The Fabulous Peruvian has wireless

I'm just back from a glorious week of skiing at Alta. We walked into the Alta Peruvian for the first time in 10 years or so to find it exactly the same as it used to be, with one exception. It was the middle of the afternoon, so everyone was skiing and the lovely lobby was almost completely empty. However, there were 5 or 6 guys lounging about, and every single one of them was on a laptop. It seemed utterly incongruous to me. This is a lodge that caters to the hard core skier - the only luxury comes from the outdoor hot tub and pool. There's no TV, and the only in-house entertainment is in the games closet (we had a hilarious Clue tournament). But it now has wireless, as well as a little computer room for those who forgot their own.

I had a computer-free vacation nonetheless. In fact, I completely detached from work. My only thought about work occurred one night during dinner. Meals at the Peruvian are served family style, and we happened this night to be sitting with Todd, the Peruvian's general manager. Somebody asked him how he hired people - how he advertised. He said he used something called coolworks.com. I immediately thought of my empty database administrator position and asked how a job gets categorized as "cool." The other folks at the table looked at me strangely when I suggested that my dba position might be a fit. I guess there's cool, and then there's cool.

I still think what we do here is pretty darn cool, and getting cooler. We spend an awful lot of time just doing the business of our daily grind, but I was inspired by Gardner's blog about his group's retreat. We need to do that. We can't step aside for two days like that, but we need to find the time to get everybody thinking bigger. That's the way to keep cool.

In the meantime, Mark somehow found time to put up a few of our Alta pictures, even though it's his first day back following a rather blissful sabbatical.