Trip to Alpharetta - Part 2

Well, this morning the alarm went off at 6:30 just like I programmed it. I went for the buzzer, since I figured it would be annoying enough to actually wake me up, and while I was right, it wasn't entirely effective. I had to be there at 8:00 and my ride was coming at 7:30...


At 7:43, I get a call from the woman who gave me a ride in from the airport to catch a lift with another lady who was going downstairs since she was runnng a little behind. I wasn't even out of bed yet, but very, very grateful she called.

So I jumped out of bed and threw on my predetermined outfit for the day and charged out the door to head downstairs. I wasn't sure what to expect since it was 7:50, and way past when the other guy was supposed to have come and gone. As I walked out, I saw him in the parking lot just waiting there for me. It is a good thing I didn't catch a ride with anyone on the way. He was totally cool about the whole thing, and we headed in for the day's non stop meeting.

Nothing of note from there on during the day. It wasn't boring, and I even learned a thing or two, especially concerning a site that the sum total of my learning of it to date was "such-and-such is on this site." I figured it was little more than a repository for documents since that's what every department I knew of used it for. I was wrong.

You see, I was pushing an idea for a "knowledge base", which would be a sort of search engine to find absolutely anything about anything in the company from general HR information to product operation information. Kind of a pipe dream, I knew, but I thought if even a tiny piece of it came about, I'd be happier.

My idea was a place where someone would place information that would be readily searchable about everything. It would be updateable by whatever department would be responsible for it, and people could find whatever they needed by a simple search. I wanted this, because I needed it. I wanted to know the information about a lot of things I just couldn't find, and through yesterday's discussion, I learned a lot of other people needed this too.

Well, turns out this site that I've had access to for the last year has this functionality already. Not only that, it contained what amounted to a company intranet site to have company specific info as well as a search engine that crawl within the documents for answers. Once I finally figured out what this thing was, I was in love. I said we need training, and to make it even better, it as built in training about all of its functions, and individual departments can build and maintain their own site in a more graphical "web-ish" format, as opposed to just a document respository. So it's way cool.

There were several revelations like that when we were coming up with things we thought we short on. People knew of places where the information could be found already, so all we needed to propose was training or information about what's already there, which is bound to make the bigwigs happier, since they won't need to spend much of any money to put the idea out there.

This evening, I took a walk to WalMart to see about getting some local souvenirs for the Queen and the Princesses. I figured I'd track down some T-shirts that said Georgia on them, but when I got there, I was immediately concerned. It took forever to find the shirts and every one of them were sport shirts. We got to choose from Atlanta Braves and Georgia Bulldogs. Great.

Well, knowing that they would take whatever I got them as a gift and love it, I went with the Georgia Bulldogs since they id say Georgia. I found some shirts for the Queen and the older two that were red with the name written in white with pretty fonts, but Sassy Pants was the one that really made out; she got a pink jersey that just said Georgia on it. I figure she'll be excited over that.

Just one day left (well, actually, I leave in the afternoon), and I go back home to see them. Not much time left.