One of those weeks

This has been a pretty tough week at work. My Product Unit Manager (boss's boss) requested that my group host one of the specialists from China while he learns about Visual Studio Team System. I'm the only one in my group experienced with the End to End (E2E) scenarios; thus, it's my task to make sure he gets what he needs. It's taken some serious concentration as he is still learning english and does not have much experience with the material. On top of everything else he only has 1 week to learn everything I know. Once he gets back to China he'll be the product specialist acting as a representative from us to some of the biggest companies in that area. This is no small feat. But, it's a great opportunity for me to show I know the product inside out and to help him find the resources he needs.

For the first two days of this week I've been working hard with my E2E team to get some servers setup and show him the ropes. We've had lots of problems ranging from bugs to bad setup instructions. It's a Beta2 product after all. Finally things looked good last night and I came in this morning eager to get going. As I moved around some ethernet cables in our very crowded office disaster struck. A coworkers coffee cup tipped over and spilled right into one of our servers. I cut the power immediately and opened up the case but it was too late. Four gigs of RAM, a 3.6Ghz processor, heat sinks and fans were soaked with coffee. Never... never put liquids on top of a stack of servers!

All was not lost. I found an alternate setup to continue my teaching. The E2E team reinstalled the server configuration on the three remaining machines (even though it took all day). And, I learned patience.

On the plus side my dad and mom have been visiting seperately over the past few days. My dad had a good trip down to Oregon and back along the coast. My mom's been staying at a nice B&B in downtown Seattle. We had dinner tonight and went to see 'War of the Worlds'. I wouldn't recommend it over Willy Wonka or Batman... but it's some good eye-candy.