Meeting Michael at the KCDC

Meghan had the kids essentially the entire time I was in LA, so I wanted to give her some time to herself today, so I took the kids to the Kansas Children's Discovery Center in Topeka.  I'd previously only been there with Joshua and Hannah, and we didn't have time to see all the different things.  This time, for example, we did several things that I didn't even notice last time (maybe they weren't there, but I probably just didn't see them) such as the coin funnel thing and the "Flo-Graphix" room, as well as the car.  All three were hits, though only Joshua cared about the car, but he was really excited to do all the maintenance on it.  Hopefully that holds, and once he has his own car as a teenager, he takes great care of it, but probably not, because, well, he'll be a teenager.  We did spend a lot of time at the vertical wind tunnel again, as Hannah really really wanted to catch one of the scarves (you put them in at the bottom, and then they spin around and upward eventually come out the open top and then slowly fall to the ground), but she wasn't willing to move around, so she could only catch one if it fell right into her outstretched arms (and if Joshua didn't snatch it first).

We then went outside to ride the bikes.  My friend Michael had planned to join us along with his daughter, but she couldn't make it at the last minute, so he came anyway since he hadn't met my kids.

The girls mostly stayed on the bikes, but Joshua was excited to see the different things, such as the Music Garden and a climbable rock formation.

During his exploration, I heard him yell over to me "Dad, I found a bird!".  I had assumed it was some toy or decoration or something, but then I look over to see him holding this guy in both hands and showing it to my like it was a trophy.  This guy who is neither a toy nor a decoration, but instead is an actual previously-alive but now very dead bird.  I disposed of him and then went with Joshua so we could immediately wash our hands.

After we were done at the KCDC, we met up with Michael's wife Becca and his daughter Bristolynn for lunch at Blue Moose before our crew headed back to Olathe after a fun day.

End of a Californian Era

Here my colleague and friend Michael and I wait to board our connecting flight to KC from SLC.  We had our last Kickoff event last night, which was our dinner party at the Strand House on Manhattan Beach, which is where we went last time too.  It was a ton of fun, as I really enjoy these events.  But it was also a bit sad, as my company is in the process of being acquired by another company.  My time at Actuate has been great in many ways.  The culture really works for me, and we're all pretty sure that's going to change from what it is that we have now, which is largely because we are a small company based in Silicon Valley with a CEO who wants us to have fun.  Our new overlords are a huge company (16 times bigger!) based in eastern Canada who certainly are more traditionally corporate, so there will be changes, it's just a matter of what and how much.

At the dinner party, I found myself to be unexpectedly sad, and in talking to the other "old-timers" (I've been at the company for almost 12 years), many of them were sad too and were a little emotional during the evening.  We're a pretty tight-knit group, as we work closely together on a lot of different things, and it really is like a family in a lot of ways.  I think we all kind of realized that while most of us should keep our jobs, it'll never really be the same again, and this represented the last hurrah of what we've known and loved for so long.  Today when I boarded the plane, it hit me again as I took off, not knowing what was ahead for all of us in the new company, but knowing it won't be like what we left.

California Kickoff

I'm in Los Angeles for my company's annual Sales and Marketing Kickoff.  We recently changed our Sales year (again), so it had been 18 months since our last Kickoff, which also was in LA.  All of us on the technical team have been here since Wednesday night, starting our sessions on Thursday morning.  On Sunday we completed our technical sessions.  Over the three days we had lots of jQuery training and exercises, custom visualization creations, competitive POC simulations, and our team projects of custom applications and presentations.  My team made an interactive analytical dashboard for historical severe weather events in the US.  NOAA tracks all of that and provides the data on data.gov, so we took the data set and made our application based on it, which let you do things such as see a bar chart of the total number of events by type (tornado, hail, drought, etc.) for a state of your choosing and to drill down to see the monetary damages and injuries/fatalities.  It was a fun project, but we didn't finish until 11pm that night, which is often how these things go.  But there are elements of fun as well, as my colleague Mica hosts a poker tournament each night.  Once the actual Kickoff starts (when all the non-technical Sales and the Marketing people arrive) which happened on Sunday, the sessions get easier, but the days are just as packed.  In this picture you can see where at a team dinner, those of us from Kansas noticed a beer on the menu from our own KC company, Boulevard Beer, which is regional, but not generally national.  But the restaurant happened to have Boulevard's Tank 7 on the menu as one of their special beers, so all of us from the Kansas office (Michael, Virgil, Jesse, Kris, me, Rob, and Kevin) took a picture holding our KC beer.  Last night we had our main company party, which had great food and included a lip sync contest that was really fun.   Tonight is our dinner party, which will be the last event, as we all head home tomorrow.