We had a guest speaker in class tonight, Tom Costello from UpStreme. I got hung up at work and missed the very beginning, but he gave a pretty killer presentation on project management. He did a great job putting a tremendous array of experiences into a relatively short presentation, and it really livened up what is at times a rather dull topic (much less dull than I expected coming into the class though).

After his presentation, a few of us stuck around to ask questions and what not. Topics were wide ranging, from identifying at-risk portions of a project to the speaker's hatred for Microsoft. A good bit of the talk was about working with geographically dispersed teams. Its' a subject that is of particular interest to me, and the reason I stuck around. As it tends to, the conversation kind of dragged off into the weeds.

There was a lot to take away from the presentation, but one thing really stuck with me. We ended up talking about Second Life of all things, and the idea of using a virtual environment like that to facilitate collaboration between teams. This is something I think about a lot, primarily because of the potential to eliminate my (and I guess others' too) commute. Tom said that just once, he'd like to work on a project using something like this. Someone else said "that could make you a millionaire" and his reply was the best thing I've heard in a long time.

I don't want to be a millionaire, I just want to see it work

This really sums everything up for me. I'll whore myself out to keep up on the bills, but deep down money never seems to be a motivator for me. I find a lot of pleasure in seeing progress on a project, in seeing ideas come to life. I especially like seeing my own ideas come to life, but between work and school there seems to be precious little time for it. Been getting a little work done on them though, and making plenty of progress at work lately, so its' all good. I never really think about my motivations for doing things all that much, I just knew deep down that I like what I do. Why bother thinking about it too much past that?

Despite not really thinking about it for so long, to see my real motivation put so eloquently was a beautiful thing.