LA, Universal Studios and Malibu

Los Angeles, California, is a very nice place. First time I went there and I'll probably come back later for a real holiday. I didn't see Holywood due to lack in time, but I saw some other nice spots...

From Thousand Oaks to Universal Studios over Santa Monica beach to Malibu and back to Thousand Oaks. It's a pity I didn't see that many "stars"! I drove in Bel Air to look at the houses. They are very impressive, so is the area. I did the Citywalk in Universal Studios and saw the life guard cabin of Pamela Anderson of Baywatch. She was just free of duty that day, a real shame. ;-)

It was nice to see the water and have good air, especially after a week of hard work.

Below some pictures I took.

I hope my flight to Belgium will be not to difficult, as I heard that there're some problems in Heathrew (London, UK).

First days in LA

The first days in LA were nice. The weather is excellent, especially when I read it's such a bad weather in Belgium!

The first days I had some meetings with the customer. As I'm living in Europe we have most of the time conference calls with customers in the States. Meeting them in real life gave me a visual image from the voice I heard before. Also seeing the environment they are working in in real life helps. The meetings are very intense as we're trying to cover a lot in a short time frame. Together with the meetings and seeing a lot of new people, the jetlag makes me "crash" in the evenings.

Yesterday we also started with a "get-up-to-speed" Oracle Application Express training.

This kind of training I didn't do that much before. Normally I'm in front of one kind of persons: business people or beginners or people who already have more experience in APEX.


But this time they are all together in one room! Next to that, at the same time we run the training as a conference. That means my laptop is connected to a web conference tool, so people from around the world see my screen. Next to that we've a voice line open for the whole day. I'm talking to a room of 30 people, but at the other end of the line there are more. I've been talking to people from Puerto Rico, Colorado , the UK and a lot others.
You also need to be careful with drawing on the board as the people on the other side of the line don't see it. To bypass that there's an online white board functionality to use. Amazing what technology can do!

The evenings are quickly over. Grabbing something to eat, prepare for the next day and have an early sleep as I get awake at 4.30 AM.

During one of the evenings I went together with Rich and his family to a famous Fish&Chips place not far from the harbor. There're some nice spots in LA, but I'll see more of it during the weekend. I plan to visit Universal Studios, Holywood, Malibu beach.