Tag Archives: Virginia

Williamsburg – November 17th 2010

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Today flowed a lot like yesterday did. Woke up, got a continental breakfast and attended sessions. Most of the sessions were useful, one got me considering swapping out my homemade ‘clever SQL use’ for T-SQL Cursors (cue the horrified screams of SQL admins everywhere!) and we were able to enjoy a quick lunch and then have our users group meeting. Mostly we’re happy with the response we’ve gotten from Sage when we initially pitched huge fits back in Chicago, then in Denver, and finally in Atlanta during previous Sage Summit events. They listened to us and a good portion of that I believe was our particular user group writing a ‘Meeting Statement’ and sending that to Sage. By doing that and not leaving it all for the pleasantries of verbal communications they could take the things we wrote to corporate management and definitively show that the users were upset. This time around we decided to do the same document style, a written statement, but instead of being full of piss and vinegar we expressed how happy we were that they responded so well to our statements of displeasure. We also indicated some useful ideas for Sage Summit 2011 which will be held sometime in July in Washington, DC. It’s looking like I may be attending that event, but only time will tell if that’s the case.

Once the convention concluded at 3pm I figured I wasn’t going to be paying any visit to family on my trip to Virginia, which I half-expected, it’s just too much distance and too much trouble and in the end ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’. I instead helped my coworkers go through another round of shopping at the outlet malls, retail therapy doesn’t being to describe it. 🙂 I broke down and after several years of simply pocketing my ID and plastic I broke down and bought a front-pocket wallet. I didn’t even know really that they made such a thing and when I found them in a Totes outlet, even the proprietor didn’t even know they made them like that. They were in a discount rack, originally $15, marked to $9. What the hell, I figure since I saved scads of money on food and supplies last week and this week that I can certainly afford a few splurgy purchases.

Tomorrow is going to be a madhouse. Our flight leaves Richmond at 9:40am, so we have to be there by 8:40, and the people at Kingsmill said that the hour drive to get to Richmond is pretty spot on because as they said “All the Military people are travelling south in the morning, so you won’t run into traffic coming north.” So… we are planning on getting on the road by 7:30am. I’m all packed up and ready to go, all I have to do is shower and load the few toiletries into my bag and I’m ready to go. Once we get back to Kalamazoo we have to rush to the office so we can all fill out our reimbursement forms so we can be reimbursed in a timely fashion. I think right after that I’m going home, as there really isn’t any point in starting work half-way through the day.

Dinner was good tonight, we went to the Whaling Company restaurant in Williamsburg. We got a far better dinner for more competitive prices than the last place that I dinged so bad for having crappy selection and outrageous prices. Now I am sitting back, helping my one coworker polish off the beer she bought so she wouldn’t leave any behind. This is a difficult task I feel I have no choice but to accept. 😉

Tomorrow, the flight. Tonight? Sleep.

Williamsburg – November 16th 2010

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Today wasn’t as ram-tear as yesterday was. Breakfast was a continental at the resort center which was a surprise considering all the stories I’ve heard about Kingsmill, but I chock up the differences to a cost-conscious host like Sage and not because the venue just can’t get their host on.

Most of the day was spent bouncing from one room to another, learning some initially upsetting things and then as time went on realizing the inherent rightness of what I needed to do, essentially upgrade via scorched-earth policy. The best way to go from where we are with our product and where we have to go is to rip out everything, and reinstall from scratch. What was going to be an onerous task now became a sluggardly onerous task, but not insurmountable.

Lunch was quick, another continental, and the rest of the sessions went by in a blur. I caught up on my email, caught up on a huge wad of unread RSS feed material and made some headway clearing out my “favorite twitter” queue.

Dinner was shortly after that. We went to Berret’s Seafood Restaurant and Taphouse Grill on South Boundary Street in Williamsburg. The restaurant was initially quite pleasant however it was designed by the same people who assembled our ballroom office-space in Walwood Hall, it is organized like a rabbit warren, little connecting pathways between staging rooms. It’s not that I found fault with my food, it’s not that I didn’t like the restaurant either, but the menu selections were agonizingly assorted. If you wanted Shrimp you could have that, but you also got Oysters. If you wanted Tilapia, you also got Crab Cakes. The short two-page menu was rife with this sort of thing and I looked it over and frankly couldn’t find anything that I could order from the menu that I wanted to eat. Individual items, of course, but each dish was a mishmash of different seafood types and I’m not one for clams, oysters, or mussels. I ended up selecting a special, Tilapia-in-a-bag and got hosed. The dish was $26 but I got food that was really $8.99, at the most generous. The scallops that came with this dish were quarter size and nominally acceptable, but they weren’t properly washed and so I got a little sand in my diet tonight. If you are going to pump a $26 plate, wash the ingredients. In the end the meal was “very light” and that was a generous estimation from some of my dining compatriots who also had what I had. “This is it?” was what we heard up and down. I didn’t pitch a fit because it was a very high-class establishment and in the end it wasn’t my money on the line. If you are visiting Williamsburg, trust me on skipping this restaurant. I’m sure their other foods are outstanding, but if you are in any way picky about your seafood like I am, you’ll either leave hungry or upset, and poorer for it.

After dinner we decided that the night wasn’t over and some of my peers went out to get beer and wine so we could have a chat about our convention and enjoy each others company. The “party” devolved into a conference group meeting and we talked about obvious things that were on our minds, mostly about the company hosting us, Sage. Almost everything we remarked on was positive and we were all generally pleased with how Sage had compensated for their earlier problems that we chided them on in Denver, Atlanta, and our Users Group meeting in St. Olaf. Some people are apparently driven to see the two co-chairs, me and another lady, attend the Sage Summit 2011 in Washington, DC. I don’t see the reason or the justification for it since I’ve already attended here in Williamsburg, but I may have to go in order to make sure that Sage keeps in line with the wishes from our group. Only time will tell with that one.

Meanwhile, I’m contemplating going to visit family tomorrow afternoon after my last session ends, but I don’t have any method of conveyance from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach as I don’t have access to the rental vehicle that I once thought I might have had. The visit to VA Beach is still a possibility, but I haven’t the foggiest how I’m going to get there.

There are some oddities that do bear sharing. Kingsmill is a fantastic resort, but their bathrooms have been outfitted with occupancy sensors that were mounted about head-level, so when you make the slightest move, the toilet flushes and you get progressively more and more spritzed. I discovered that I could fix this … annoying problem by wrapping the occupancy sensor in toilet paper until I was good and ready for it to figure out that it was time to flush. I also noticed that in high traffic areas Kingsmill spares no expense and lays out cloth napkins to dry your hands after using the lavatory. In lesser used areas? Just paper towels. It’s not a problem, but it is kind of funny to see cleverness all the way down to how patrons dry their hands. The only other irking thing has nothing to do with the resort itself, but the obvious and annoying lack of any cellular signal whatsoever. I suppose if you are visiting for the spa, or the golf, or the grounds you don’t care so much about cellular technology. For me it would be a problem, if it weren’t for free Wifi and Google Voice.

Tomorrow is another day, up at 7ish, some more conference sessions and then? We’ll have to see…

Williamsburg – November 15th 2010

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Today was the official beginning of the Sage Millennium Symposium. This is the direct result of all of the user base griping about how we missed this place and how we wish we had a little conference all on our own, like the way it used to be. Much like a magic genie, Sage granted us our wish and here we are again, for my coworkers who joined me in this trip it’s old-hat to them, it’ll be my first time staying at Kingsmill Resort.

We arrived last evening and I found this place to be very expansive, definitely charming, and a great place to “Get away from it all”. The price tag, well, that’s definitely on the high side, but the quality is unmistakably there. My room is laid out very spaciously and everywhere they could have skimped out they did not, which earns my respect.

Last night we went to the Red White and Blue, which is a Blues-themed Memphis style BBQ Rib restaurant in Williamsburg. The food was okay, the ribs were done well. What more can you ask for while traveling into a tourist trap?

Overnight everything went well, my iPad doubled as a noisemaker/alarm clock very nicely as well as a book, a newspaper, a game of Uno and a window into the world of all my collected RSS feeds that I aggregate through Google Reader.

In the morning we all visited Colonial Pancake House. We’re in the middle of Pancake House Central and this one got a 5-star review so we decided to give it a shot. There wasn’t much that was remarkable about the place, the food was good, the atmosphere was what you’d expect and the prices were fair.

After breakfast we talked for a little while and then my coworkers settled on hitting the local outlet mall. I didn’t have anything else better to do since the meat of the convention wasn’t due to begin until 2pm, so I tagged along. We found it easily enough as the two coworkers who had been here before knew the path to the outlet mall very well. I pulled in and parked, scanned the shops and immediately noticed the kitchen outlets, which are (I think) identical to the ones in Michigan City. We only had an hour and then one of my coworkers who knew I was fond of Under Armour pointed out that UA had a factory store in this particular outlet mall. UA is kind of like my Kryptonite, I’m quite fond of their clothing and seeing the store put a foolish grin, even for a short flash, on my face. As we walked along everyone sort of split up and went their separate ways. I joined my boss on a search for a replacement tote-bag to replace the flimsy bag provided by Sage when we registered the night before. We weren’t able to find anything for her and as we walked we met up with our other coworkers and while they went looking in a nearby shop I decided since there was only about twenty minutes left that I should at least check out the UA shop. It only took me ten minutes to pick out some things I liked and went to try them on. I did buy some Under Armour, but it was on the clearance rack, $10 off plus 20% after that so I wasn’t feeling too upset about the cost. Under Armour is mighty expensive stuff, but it’s durable and it’s one of my few vices that I get to indulge in from time to time.

Afterwards we put all our winnings in the back of the rental SUV and headed back to Kingsmill. We heard the welcome song-and-dance from Sage regarding their database software, Millennium, which powers our alumni and donor record database.

Sage laid out the Millennium roadmap for us, telling us what to expect in the future and some of us were mildly jilted that they delayed the “Rip out that damned Java!” request we lodged with them last year. Now we’ll have to wait for version 8 to roll around, we’re currently on 7.6.1 and we’re dallying with the notion of upgrading to 7.7.1 or 7.8, maybe on the outside chance, 7.8.2. This software is very competent at what it does, there have been some missteps and from what I can perceive they essentially rushed a RDBMS product into a “web enabled” paradigm by using shortcuts. In the short-term this worked great, they were able to convert their Windows only application interface with one that worked via a web-browser. On closer inspection this greatness tarnishes because you can only use IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, not Windows 7. (Windows Vista works, but it’s abomination, so we don’t speak it’s name). The key sticking point is that the software relies in very specific and vital parts on loading the Java runtime library. In ways, they cheated. They got a product rushed to market and it worked well as long as you had all these backup-singers in place to provide the parts to make the entire production work. This would be not-an-issue if it wasn’t for the fact that in order to use this core-to-our-business-case software, we are effectively stuck using Java 1.5.11. This in and of itself isn’t harmful, but this old copy of Java is vulnerable and opens up computers to a heaping batch of security vulnerabilities, add to that damning fact that another piece of software we use, BSR’s Banner requires an updated jInitiator and JDK update which forces a machines JRE to the most updated version, breaking Millennium. So we have two products we need so that we can do our jobs and Java is the pinion of suck that we’re stuck upon. Removing Java is only the first step, as they really ought to only push their web-based product (and it’s the only thing that they can really push, so get to it!) and that product really ought to be W3C compliant. If that was the case then all my users could have the freedom to select whatever operating system they liked to interface and use the database. They could use Chrome on Ubuntu or even Safari on the Mac. The benefits of switching out Java for AJAX and Javascript are pretty compelling, even as such that by doing so they would effectively enable other non-Java OS’es to be able to login, such as iPhones, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, and Androids. Technically one of our staff could query our database on a color Nook. It’s not the particular devices that I’m in love with (despite the fact that I am quite smitten with my iPad) but rather that standards are respected, that the software follows a logical and plain design and works well, simply.

After the chat and the disenchantment discovering the delay with tearing out Java we waited around for the Welcome Bash at 5:30pm. Sage puts this welcome on whenever they have an event like this one, open bar, nibbly bits, the works. I chatted with a new Millennium client that’s coming out of Boston, MA. The school starts with a B, I’m terrible with names unless I have business cards and as dumb luck would have it, I totally forgot to bring business cards with me on my travels this week. Duh. We waited and schmoozed until about 7pm when we had to gather everyone up and head to an Italian restaurant here in Williamsburg called Donelos or something. We did more eating, more chatting, and only now did I have any time to myself. I was going to call Scott and relate to him the days events and then I looked down at my watch and felt wrong to make a call after 9pm. So, instead of a call, I thought I would write a blog entry and share this with all of you. Tomorrow we’ll have presenters and I’ll write a lot of ‘neat ideas’ that ‘I’m definitely going to get to work on’ until I actually get to work and that occupies all my time and this entire batch of ‘neat ideas’ falls by the wayside. It always seems to happen this way. When I don’t have life pushing me around I can get all creative and clever with the database, but without fail, life butts in and I’m right back where I started.

On high notes, I have discovered Whitley’s Virginia Peanuts. These are hand-picked giant peanuts in a variety of preparations. I ended up buying two little 16oz. sacks, one Honey Roasted and the other Honey Toffee. They will serve as snacks during this week when I can’t get free of my meetings and end up missing the snacks they lay out for us just outside our meeting halls. These peanuts are exceptionally good and the lady in the little shop we went into had a great sense of humor.

I’m thinking about contacting my family out here and see if they’re available Tuesday or Wednesday night, perhaps I can manage to get the rental SUV for the night so I can get down to VA Beach and then back up again, we’ll see how my coworkers feel and if my family has time.