Sooke Alright, so I haven't been able to get to this and finish my stories recently. I've been asked to complete it so I don't leave everyone hanging! I've decided to break it up even more and talk about the reason I went to Victoria in the first place in this episode. AJ and I went out to meet with the people from a company called Power Soft. They are a small rising tech company located in Sooke. Power Soft are the creators of the Power quote software used by many insurance companies. The purpose of our meeting was to meet them and discuss some web based application of their current software.

Marshall lent us his truck to drive out to Sooke. AJ had directions from the marketing manager from Power Soft, and he also had directions from Marshall, and he had a map to go along with the directions. Thank god he had me in the truck or he would have gotten lost! Around the right corner, left on Hillsdale, take the right hand turn off on Douglas, then out the highway, and turn 14 to Sooke. Follow the highway. This is a week later, and I think I got it right still. So we were happily on our way. It was a really cool drive, but the fog was so heavy we really couldn't see much further than 2 feet off the sides of the roads. I'll use that as our excuse for driving right through Sooke.

Actually we stopped to grab a couple of McMuffins, and since Sooke is so small that if you spit on the ground you might drown the town. We were looking for the Royal Bank building. Being from Calgary we are used to the sky scraper metropolis type banks. This bank however takes up the main floor of a two story building, and where we wanted to be was the second floor.

We arrived! We met with Chris Lang (president), Chris Dunn (Marketing). We also met everyone else who works there. Steve, Rudy and several other people. I apologize for not remembering all of your names. We had the whole tour of the offices. It's a small shop with about a dozen people. They were all fantastic. What a great atmosphere to be around. The friendliness began by the traditional offering of coffee and pastry treats (donuts). The coffee was again superb, but several LARGE cups later did not agree with the fact to make use of the washrooms you had to get the key first. I sometimes forget how small towns work. ;-)

We discussed the current power quote capabilites, and the new features coming up. We learned about their new web development of a CMS, and other tasks. Basically the group of us just sat around in the board room talking about every topic under the sun. Including Hockey, E-Bay, sports cards, insurance companies, computers, development ... well you get the picture anyways. It was very enlightening for me, and very very productive all around.

We went for lunch at a little wharf restaraunt. It was quaint, and seemed like it was in an old house. The chef came out to meet us and ask how the meal was. It was excellent! We had the biggest vent session over lunch. We ended up just tearing loose on teachers and city workers. I don't know why it happened. Computer people must hold everything in for a while.

We continued the afternoon with more talks and discussion. The end result is that I'm going back for a few weeks in December. We ended the day with Chris Lang touring us through his computer collections. He collects hard to find computers. He has some very unique Mac computers, and even has some NeXT computers. They were a tad expensive when they came out, but seem to have dropped in price tremendously since the original release.

Phew! What a mentally draining day. AJ and I ended up driving for about 10 minutes and didn't say a word to each other. Our brains were so fried from everything that went on. It's a good feeling when things going well, and your brain hurts from all of the work. The drive was like the calming period, minus the body convulsions from too much coffee. We did have to make a stop to get any sort of drink that was non-caffeinated. Brain feels melty ... must cut loose! And boy did we. I'll leave that for the next episode!  ¶ 2:12:00 PM