Well, Albuquerque was pretty - not sure of the population, but I'd hazard a guess at less than 250K, but incredibly sprawling city, with a positive tangle of interstates weaved through it. Fortunately I could rely on taxis to negotiate it, while I stared at the countryside.
The place is about 5000' up, in the fringe of the (I guess) southern Rockies, and a very arid desert. The air is very dry, to the point of making you thirsty after a couple of minutes walking in it, but the light is beautiful, quite hard and crystalline, especially at dusk, when it looks so clear you could reach out and tumble the mountain peaks.
The reason I was there was to meet the DBA's I'd be supporting/taking over from, and that went extremely well - the SQLServer DBA was a woman called Debbie Rosen, who I found very friendly, and a lot of fun to talk with: she looks to be an excellent DBA, and we spent the first day going over the layouts, the sorts of problems encountered, and so on: she is staying on with PNMR, supporting the dev/test environments, while I'm just taking over her production support work, so it's good we seem to be on the same wavelength.
The Oracle DBA will be staying on, so I'm just backing him up. He seems able, but we didn't spend that much time talking (altho he's a bike fiend, & a little older than me, so I suspect this will change with time).
Otherwise the trip was pretty dreadful - delayed flights both ways, so lots of sitting around; poor quality room with an awfully noisy aircon; and the food nearby (Applebees & Pizza Hut) was actively bad - definitely a first for my US experiences. No worse than many UK places, but bad by US standards.
No comments:
Post a Comment