Trip to Ft. Collins

I spent the last few days over in Ft. Collins visiting with HP. They have done this thing they call the HP Customer Advisory Board for the past 6 years, they have been having me over for it for the past 5. (I guess they like my jokes.)

Ft. Collins is nice, it's a lot like here in climate, the town is a lot like here in feel, also. One thing I like about the town is that all the way up and down College Avenue, they have tons of stores and restaurants, but they have planted tons of trees, so it tones down all the commericalization. You drive down the street, and need to pay attention if you are looking for somewhere specific, but if you are just driving, all the stores don't distract.

On Tuesday, I wore my dark green BYU shirt. I called it my Colorado State appeasement shirt. This was a very well recieved joke. (Ft. Collins is the home of CSU.)

Last year, I get signed up for the National Rent a Car Emerald club. This year, I got a car from them, we went to the rental agency, and picked out our car. This would have been more impressive if they hadn't had only 2 mid sized cars on the lot, but we picked the maroon car over the white car.

On the way home, we checked in at the airport, neither of us had a seat assignment. When we eventually got through Denver security (long lines) and got to the gate, we went up to see what was going on. My boss went up first, he got a new ticket with a seat. I went up, and they told me they didn't have a seat for me yet. (My thought was "what part of 'confirmed' don't you understand?", but I supressed it.) They ended up talking some old lady into getting bumped ($200 in vouchers, but I needed to get home to babysit for Tara), so I got her seat.

It was a good trip, we got quite a bit of good feedback from both HP and from the other customers that were there. (We were one of the 2 smallest. Most of the others were big customers. The HP engineers say they like to have us there because we keep things honest, having the "small customer" opinion to balance out the very large customers... The biggest this time was a bank that has 24000 Unix and Linux machines and 31000 Windows machines.) I always seem to have a bunch of things to work on after one of these things, I think I've got even more today than normal.