accessories. They're my heros.

I managed to impress them and myself today. I've discovered that everything I've learned in the past 5 years has swished around in my head and actually left me knowing quite a lot about my job. I was happy with myself when I discovered I was not so bad at writing marketing materials and white papers (white paper = industry paper that examines a technology and/or it's business case in a general way, but with specific examples for people doing sector research). Then at X-Pubs 2006 I stood up in front of industry thought-leaders like JoAnn Hackos and Scott Abel and delivered a presentation about their area of expertise and got mad props respect on it afterwards.

If in high school my band had opened for Metallica, and James Hetfield had walked up to me after the show and told me he was rockin' out in the mosh pit during our set, that would've been a little cooler, but otherwise equivalent. I was walking on clouds for a week after.

I'm presenting at this international conference on the same bill as people that publish the books that make the whole content industry stop and think, or I'm at the offices of some cutting-edge market-leading technology company and I'm reeling off ways they could do their business better, every now and then, this little voice in the back of my head is going, "Where the hell are you getting this shit?" and "5 years ago you were crawling around under desks installing printer cables!" A tonne of what I'm saying has been said by others before of course, but apparently, I'm just saying it really well, and in a way that makes people "get it". I manage to bring the technology to the people, and tell a story that makes people understand.

AOB - Driver's License

After about 1 MILL-EE-ON pounds worth of driving lessons I finally took my driving test!

The British driving test is incredibly hard, by all accounts. My friend Canadian friend Pascal got a lesson here to just brush up to make sure he was ready to take it here and was basically told that his 10 years of Canadian driving were so "unsafe" that the Examiner would stop the test in the middle and drive him back because they would feel he wasn't able to safely conduct the car back to the test centre on his own.

Passing on your first time is apparently rare, and taking it 2-3 times is quite normal. I had been crippled by the fact that I'd taken quite a few lessons with a teacher that was not exactly "into" being a driving teacher.

He used to be a law clerk and decided to be a driving teacher kinda for a lark. He took me out on dozens of hours of lessons and let me tootle around in the car. After a few months of this, weeks before my test and without having remotely successfully having taught me manoeuvres like parallel and bay parking, he turned to me and said, "uhm... by the way, I quit my job. You'll be FINE! Byeeee!!" and went back to being a law clerk!

I got a new teacher who promptly told me there was tonnes of stuff I hadan't been told about driving and LOTS of situations I wasn't prepared for, and wasn't ready for my test at all.

My new teacher was the Yoda of driving. He was a Greek guy named Toli who was training to be a Police Tactical Driving instructor and had a 4th Degree Black Belt. He'd say shit to me like, "You cannot just do the manoeuver. First you must stop -- Think -- UNDERSTAND the manoeuver. Then you can act. Over. Done with. The tester can say nothing." He was hilarious, but a really nice guy and really really knew his stuff.

I took my test on a day that started sunny, as it had been for my last two months of lessons. Then just as we were getting started, it started to rain. It pelted it down for my entire test. I started to let up just as my Examiner got me back to the test centre and said, "Mr. Urbina, I'm pleased to say you've passed."

Any Other Business: I HAVE MY DRIVERS LICENSE!!

OH YES. I rock. Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance.