I’m currently sitting in the departure area at Kansas City International’s Terminal C awaiting my flight to Denver. This all came up rather suddenly last Friday afternoon when I got an E-mail from Bill English at MindSharp, offering me a seat at one of their SharePoint training events. The only one they had scheduled for Kansas City this year was the course for SharePoint Designer 2007, which Bill admitted probably wasn’t quite what I needed. After a quick jaunt through their course schedules, I found that they were offering the SharePoint Administration course this week in Denver. Since I have family in Denver, that made it easy to do on a church budget. After some fortunate timing involving Clif showing up online (he’s in Texas for the next few weeks) and getting his approval for my travel expenses, a plan was put together. The original plan was to load up the minivan and whisk away my lovely wife and two adorable daughters for a week, but we weren’t able to secure the time off for her, so I sadly have to go to Plan B, which means I go by myself. On the other hand, driving is an expensive way to go at the standard IRS mileage rate, so I booked myself a flight and a rental car on Friday night and saved the church a few hundred bucks in the process.

Added bonus: I can take a SharePoint test as an MCSE elective, which improves the Bird:Stone ratio considerably. I’ll also probably spend most of the flight seeing where my existing knowledge stands with regards to the certification requirements. I’ve been getting an awful lot of on-the-job learning for that stuff.

I’m discovering that the WiFi in Terminal C is much better than that in Terminal A (as I discovered last February on a Southwest flight). Terminal A’s WiFi is nearly unusable. I have a fallback plan, however… I got me a new Mogul with Phone-As-Modem capability (more on that in a later post).

I’ll post more on SharePoint as well.