My boss asked me to “make it so” (on a Kaseya module purchase, if you’re curious) and I did so.

I then pointed out that I have as yet been unable to make it la, ti or do, and that we may need to look into renewal pricing for do, re, mi and fa.

(Also, the LJ crossposting plugin ate Monday’s post. It’s there now, you may just have to dig back through your f’list to find it if you’re reading this via that service.)

The final day of Kaseya Connect posed a small dilemma for me. Checkout of the hotel needed completion by noon, but sessions and meals were scheduled the entire time from 8:30am to 4:00pm, and none of the morning sessions were of the sort I could justify skipping. So, I packed up Tuesday morning and checked out, keeping only the Nook Color and my phone with me.

Have I mentioned that with last Monday’s software upgrade, the Nook Color became quite the little nearly-an-Android-tablet device? It has email, web browsing, and some apps now in addition to being a fairly decent little e-reader. I’m quite pleased.

At any rate. The Four Seasons gladly took my suitcase and gave me a claim ticket, and I headed out for the last day’s worth of sessions. Breakfast wasn’t much to speak of, yet again. (Monday’s involved “breakfast burritos” that were all egg and scallops and almost no bacon or cheese. Tuesday’s involved some kind of egg-and-red-pepper sandwiches. Thanks but no thanks, eh?) The keynote speech for the day involved a lot of business philosophy that sailed clear over my tired little brain, but the actual sessions on Tuesday were generally useful.

The only “business track” session I attended all week was that of the Malwarebytes crew, because hearing their story interested me greatly. Turns out that the guy behind ComboFix is one of their crew, which makes me wonder why they don’t just fold some of that functionality into the main product, but whatever works. I’m certainly not clever enough to justify questioning their judgment there.

Knowing that I’d be at an airport for hours on end without means to get a decent meal, when lunch came I sort of doubled up: I ate lunch (those turkey/stuffing/cranberry-sauce sliders were divine) and followed it up with “dinner” (another slider for the road, essentially).

4pm finally arrived, I acquired my luggage and caught the next shuttle back to the airport, where I read part of a book until the Nook’s battery indicator finally started to gripe at me. I picked up a souvenir, listened to music, caught a plane home (same row as on the trip down, but on the starboard-side window seat instead of the port-side seat… I sat on the east-facing side of the plane each direction), made it home safely and collapsed into bed at midnight after only the most brief of systems checks.

And that, boys and girls, is the sordid and fascinating tale of my first trip to Vegas, my first Kaseya Connect conference.

Today featured the bulk of the Kaseya Connect conference material. Yes, there’s more tomorrow, but today we received the keynote speech and the motivational speaker (Jim Abbott, a baseball pitcher born without a right hand, quite a storyteller with a good message but not necessarily the best fit for a room full of people who don’t follow baseball, even if they’ve heard of it at all) and most of the Big Product Announcements.

So, what’s on my shopping list?

• Enterprise Monitoring: They ditched Zabbix (a product I generally like, but admit that the configuration is somewhat arcane) for Intellipool, a company that Kaseya acquired just for this purpose. The demo looks fantastic, and will probably obviate the need for the quirky, cumbersome Network Discovery module. (Um… whoops?)
• Policy Management: If we can get rid of the tangled mess of templates and replace it with policies that we can apply consistently and automatically based on service-level orgs and client groups, I’ll be able to provide a far more consistent management experience. We want it, oh yes, we do.
• Online Backup: We’re using Ahsay right now, but if Kaseya can integrate an offsite folder backup solution and let us pick our own destination, I’ll try to get the bosses to buy it. Right now, however, it’s Amazon S3 only… and we like having end-to-end control far too much to go for that.
• Mobile Device Management: I almost skipped this presentation, but a live demo of deploying the agent to an iPhone and an Android, backing up and restoring contacts, and wiping the iPhone completely convinced me that we may have a chance at selling this to certain C-level types among our clientele.

Meanwhile, staying in a fairly posh hotel provided some amusement. When they came in to tidy up while I was off at conference sessions, they not only made the bed and replaced the towels as I expected, they also took the time to line up and organize the little travel bottles of toiletries I’d left clustered (but upright, I’m not a total slob) on the sink. Cute, guys.

Tomorrow morning I get to pack up, check out, get through the last day of conferences, head to the airport, check through security, wait a few hours, then finally fly home.

I can’t wait to be home. I’ve had some fun here but after tomorrow I won’t want to travel again for a good long time…

Unfortunately, this meant flying. To Vegas. Days before payday.

The flight itself wasn’t actually terrible, but getting out of bed at 5:30am on a Sunday is nearly against my religion. (Yes, I’m an atheist. Shut up. It’s been a long damned day.) Then there’s the security theater to get through, please take off your shoes, sir you forgot to remove your laptop from the bag, and so on. After all that, wait. The plane ride itself wasn’t terrible, as these things go. I’ll never be a fan of air travel but I can manage. Descents do bad things to my stress levels and innards, mind you.

Let’s talk about shuttle buses and Vegas. For $6.50, you get to be hauled from the airport to your hotel… eventually. Unless you’re staying at Hooters, which was the first stop on the itinerary. I’m sure those newlyweds are in for decades of wedded bliss, you betcha. The Four Seasons? Last stop. Oh, and along the way, some guy tries to sell you on various amenities available, complete with stand-up-comedian patter. Dude, I’ve been up since oh-dark-thirty, shut up and let me get to my hotel in peace.

And then I learn a priceless, by which I mean expensive, lesson about hotel reservations: If you don’t have a proper credit card but only a debit card, they want to “authorize a charge” amounting to possibly hundreds of dollars, in anticipation of your use of, say, the bar in your room. Great, but I don’t get paid ’til Thursday, I don’t have $300 sitting in my account right now. Even if I cleared out savings, the money wouldn’t be actually available until tomorrow. After some back-and-forth, they settled for swiping my card and going on a “cash” basis in return for my agreement not to use anything from the bar. (Like I was going to? Three bucks for a candy bar, are you mental?) Fine, great, I’m sure I’m the last person on the planet to know this. I’m sure the hotel staff are having a nice chuckle somewhere at the rube from Portland. Whatever.

Of course, right now I’m craving a candy bar, or pretty much anything at all. See, I didn’t buy any food on the plane, breakfast was at 6:30 this morning, and as I write this nearly 12 hours later I don’t expect to be provided dinner for at least another 90 minutes.

At least the two hours of “pre-conference” material was interesting, consisting of a Q&A session with various technical types. Good stuff. Now, can I eat something, please?

Client calls in, says that a key software vendor wants to upgrade software on a particular server but they need another few hundred megabytes of free space on the OS partition to get it up to 2 full gigabytes. It’s a relatively small OS partition by today’s standards, only about 18GB. Client wants to know if we can help find a way to eke out this chunk of additional hard disk real estate somehow.

Let’s see. I have a script to clean the SoftwareDistribution directory (Windows Update stores downloaded patches here), I have a script to run MSIZAP (to get rid of obsolete Installers content), I have a script to clean the main Windows as well as user profile Temp directories…

…what’s that? You have 3.5 gigabytes of free space now? You’re welcome, sir. Have a wonderful day.

This sort of thing is why I love working with Kaseya. Several times per day I get to go from “worried client” to “happy client” with no more than a dozen clicks of the mouse.

Please disregard any reports you may hear involving maniacal mad-scientist laughter emanating from the general vicinity of my office.

The Kaseya road show event was scheduled for Tuesday morning, 8 o’clock sharp. My boss, John, gave me the go-ahead to register several weeks ago, then decided he’d attend as well. The debate about possible transportation methods went back and forth from driving up the night before, to flying, to taking the train, back to driving, then driving up the morning of the event, then back and forth some more.

Come Sunday night, John sent me a text advising me to come to work Monday packed for a drive up after close of business. Okay, sure, I packed my bag. When 5 o’clock rolled around, John came by the office to pick me up.

What we did not do, however, was make way to I-5 for a three-hour drive north. Oh, no. Instead, we pulled into Hillsboro airport and rolled out the Cessna two-seater he’s been flying around in lately.

Those of you who know me well are guessing at the panic levels I started wrestling with at that precise moment. But… I’m a grown-up, right? (Right? Okay, you, over there… stop laughing. I mean it! Don’t make me come over there!) And this is a perfectly safe and expedient way to get from city to city. You bet.

Thing is, John had looked at the weather reports and decided that things would be plenty clear enough to go up Monday evening and come back Tuesday afternoon. No worries! So he had the plane fueled up, went through the preflight checks, fired up the bird and got us into the air.

Oddly enough, I was only white-knuckled for about the first quarter hour. (“I’m in a tin can, thousands of feet above the ground, and there’s NOTHING UNDERNEATH ME AUUUGH!”) After that it became kind of fun to listen to the radio chatter and try to spot the company we were keeping up there. Mental discipline was involved, yes, in deliberately not thinking about certain panic-inducing facts. And, let’s face it, the view is gorgeous on a partly cloudy summer evening while flying over the Pacific Northwest. I even managed to snap a few pictures, though the propeller was a bit of a nuisance at first. Eventually I got a shot out of the side window that I was somewhat happy with:

That’s the Tacoma Narrows, new bridge and old, from a bit more than 3,000 feet up and some distance away. A while after this, we made a rather entertaining landing at Boeing Field (oh my, but those little planes can turn on a dime if you stand them on one wingtip in the air…) and wandered off toward downtown Seattle.

Via public transit. See, John wanted an adventure. (And wanted to avoid paying parking fees. And dealing with traffic.) So he chose the Seattle-area “Metro” system as his inauguration to the wonderful world of riding the bus hither and yon. Yes, as expected, we ended up with a half-drunk and mostly-loony shift-worker across the aisle from us. “Whoah!” “Wow!” “Whee!” every few minutes… I’m glad it was a relatively short trip to downtown, is what I’m saying.

Now, I like to walk. John likes to walk even more than I do, apparently, because he had no problem hiking about a mile each way to and from our dinner destination, Daniel’s Broiler on Lake Union. (Steak, $40. Blue cheese topping for said steak, $5. I shudder to think what his glass of wine cost.) The hike back burned off some of those calories at any rate. Besides, the weather remained utterly gorgeous and we looked forward to the prospect of a nice conference the next day and a quick flight home afterward.

Naturally, then, the next morning I woke to rain going sideways outside the hotel window.

Oh, and the hotel hosting the Kaseya event? About ten blocks away from our hotel. Through that sideways rain, of course, and forget using the umbrella or the hood of my jacket… it was nice, I quipped later, of Seattle to make sure I bathed an extra time that morning.

I’m grateful to the Kaseya folks for feeding me breakfast and lunch. Also, they put on a good presentation and I’m quite excited about some of the new toys I’ll be getting my hands on. In October. No, really, in October. We know this because Gerald Blackie made a humorous point of answering all release-date questions with those two words. (I want the Enterprise Monitoring module in the worst way, I tell you.) I learned a couple of new tricks for scripting as well. Win-win all around, really.

For the entire duration of the event, however, my eye kept wandering to the very large tree blowing around wildly in the lousy weather just outside the window. This was not flying weather. After some debate, John decided to see if we could snag a seat for me on the next Amtrak Cascades train heading to Portland. (He’d be staying an extra day so as to fly the plane back to Hillsboro where it belongs.) It would be very last-minute, thus something of a gamble, but as it was mid-week I figured it a reasonable chance to take.

So at about ten ’til 2pm we entered King Street Station, which has apparently been under reconstruction since shortly after the turn of the century. The 20th century. (Still, guys? Really?) We were just in time for what should’ve been the 2:20pm run, which was “about half an hour behind schedule” at the time. John procured me a ticket and said his goodbyes, then I sat down to wait for the boarding-pass cattle-call.

I didn’t wait long. Only a few minutes after I sat down, they announced that boarding passes would be handed out starting at about twenty minutes past 2pm. Nearly half an hour, mind you, but the huddled masses must have been yearning quite a bit because the line formed quickly. Not wanting to end up with a truly lousy seat, and taking in the vast hordes involved, I quickly got myself standing in line. I figured I’d be there for twenty minutes or so, then I’d get my pass and sit back down again or be boarding soon after.

No. Oh, no.

I didn’t move from an 8-foot-by-8-foot portion of the floor for an entire hour. And that was just to get the boarding pass, which they didn’t start handing out until nearly 3:15. The train itself didn’t depart until quarter ’til 4pm, almost 90 minutes late. (This didn’t endear Amtrak to me or to the lovely Kylanath who’d agreed to meet me at the Portland end of this journey.) Never mind that I got stuck in the car with every last one of the antsy rugrats in the entire train. Hey, this is what headphones are for… and I’ve got to plug the Sansa Fuze 4GB music player, because: Finest portable player I’ve owned yet. 800 songs, Ogg Vorbis friendly, a good randomizer, and it just kept on playing and playing for all four hours of the trip. Yes, we didn’t pull into Portland until 7:45pm.

Along the way, however, I couldn’t resist the urge to take this picture:

That’s the same bridge as before, but this time at mere feet above sea level… three thousand feet below where I was the day before. I’m a sucker for these bookending events, what can I say?

At any rate… Kylanath met me in Portland, we scampered to (barely) catch a bus out of downtown, she fed me Japanese food and then we wandered home to sleep. Adventure, complete.