Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-06-07 15:42:47 - Graham Ellis
"Even if the conference was held on the Mersey Ferry, I would have gone". I've had the pleasure of meeting the authors and their immediate teams for Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL and some of the Linux elements, and much of that was thanks to Geek Cruises, now part of Insight Cruises. These voyages of meeting have taken us to Canada, Alaska, Italy, Greece, Croatia and Turkey and each has been a real pleasure. They have also been just about the hardest and most rewarding week's work (in each case) that I can recall. Listening to the key experts talking, making notes and writing them up in detail to ensure the real gain from the course is made, and at the same time keeping other things running, and getting to know the geeks socially too.
But the reward is immense - I can train secondhand rather than fourth or fifth as to what the author team really intended, and I can pass on their highly technical view to others who require to be taught at a less technical level. And with that ability I gain a confidence that I'm doing it right for our customers.
You won't bump into Rasmus Lerdorf in Melksham. Nor Mark Lutz in Bath, nor Larry Wall in Chippenham. (You may meet one of the W3C HTML team in a nearby town, but that's another story). So it was necessary for me to go away - to wherever the geeks were talking - as an ongoing part of our business. And, yes, it costs money to fly halfway around the world, book on a cruise, and pay conference expenses on top of that.
It probably won't surprise you to be told that our accountants questioned a cruise as a business expense (until we explained it), and cautioned us that HM Inspector of Taxes might ask the same question - "is it really a business expense". And my answer? "We would have gone even if it had been on the Mersey Ferry, shuttling back and forth from Liverpool's Pier Head to Birkenhead all day for a week".
I was reminded of this last night, as I stood on the river wall in Liverpool and watched the Mersey Ferry arrive on its last trip of the day. And in researching this article, I looked up insight's next technical cruise. MacMania, from Sydney Australia. Had it been from Southampton, I would have been tempted, but I don't think I can justify the extra time / jetlag recovery / cost of going all the way down-under.
Our courses don't run on cruises - they run at our Melksham, Wiltshire Training Centre and Hotel. It's about 100 miles to the west of London (that's on the same side as Heathrow airport) and is just a few miles from the M4 motorway and railheads at Chippenham, Bradford-on-Avon and Westbury.
If you've got a whole group of delegates who need the same course at the same time, we can lay a special course on for you, and once you're over 6 or 7 delegates for the course, it's much better if I travel to you. This week, for example, I'm teaching Ruby and Rails in Liverpool although not, it must be admitted, on the Mersey Ferry!
"Even if the conference was held on the Mersey Ferry, I would have gone". I've had the pleasure of meeting the authors and their immediate teams for Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL and some of the Linux elements, and much of that was thanks to Geek Cruises, now part of Insight Cruises. These voyages of meeting have taken us to Canada, Alaska, Italy, Greece, Croatia and Turkey and each has been a real pleasure. They have also been just about the hardest and most rewarding week's work (in each case) that I can recall. Listening to the key experts talking, making notes and writing them up in detail to ensure the real gain from the course is made, and at the same time keeping other things running, and getting to know the geeks socially too.