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The Arizona Trip: Part II

Shaiful Borhan — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:16:19 +0000

Grand Canyon

(Note: This is Part 2 of Shaiful’s Arizona trip. Click to read Part 1)

Meeting A.J.

A.J. and Laura arrived the next day around afternoon. While I was relaxing in my room, the phone rang and the instant I heard the voice at the end of the line, I knew it was A.J. Awesome! We have been working together for over a year remotely, with each one of us in different part of the world. Getting the opportunity to finally meet in person is really refreshing, and not to mention, feels real too.

A.J. is the founder of the Trading Trainer company, which essentially provides training and advice to members in the field of stock options trading. He flew in from Fort Collins, CO. Laura is from Atlanta about 4 hours away, she’s the bubbly main admin person of Trading Trainer that really kept the group lively. We were also expecting Kevin, project manager and programmer of Trading Trainer – he would only arrive Wednesday.

The collaboration between Trading Trainer and Stampede started sometime in 2008 when Trading Trainer needed to revamp their existing member portal. It was a huge endeavor in design, usability and functionality. The project involved integrating a handful of tools into one another with Joomla handling content management and acting as the main access point for members. It was one of my first Joomla 1.5 projects and it is the biggest project for me to date. Since then, the site has undergone multiple phases of enhancements and it was the reason that brought me to the Grand Canyon state.

We were here to attend the on-site training session at Infusionsoft. As mentioned in my first post, Infusionsoft is a hosted web-based solution that specializes in email marketing, CRM as well as having support for e-Commerce and affiliate program. A.J. has been planning to incorporate this tool into the Trading Trainer workflow, making it the central member and order manager, automate follow-up email marketing and to take advantage of the affiliate module. By doing this, we will be phasing out other third-party tools to only handle product permissions.

On-Site, Web 2.0 Style

At Infusion, we were introduced to Marty Woodward, the guy in charge of our on-site session. The Infusion office has the vibe of a cool web 2.0 start-up, with mini basketball court in the main hall, casual-looking folks and a fully stocked-up snack room. Fridge-load of cereals and milk, energy bars on the counter, sodas and coffee with French vanilla and hazelnut creamer, not being a coffee person I still could drink two cups a day. And to top all of that, employee of the month gets to drive the company’s smoking hot 370Z.

At Infusionsoft

All levity aside, the first two and a half days were pure training and configuration, with the first day being the most challenging in terms of staying awake in the afternoon for all of us. The Infusionsoft application is a very powerful beast but it requires guidance to master. Good thing Marty provided us with some preparation guidelines on what to expect a few weeks before our trip.

It started to get interesting for me towards the second half of Wednesday when I finally started work on the API and codes. My first task was to activate the Infusionsoft affiliate module. Every once in a while, I had to go back and forth to assist Laura and the team perform data migration, churning out CSVs and rapid database queries. The rest of my tasks were to upgrade the Trading Trainer Blackbox order form to support shipping, creating an order summary page, adding a profile page in Joomla where members can edit their credit card details and migrating the Trading Trainer Blackbox tool into Joomla.

Marty’s office at Infusionsoft

We were totally on full steam from Thursday to Friday as Marty kindly gave us the privilege to use his office while he was away on vacation. Thanks to Marty’s whiteboard and multi-colored markers we were able to keep our to-do list central and organized, and not to forget the 42” LCD allowing us to conveniently share screen with everyone. On our final day at Infusion, we took photos of the place and with some of the folks that helped us while we were there. Laura was also leaving today.

Back at the hotel, A.J. and I were very excited talking about our Grand Canyon helicopter ride happening the next day. We decided to get some decent winter clothing for the trip as the canyon was covered with three feet of snow at this time of the year. A quick shopping at Goodwill did the job. We have our coats and called it a day.

The Part When I Hovered Over Grand Canyon

With AJ

Saturday was a really long day. The tour van picked us up at 6am in the very cold morning. We reached the helipad at around 11am and went airborne a few minutes later. Being a first timer, the wobbly take-off was a little discomforting to say the least. I tried not to let emotion took over and told myself that everything should be just fine. The bird’s eye view overlooking the vast canyon was an incredible sight to behold. Hovering over a gigantic hole with unique rock formations and snow-covered summits really makes you feel tiny.

Grand Canyon

According to the pilot, the rocky point in front of us although it seemed close was actually 15 miles away. And it still looked huge! The ride ended 25 minutes later. The rest of the day we spent visiting numerous Grand Canyon vantage points as our tour guide, Todd entertained us with his fascinating stories unique to each vantage point. We headed home around 4pm as the fog started to come down and made our final stop at a native Indian gift shop in Cameron. We reached the hotel at 9pm, exhausted as hell. Even so, I must pack for tomorrow flight home.

Heading Home

The flight home was not nearly as legendary as the flight coming here. It was smooth sailing. The layovers were just nice for me to window-shop in the airport terminals. Instead of Tokyo, I stopped at Shanghai this time. Finally, touched down in KLIA at odd hours on Feb 2nd, losing a day. No bros could pick me up this late. Thankfully, I have my parents to the rescue.

Altogether, the whole week was a great learning experience. I gained valuable exposure working on-site at Infusion alongside our client. As a team, we were very pleased with what we achieved during the five days. Like all great software, we will keep on discovering new ways to make full use of it and I am sure A.J. is coming up with more cool ideas as we speak. TTP4, wait for it.

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The Arizona Trip: Part I

Shaiful Borhan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:55:36 +0000

January started magnificently. I spent a week in the wonderful city of Kuching, visiting places such as the Sarawak Cultural Village in Santubong and picking dragon-fruits at my best friend’s little orchard. It is a city with diverse ethnicity background, colorful culture and not to forget, pretty people too. It’s my second time around.

At Narita Airport

The highlight of the month however, was my trip to Phoenix, AZ. It was a personal invitation from one of our clients – A.J. Brown of Trading Trainer – who wanted me to be on-site for the training and integration of their existing website with a third-party software, Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is a hosted web-based solution that specializes in email marketing and CRM. It also provides support for e-Commerce and affiliate programs.

This being my first trip to the States, had me drove back and forth to the US embassy in KL as part of the visa application procedures and with the Kuching trip and all, it was pretty tight. Interestingly and well, fortunately too though, I had my visa issued on Friday 23rd at 3pm which was on the same day I was flying. I flew out of KL at 1130pm. Yes, it was pretty tight.

Well hello, Tokyo!

The journey itself was an epic adventure in its own. As you might have guessed it, it was not a direct flight. I bid “sayonara” to KL close to midnight, bound for Narita, Tokyo. (I just have to let my thought out loud on this one though. This is definitely my favorite flight to date, MAS operated 777. Really superb in many ways!).

We reached Japan air space right around 6am. Rolled up the window shades, looked outside and guess what you’d see. Yeah, sunrise in the land of the rising sun right from the cabin! Every second of it was breath-taking. I may not seen a lot of sunrises in my life, but I’m not sure if they can come any better than this one.

The ground temperature at Narita was around -1°C. I’m supposed to board my connecting flight to San Francisco (SFO) here except it was not to leave ground until 10 hours later. Man, I hate long layovers. Thankfully though, they have rooms that weary travelers like me can rent by the hour. I had 5 hours killed. Fast-forward a few hours, and we were all set to board the SFO flight.

This is when it got hairy. I went into the plane and saw my seat was occupied. Little did I realize that I got the wrong boarding pass issued to me while I was checking-in. It was for my other connecting flight, SFO to Phoenix (PHX). Both flights were operated by the same airline, thus the passes look similar. In spite of all the confusion, they still managed to put me onboard in a different seat close to the rear. Well, that’s cool. Kudos to the Narita ground staff for handling the matter professionally, Japanese-style! *

* That is to say very briskly, trying really hard to explain in English with plenty of apologetic gestures.

The San Francisco Connection

The flight was really long. Going back against time, we reached SFO about 12 hours later. The SFO airport is really huge with planes coming in and going out literally every single minute. As active as the air traffic may be, I was there stucked at the Homeland Security gates. For a first timer like myself, plus all the recent developments regarding enhanced security for US bound flights, it’s understandable though. Even so, my connecting flight to PHX is just 2 hours away and by the look of the queue length and speed, I doubt I could make it in time. I texted Shaza to let her know of my little situation so she can relay the news to A.J.

As expected, I missed my PHX flight. I did receive some good news from the security officer that the airline should be able to rebook me on the next flight to Phoenix. What a breather! Well, it’s lunch time in California, and with 2 extra hours to spare, Mexican did the job.

Phoenix, Finally

Arizona Airport

Phoenix Marriot

By the time I touched down in Phoenix, the only thing I had in mind was to get some serious rest. It was a very long day indeed and I was drained. Had a long hot shower and went straight to bed.

To be continued in Part II…

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