A Week of My Life on the Road

I took a lot of pictures during my trip to Utah last week, and thought that it would be fun to put together a little “Week of My Life” post. I arrived in Salt Lake City late on the evening of Monday, February 5th. After waiting in vain for my checked luggage, I got my rental car and drove 50 miles south to Provo. My luggage arrived early the next morning.

Started out bright and early Tuesday morning with a meeting at TGN (The Generations Network). TGN operates a number of family and genealogy web sites including Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, Genealogy.com, and Rootsweb.com.

 

Lunch meeting with Jason Alba, Robert Merrill, and John Davis at Tucano’s Brazilian Grill. There was no big plan for this meeting; Jason emailed me and asked if he could treat me to lunch. I was happy to meet with him and his friends and to tell them about AWS and to talk about blogging and developer communities. Rob writes the Utah Tech Jobs Blog. Jason runs JibberJobber, a career management and personal relationship management tool.

I met two senior executives from LignUp at the coffee shop inside of a Borders. They will be participating in the Future of Web Apps conference with us next month.

I drove about 15 miles south of Provo for a late-night meeting with Phil Burns and Ryan Hansen at TagJungle. Phil was also the organizer of the Utah Geek Dinner (see below).

 

Met with BYU Professor Phil Windley to discuss my talk to his class, and made plans to record a podcast later in the day. Talked about some ways that Amazon EC2 could be used as part of the Computer Science curriculum.

Gave a one hour AWS presentation to Phil Windley’s graduate CS class.

Recorded an IT Conversations podcast with Phil Windley, Doug Kaye, Scott Lemon, and Mike (I forgot his last name). We discussed Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon SQS, all in the context of Doug’s new podcast processing architecture.

Lunch at Brick Oven Pizza with the developers behind a new web site (no details; I am sworn to secrecy).

As part of the eBusiness Lecture Series, spoke to a large, energetic class of BYU business students.

 

Gave a recruiting tech talk to a small audience. Another interesting event was scheduled against this, so I didn’t get the turnout that I was expecting. Before the crowd showed up I took the picture at right.

 

Recorded a podcast with Kip Meacham of Rocky Mountain Voices.

On Wednesday morning I had lunch with friend Bryan Sparks. Bryan told me all about his newest venture, Solara Networks. Their product can record all of the network activity on one or more gigabit-speed network connections.

 

As the guest of the Provo Labs Academy, delivered my “Fueling Innovation” talk in the Provo Public Library. Hosted by Paul Allen.

Lunch with Paul Allen on the BYU campus.

Visited with the team at Bungee Labs.

 

Utah Geek dinner, hosted by Phil Burns. Met lots of interesting people and had a whole bunch of great conversations. My 5-minute off the cuff talk was recorded by Brad from Rocky Mountain Voices.

 

On Friday morning I had breakfast at my remote office (see picture at right) with Sean Roylance of Podango. After breakfast I drove north to Salt Lake City.

 

I gave my “Fueling Innovation” talk to a room full of product managers at the LDS Church.

 

I had lunch with LDS Church CIO Joel Dehlin, an old friend who used to live in Sammamish.

After my final meeting on Friday afternoon I spent about an hour driving through some of the residential parts of Salt Lake City, and then headed to the airport.

So, there you have it. 4 days, 19 separate opportunities to evangelize, and over 250 miles on my rental car. That’s what I do.