woop :)

Hoo-ray for friday night :) (okay, well.. my friday at least).

Things are gearing up for the Mac Business Expo and the general activity level is rising. We’ve been getting truck after truck of product at the store… our inventory peeps are earning their money, dats fo sho.

Today I did full-length runs of the seminars I’ll be doing at the expo. Our VP of biz. ops. wanted to make sure that I (and the other presenters) had it together / provide feedback before the real deal (which, incidentally, will be a bit smaller than previously estimated… my presentation room tops out at 80 seats). In any case, she was the one who decided to get me trained and apple certified, etc… today was the first time she’s seen my training shtick, and so getting the mad props and being told that she was very glad she decided to get me on as a trainer was good.

Also good today was the reception of the first fruit of the contract training for apple. It’s a fun contrast… one day I’m more broke than I’ve been a long time, and the next day I get a paycheck about double the expected size…

So that was last wednesday… apparently I didn’t post it then, as it was sitting in my lj client app…

I developed a flu over that following weekend that hopefully will peak soon. It’s Thursday and the expo has just finished.

Yesterday was a long day of manual labor followed by a boisterous gathering at Jillian’s… it was a company sponsored event, and there were minor treats for free. Even though I was pretty sick, I managed to stay and have some beers, and play some more ping pong, finally.

Slept poorly that night (last night)… the way you can’t sleep when yer sick. Feels like your body is just pissed off. This morning I was at the convention center at 7:30, after a small debate as to whether I’d go in at all. I felt nauseous and generally shitty. But, I went… it would have been a fairly significant hit for the expo to lose 3 out of 20 or so seminars.

It certainly was not the hardest thing I ever did, by a long shot… but being on display, under lights, with masses of herding llamas (actually most of the people were pretty cool, I was surprised) all around me, I was definitely wishing for the dark and quiet confines of my bedroom. An otherwise exciting / fun experience was made basically miserable (although I still had some good times, more of that in a bit).

Doors opened to the public at 10:30, so until then it was last minute stuff. Thankfully the nasuea wore off sometime around then, so at least I didn’t have to carry a plastic bag around in my pocket any more. Worked the training booth for a bit and walked the floor some. Ate lunch just before my first seminar, which was at 1:00. Then two more seminars back to back, directly after the 1:00 (all part of the apple training curriculum, taught by a certified trainer (me), etc, etc), and that ran me out until about 5:20.

The last one was the QuickTime Streaming Server seminar… a tiny morsel of the full 3 day QTSS course, condensed into seminar format for the expo. I blazed through two of the 10 chapters with nodding heads all around, then demoed QTSS and broadcaster, plus some mp3 streaming, and it was a hoot :) During times of necessary performance, the body has a way of shutting out the negative feedback… getting up in front of an audience can be one of those times. Anyway, there were several audio / video geeks in the room, and we had some great discussions going toward the end. It went as well as I thought it did… four people thanked me and shook my hand before they left :) So that’s the shiny stone of gratification in a sea of turbulent discomfort… heh.

Then it was over. Then we had to break down. We sold a lot of shit there… like a lot, but we came with about a store’s worth of inventory… two bigass trucks, one full and one 3/4 full. Loading it all in sucked, and loading at least half of it back out sucked even worse, cause it was evening time, and my flu had intensified further since the previous morning (load in). Blah blah blah, enough whining out of me :)

I was fading fast by around 7:30, so I told the inventory manager that I was out of gas, and it was cool.

… and now, after a subway sandwich and some well deserved sitting time. I’m about ready to pass out for many many hours, for tomorrow…. is a day off :)

Oh yeah. and apple has invited me down to cupertino for the alpha certification course of the jaguar-revised ACSA curriculum, which won’t be publicly available until spring of ’03… For some reason, they seem to be allowing me to skip stuff and still get certified to teach the material… this happened with the ACTC stuff… you’re supposed to receive the material as a regular student, pass the exam, and then go to an additional session where you deliver the course to an apple training guy, who then puts an evaluation of you on file with the apple training scheduler people … with the ACTC certified trainer bit I just kinda jumped straight to the last session – taking the test a week or so afterwards, and did well enough at the session that they’re asking me back to do it again for the ACSA, so I’ll be certified to teach it as well, even though I have received none of the ACSA material as a student… either it’s pretty easy, or I catch on pretty quick… but it seems to be working good so far :) woop :) That ACSA session is in November… also another QTSS class for apple in cupertino at the end of this month.

out

About dre

I like all kinds of food.
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