Saturday, September 17, 2005

REACH Katrina Benefit


REACH Katrina Benefit
Originally uploaded by adamb0mb.
I know... its a flood of posts... two in ONE day!

Anyways, I thought I'd share a recent REACH event with y'all.

Boeing sent out an email to all employees a couple weeks ago stating that for 3 weeks, every dollar that an employee or retiree donated to Hurricane Katrina relief funds, Boeing would match it. This sparked an idea in my head (and more importantly) in my friend Matt's head. Matt is from Louisiana and know lots of people affected by the hurricane.
It was time for a "relief party." You might remember some friends of mine throwing one of these for the tsunami victims (back in February).
I was going to try to help Matt organize this party... turns out Matt didn't need any help, and did it all on his own (but, its the thought that counts... right?). He found an awesome venue for the party. And they were amazingly generous to us... and donated lots of money!
Howl at the Moon is a awesome place... and everyone should go there.
We charged a $10 optional cover at the door. Of course, some people donated more. I think we ended up with ~160 Boeing Employees (and with 98% of us in attendence were under 30). At the door we collected $2100. $2100!! thats awesome.
Here is where Howl at the Moon gets to be awesome. Between 6PM and 9PM, Fat Tire, Mac & Jacks, and Pyramid Hef were all $2 for a pint and Lemon Drop shots were $2 too... AND they donated all of the money to the fund! Thats another $1400.
Thats $3500 total. I don't know if he wants everyone to know or not. But someone very close to this event personally donated another $700. He claims it was because its a tax write-off... but I think its because he's secretly a nice guy.
So... the grand total is $4200. Not bad for a night! The best part? Boeing is going to match it. So thats $8400!

I want to thank everyone for coming out and making it an awesome event. I want to thank everyone who worked at the door collecting money. I want to thank Howl at the Moon (again) for being so hospitable. I know Matt wants to thank all you guys too.
Thanks to Boeing for matching the money (at last check, Boeing employees had donated almost $3,000,000 to the relief effort... we rule!)

Stuff like this...

I work on something that is going to change how people hear airplanes. Or maybe you won't even hear it, and that's the best part. Boeing recently spend some time over in Glasgow Montana at our remote flight test facility (that's right... we own an airport in the middle of nowhere)... working on making 777s quieter.
One of the systems that was on-site for the test was a system that I run. And of course, while the system is 700 miles away... Oracle decides it doesn't want to work. Just to give you an idea of how remote Glasgow Montana is... they do not have high-speed internet. I literally walked someone keystroke-by-keystroke through rebuilding an Oracle database (for those of you in the know: missing archivelog files, so I couldn't just recover the instance... I had to walk the developer and SA through an oracle import (a tablespace was so corrupted, it couldn't even be dropped)).
Anyways... looks like the official "Flight Test Journal" is going to do a 2-part series of posts on the Quiet Technology Demonstrator 2 (QTD2... you don't wanna know what happened to QTD1, just kidding). Here is the first part. Good read... I hope the second post has some more technical details though.

This sounds corny... but its is stuff like this that makes it cool to work at Boeing.