Thursday

Going home today - hooray! Lots of travelling though, boo.

Got up and had breakfast, still a prety overcast day and decided that we'd go via the Shopping Mall when on the way to the Airport. Its pretty close but we needed to arrange some transport that would look after our luggage too.

After some negotiation with the taxi driver, $100 for 5 people including a 2 hour stay at the shopping mall, execellent!

My flight is at 3:00pm and arrives the next day at 7:05am, I've then got to wait for a few hours for the 2:00pm flight from Gatwick to Newcastle and I think I arrive at just after 3:00pm! not looking for to that at all!!

Wednesday

A Cloudy start to the day. One of the most irritating things is American TV, full of rubbish adverts and hardly any news - no international news at all.

We had a brief visit to the Sixth Floor Museum today, pretty good! I rolled around on the grass knoll like a true tourist. In the afternoon I attended the EMEA conference and customer exchange, which allowed me to see other solutions using DC and to present out own opportunity. The CEO, SVP for Emea and Product Managers were there and so the presentation was targetted at the right audience.

We then went out for a meal to Lawrys Prime Rib, very nice food - especially the steak! Finally we went back to the bar and put right the wrongs in the world!

I'm looking forward to going home though....

Tuesday

A good day today, I did some work on my elusive strategy this morning and had a few conversations with Docucorp people but the meeting in the afternoon with the ASP Architect, their Senior Vice President for ASPs, the Senior Vice President for EMEA and a few others was very productive.

I went through our design, as detailed in the response and walked through the logical and physical architecture. The design has been approved as coherant and workable and they agreed that it may be a better idea to put the staging area of Filenet - if this is one of the questions the DWP may ask.

It also seems that the beta products coming out may make things easier and certainly handle JMS which was a hole in the old version. I've also checked out the volume and multi-threading possibilities.

I highlighted the holes in the product and suggested that a) they must commit in our next response to dates aligned with a product roadmap, b) i've also suggested that they work very closely with us, taking on most of the responsibility for things like the GUI we are looking to build as they could then use this in their core product and its something their alliance with Virtusa are looking at anyway.

The SVP's were excited by it, though that we had good ideas and want to make this work. I feel confident about their committment, just need to tie them down.

As for Entertainment, it was the 'Ranch Visit' in the evening which was ok. Good food, free b eer, armadillo racing (which I won) - don't ask! A live band and overall a good evening but we got back pretty early (midnight) and the hotel wouldn't open the bar so an earlish night it was

Anyway, customer presentation tomorrow - more networking and I'm gonna visit the Sixth Floor Museum (JFK memorial) in the evening. night!

Monday

I finally managed to get up, still suffering a little from jet lag and too much beer. ;-)

The keynote was ok, funniest part was when they introduced the CEO and were a little heavy handed on the dry-ice - he couldn't see the audience, we couldn't see him and he nearly fell off the stage!

Gartner gave a little talk but to be honest were rubbish - well at least I thought so

I went to a few sessions, one guy was ok but very wooden - my customer presentation cant be any worse than that. I got to ask some techy questions about 'Transall' which helped and got the business card of the guy that wrote it.

I also went to a session on multi-threading the Transall process and other DC processes. This helped but still some hurdles to overcome in terms of failover - joy! The best part of this presentation was they started to sing a song called 'the trandyman can' to the music of the 'candy man can' absolutely hilarious - the UK guy next to me was in tears and I was struggling to hold it together.

In the evening we decided to go to a mexican restaurant which was in a shopping mall. The mall was huge with some shops like Macy's, Tiffany's etc. It was ok but if somebody asks me how I am, if I want any help or to have a good day - I'm gonna crack. I'm like a thin piece of string being stretched to its limit.

We went back to the bar in the hotel and sat outside, had more beer and I went to bed at a respectible time, 11pm.

Sunday

We had two meetings planned for today, one to the ASP centre which was impressive - lots of big printing machines and a relatively small computer room and also a meeting with B, the product manager.

The ASP centre was good, got to see the physical environment and looked a little at the IT surrounding it - not much to look at. We were also given a high-level overview of the Portal but that wasn't that exciting either.

I know now why the Americans have SUV's, its to cope with the rubbish freeways!

And the meeting with B (product manager) and T (VP for Emea) was good. They seemed happy at our requests and had even started some work on PDF/A and PDF 1.6 support - still a way to go though.

We then decided to go out for a drink, Sherlocks bar, lots of beer and american singers and Darts! In at midnight, knackered and ready to get up at 7.00am for more meetings. joy!

The Eagle has Landed.....Welcome to Dallas

Oliver woke me at 5.30 and I caught the 8.45am flight to London Gatwick. After catching the 2.00pm flight to Dallas and over a 10hr flight, I arrived in overcast Dallas Fort Worth - not raining at least. The flight was ok, spent some time talking to a girl who was returning from Russia after rescuing a little girl from a rundown 'home for orphans', cute girl and a nice story..

After a $40 cab ride to the Hotel, I decided to order food. I turned down an invite to eat out, I was really tired. I order some buffalo wings and a sandwich, what arrived was enough wings to wipe out the population of a small chicken farm and a sandwich so big it wouldn't fit in my mouth. Welcome to America!

Eventually I got to sleep around 4.00am UK time and slept pretty well, getting up for breakfast at 8.30am. I decided to use the 'restroom' and can't get used to the fact that you can see the persons shoes in the 'cubicles' - its just wrong - what's wrong with floor to ceiling cubiles for god sake!

Anyway, gonna meet Neil for Coffee soon and then attend a couple of meetings that are planned in down-town Dallas. Update you later.....