Right now I am sitting at the Newark Airport waiting for my flight to Dallas to arrive, blogging offline. Every year, Thomson brings technology people from all of their organisations together to Texas to exchange ideas, compare experience, and most important of all, do some networking. So for the next two days, I will be spending time with people I hardly know but hugely important to my career, talking shop and mixing business buzz words with technology TLA (Three Letter Acronym).
When my company was acquired by Thomson back in March, we almost missed the opportunity to be part of this technology summit since the deadline for registration had already passed. But after a few well placed calls to high level development management, invitations were extended to my boss and me. It would be a big loss for us if we were to miss this summit due to its annual nature. And my boss and I believe we can bring a lot to the Thomson organisation with our Agile practice and .Net development experience (Thomson has only recently started on both, whereas we have been doing them for over 3 years now). Conversely, Thomson’s extensive knowledge in business analysis, software development process, and functional testing with FIT (Functional Integration Testing) would be very useful for our own project.
One decision I had to made this morning is whether I should bring my PC laptop or my PowerBook with me. Bringing the PC laptop means I can work on ecto or any work related programming while I am in Dallas but would I actually have the time or the inclination? With the PowerBook, at least I can blog with ease using all the tools that I love but I’ll have to be careful about letting Thomson people know about the Mac. If only it is a Macbook Pro so I can at least say I am trying out the new Microsoft development tool, Silverlight, on the Mac. And I can always dual-boot into XP on the Macbook Pro if I have to. Flimsy excuse, I know, but it is better than nothing. But I can’t really justify the cost of a new laptop, even a used one from eBay due to my lack of travelling, business or personal. So my trusty G4 800MHz PowerBook has to last for a little longer.
Oh, one last thing. Our official Thomson titles have been announced yesterday. Almost everyone keep their titles apart from me. I got ‘demoted’ from Senior Manager of Development to Lead Software Engineer. No change in pay which is good. How do I feel about the ‘demotion’? I think it is a good thing. Senior Manager implies a degree of managerial tasks that I perform when in reality there is nothing for me to manage unless my boss is out of office for extended period of time. So the new title reflects much more in line with my daily responsibility which can only be a good thing. Hey, they can call me a janitor as long as they keep paying me the same!
Lost in Colonisation 
Leave a Reply