A rare trip to Sacramento

I only make it to the capital of California about once or twice a year. For this trip, the goal is to play golf with HP, then take them out to dinner. I'm hoping that I can also sync up with Brian Dowling or Mike Frey while I'm in town. We'll see how things go.

It's been a week since my last post, so I will at least catch up on a few things from this week. It's already Thursday and I can't believe how fast this week has gone. I've been very busy at work and it has been pretty tough just to keep up. Although my meetings have been kind of "heavy", I think they've all gone pretty well. I've been very happy with turn-out. Here's a few of the "heavy" meetings I had yesterday:

• Greg's Staff meeting - normally, this is not a stressful meeting, but Greg was really laying into me on the Conference budget. I will have to do some more justification on this. I also got into a rather heated discussion about the memory team with Greg and Gordon.
• My Staff meeting - I only had 30 minutes to meet with the team today. It was a quick meeting, but we got into some good subjects. We spent some time discussing the new Memory team as well. I've decided this week that I am going to need to get re-engaged in those discussions. I feel like the wheels are coming off the bus again.
• Lunch with Frank - A surprise invite from Frank for a quick lunch and discussion about Lion to prep him for his call with Luca from Insieme. It was nice to have some 1-1 time with Frank. He's a great guy.
• IT call - this was expected to be a very heated meeting. The goal was to push back on the tops-down IT decisions to basically boot us from our current IT schemes to something different. My only goal was to enlighten the listeners with the idea that we all need to at least get all the Stakeholders involved before we make unilateral decisions that impact large groups of people. I'm not sure we made any difference, but we at least got a chance to air our opinions and set up some action items. We'll see how things go.
• Blackswift on-site call - another heated meeting. One of our on-site engineers will be moving to another team within Avago and there is a request from the new team that we backfill him completely so he can focus on his new job. We don't have the resources to do that, in fact his departure is leaving us even more empty handed. The good news is that we were able to convince him to manage his demand and resources himself - we will see how that goes.

Anyway, at home, we had a great evening together. I cooked dinner and helped teach Jantzen how to do the dishes. He seemed eager and excited to learn how to do the kitchen. I was happy that I had the patience to help him and teach him. He's a good little boy, but we really need to learn how to motivate him to stop wetting himself at school. It's really not a good sign at all - he will get some incredible bullying if he keeps that up! I'm going to start volunteering at the school in a couple of weeks to hopefully help with that situation.

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