San Francisco is an amazing city; it's always been a fun place to visit, though I've come here on pleasure alone and never for more than a day trip. At least that's how it was before the training today. First it was on, then it was cancelled, and then at the last second it was back on once more. I'm staying at the Holliday Inn Select about a block from Chinatown, and I've already noticed three major things about business traveling.
A half mile with your luggage isn't that bad. 411 info really is worthless The hotel lied about high speed access
I probably should have brought my bluetooth adapter, as I think I could have used its dialing services to connect to the NPS network (or any network, really) and continued on my merry way of Internet fun. However, not thinking, I grabbed my USB Memory Stick and not the flashing blue one. And so, instead of chatting online and moderating for Gaia Online, I am instead sitting here in my hotel room, typing about my travels. Rumor has it the hotel lobby has wireless though, so I will have to sneak down and see if this really does hold true. If so, I shall post and surf for a few hours in the evening, though not a whole lot more. Battery life is precious, and I don't think the folks here understand the importance of "being connected" to the online world. I've very much a digital kid. My bank stuff, my primary form of contact, the ways I spend my time- most all of them involve the Internet in some fashion.
So the first day of uPortal training was nothing spectacular, it really reminded me of the first day of school. We installed our software, we configured our portal, and we did just some really basic stuff. So far, I know how to install a portal, how to install premade channels, and how to manually deploy a channel. XML/XSLT transformations seem to be the next threshold level for my knowledge, and it seems pretty interesting to work with. XSLT programming though looks to be a beast all its own. Tomorrow is supposed to touch on LDAP, Themes, and a good introduction into XML Stylesheets. How much exactly we can cover in 6 hours though will remain to be seen. Day three is offering a primer to the advanced course.
Tonight though, I need to buckle down and finish a ton of code I want to have done by this weekend. I'm supposed to go up to El Sobrante for the BAAS BBQ, and hopefully can drop off a finished or mostly polished version of the code.
According to my wireless sniff, there is a network somewhere around here. As soon as I lock into it, this is going to be happily posted. (Update: It went magically MIA, so post-dinner I will try my luck down in the lobby.)
In response to "uPortal Training Day 1":
“I grabbed my USB Memory Stick and not the flashing blue one”
You have been hanging around me too much, methinks. ^^