sean’s place

Detroit and Cleveland

Before I start on this, I find it at least a little funny that I haven’t yet blogged on my trip to Ireland. I hope I get to that soon.

I like to travel. Unfortunately, a side of my personality — the frugal side (both with cash and paid-time-off) — seems to keep me around Fort Collins. I threw all that to the wind and took a much-needed vacation to Ireland with Myles and Kim at the end of the May (very refreshing, more on this in a later entry). My frugality being what it is (an interesting side note here, I’m hardly ever frugal with dining out), I never (rarely, now) turn down a free trip.

As luck would have it, late last week, an email went out asking if anyone would like to cover the Sarix presentation on Pelco’s IP Road Show in Detroit and Cleveland. I answered in the affirmative about an hour after it went out, figuring that I’d already missed the window of opportunity (things like this rarely go unanswered for long). Turns out, I didn’t!

I received my official tee-shirts via FedEx the next day and was on a plane Monday morning. I found out later that neither Detroit nor Cleveland appealed to anyone else (I don’t understand why — Michigan and Ohio are lovely) and that I was, in effect, drawing the short straw. Not so, I tell you.

I made it to both roadshows, met a lot of cool people (some folks from Clovis, one from Orangeburg, our reps, and customers!) and managed to further develop my presentation and speaking style. My biggest takeaway from all of this was finding a comfort zone when speaking in public (and representing my company and the product I helped create). I think I grew more in the professional sense in the 4 days moonlighting as a road warrior than I have in years. I had a ton of fun, to boot.

More than that, apparently I did a good job. I was offered to present at the next set of road shows in Syracuse and Cherry Hill next week. It didn’t fit with my schedule though — need to catch back up for our upcoming 1.3 Sarix software release lest I be the cause of it slipping. Oh well, hopefully another slot will open up.