John was just in here admiring my Nomad Zen Xtra. I’ve got nearly 500 albums loaded, over 6000 songs, and I’ve only filled it half way. On my recent trip to Atlanta, I realized I regularly travel with 220 GB of storage. 60GB internal laptop drive, 60GB multibay drive, 60GB Iomega external portable USB drive and the 40GB Nomad Zen. I can even get really obscene and make it a round 300GB, with my new Argosy drive enclosure (thanks to Peter for recommending Argosy) and extra 80GB drive.

I’m behind on blogging. Not just writing, I’m behind on reading blogs as well. I hit 1000 unread posts today, and scrapped them all. I can offer up excuses like I was on the road most of July so far, my son hasn’t been feeling well, the start of the fiscal year is always busy (all true – I had to get up and soothe Patrick back to sleep after he woke up coughing as I wrote this post) but there’s no real point in making excuses. I started an outlook task list of “Shit to Blog” back at TechEd, and so far I’ve only removed two items from the list. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve been reading Software Factories which isn’t generally available, so I’m holding off on blogging my thoughts until the book ships. Next week, I’m off for New Zealand and Australia for TechEd, which is going to be awesome but probably mean still less blogging.

.NET Rocks has had a slew of architecture related guests recently. Rocky, Tim and now Clemens. Carl and Rory, keep up the good work!

All it takes is one bad trip to remind me why I took a job that only requires a handful of trips a year. Pat mentioned that this is the week of our big annual internal training event in Atlanta. We had a two day pre-training event for all our field architects. (which explains the lack of posts around here.) We need to keep them in the know about the content and programs we are working on back at corporate, plus these are great bunch of people so it’s always nice to hang out with them. Too bad the travel has been such a nightmare.

My flights into and out of Atlanta were each several hours late. Getting an elevator in the hotel took forever – once over 15 minutes! The 70-story Westin was booked to capacity, and I guess everyone wanted an elevator at 8am in the morning. But given that “booked to capacity” is a desirable state for any hotel, why didn’t they design for that eventuality? I mean, it’s not exactly an edge case scenario. Then, I left the pre-training early to visit a customer in Minneapolis. The customer meeting went great, but we had a miscommunication on the meeting time and I missed my flight home. So now I’m hanging around the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport hoping to get home flying standby.

It was pointed out to me that I’m not supposed to be visiting customers anymore, and after this trip I’m inclined to agree. However, you can’t solve real world problems if you don’t get out and experience real world customers and their real world problems from time to time. Usually, I meet with customers who come for executive briefings on campus. This meeting in Minneapolis grew out of one of those on-campus briefings. And since I was on the road anyway, I didn’t think it would be a big. Next time, I think I’ll opt to attend via Live Meeting.

I love my Olympus digital camera, but it does have one annoying issue. Occasionally, it “forgets” the current time and date. This leaves me with a bunch of images with a corrupt “Date Picture Taken” field (here’s an example). Luckily, Omar’s PhotoLibrary let me hack up a little program to update the date fields in the EXIF header. I couldn’t use JPEG Hammer out-of-the-box becuase it doesn’t handle the corrupt date fields. No matter. My app is a total hack, but since I only need to use it once-in-a-great-while, it’s no big deal.