A Late Night in Copenhagen

Over the last week and a half, I’ve been doing some business travel throughout Europe.  My friends and family always say “I want your job” but if they actually went on one of these trips, they would probably say “I’m glad I don’t have your job!”.  Most of the time, they entail late nights, early mornings,  days full of visits with customers, and a few long plane rides sprinkled in.   You do occasionally get to see something interesting, such as this trip I got to visit Jerusalem and the Dead Sea which was a great experience, but on the whole, it’s no picnic.

There is also the fact that you have your regular job to try and tend to while you’re doing all this traveling.  On this trip, it so happened that my regular job had a deadline right near the end of my trip – you know, the point where you’re running out of steam.  I was going to be delivering a webinar on DDRx design with HyperLynx this week and of course, as a good procrastinator, I didn’t prepare my content ahead of time before my trip (at least I can tell myself I’m good at something!).   So, on the final day of my trip to Europe, the last possible day I could have recorded the content for my webinar, I arrived in Copenhagen.

I’ve been to Copenhagen once before – it’s a wonderful city and I enjoyed the half day I had there to be a pseudo-tourist.  But this time, it was all business.  I had to get my webinar complete!  I got off the train and walked in the rain straight to my hotel.  I started pulling slides together, recording a demonstration, and then I recorded the voice over.  If you haven’t ever recorded a webinar, let me just say it’s not as easy as it may seem.  Since you are doing this as a recording, you want it to be as perfect as possible, and that can take a long time.  When you give a presentation live, if you make a mistake, you just move on, but here, you just keep repeating and repeating till it’s right.  What would take 1 hour to do live ends up taking you 8 to 10 hours to do recorded.

So that’s how I spent my Friday afternoon and night in Copenhagen – recording a HyperLynx DDR webinar till almost 1:00am.    It’s not as exciting as I had planned for my final night in Europe and probably not as exciting of a story as you hoped when you started reading this, but that’s how these business trips turn out – late nights working.

Coincidentally, the webinar is now available on the Mentor website at the link below.  Take a look at it and let me know what you think.  Hopefully you can find some value in the content and my hours spent on this will not have been in vain.

http://www.mentor.com/products/pcb-system-design/multimedia/ddrx-design-webinar