Random update

Still nothing terribly interesting going on.

Yeah, that'll drive up the old readership numbers.

I realized yesterday that starting mid-day tomorrow I'll be out of the office for a week and a half, basically. That kinds threw me for a loop, as this round of work travel has kinda snuck up on me. I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon to go to Raleigh to attend a grand opening performance at Burning Coal's new theatre, which we installed the lighting system for. The Burning Coal folks have been striving for years to get their own space, and they do a great job of bringing edgy professional theatre to the Raleigh area, while still maintaining high production values and great performances. They're almost everything I wanted Off-Tryon to be, only not quite as edgy as we were. So I'm very happy that they now have their new facility, and it's a really nice venue, too. It's a converted school auditorium, turned into a 175-seat black box (at it's max seating configuration).

I could be more thrilled with the choice of grand opening plays, since I've recently seen a mediocre production of Inherit the Wind and am not exactly jumping at the prospect of seeing the play again. But I didn't pick the season, so I'll see what their take on it is.

Then Monday I head to Denver for three days of management training. It's interesting that my company has only recently begun training the managers, which shows in a way how far our industry still has to go. We've been around for 60+ years and have just started training our mid-level managers, and most other companies in our business have no management training at any level other than the purely practical. This looks to be two days of leadership training and mental gymnastics, and a half-day session that is more practicum-based, as it were.

Don't get me wrong with referring to it as mental gymnastics, I understand the value of leadership training. Hell, I'm still paying off tuition from my grad school leadership training (which I dropped out of and kinda still regret). I just don't really have a better term. It is taking a bunch of people who are largely gearheads and salespeople and training their minds to leap through different hoops. The last one we had was very good, and I got a lot out of it, but I need to focus more on retaining and integrating those leadership strategies into my daily work habits to be a better manager.

That's not just lip service in case my boss wanders by here (although if you do, go away!). I want to be better as a manager, and I'm putting some things in place to make my team better and position all of us better to be more effective, but it's hard to balance being the top salesperson and the manager, and I frequently focus too much on the sales aspect to keep the management aspect flowing. Maybe someday I can just be a manager, but I think I'd probably hate it.

The last two days I've had the big boss from corporate down for his quarterly visit, which happened to fall right before we spend a week at the same management training session together. It's always good to see Bill, and he was pretty happy with the way things are going with my group, but it was just one more thing to try and deal with as I get ready to be gone for a while.

Fortunately at the end of my training week I stuck a weekend in Vegas on as a 3-day layover, so I'll be in Vegas Friday afternoon through Monday mid-day. I'm hoping to hit up some rooms I've never played before (like Bellagio), so games I've never played before (like Stud at the Mirage) and more tournaments. If I can win a couple quick buy-ins on Friday night, I'll enter the $540 Deep Stack on Saturday at the Venetian. Otherwise, I'll stick to small tournies like the Sahara and maybe the Planet Ho tourney. So those of you who live there, I'll be in town, call me for lunch or dinner.