Last day of work

Candle and Wax centerpeices at the bar
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Thursday dawns bright with the last full day of work at LAbs University.  Last night we had a fun dinner at a resaraunt within the Castle de Sao Jorge (Castle of St. George) - cool castle with the best views of Lisbon yet.  However, the restaraunt service was ATROCIOUS - but given that this high end establishment was overrun by a bunch of tired, underdressed HP'er's and journalists on a Wednesday night, they may have been a little overwhelmed. Or perhaps the servers were just being rude - given the level of mistake that may be more likely.  Things like forgetting to bring out one entree for 5 minutes after everyone else was served, providing bread randomly around the table, and offering dessert to only 1/2 the table (the rest of us never did see the dessert cart!), make you wonder if we were being 'dissed' on purpose!  NO matter, the company was excellent, the conversation lively, and the setting was beautiful!

Test printer test team in front of the Castle
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So today (Thursday) the goal was to finally break a printer during our presentations....we've been dropping the same two printers all week (to demonstrate some high speed video equipment, and to show the robustness of HP design), and haven't had anything damaged yet.  Since we haven't needed our backup units, during the last session we allowed the journalists to drop the printers from higher and higher until we finally had things breaking!  They loved it, and we got some good video of the trays breaking after a drop of over 24 inches onto a tabletop.  The best part was, I was able to jury-rig the input tray and actually print a picture (with serious banding, but printing none-the-less!) which impressed the journalists immensely!

the company was excellent, the conversation lively, and the setting was beautiful!

Castle of St. George overlooking Lisbon
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After the last session it's PARTY TIME!  First we are taken to a beautiful park on a hilltop in Lisbon (I never did find out exactly where!) and we got to be a Samba rythym section....we were all given cow-bells, maracas, drums, etc and taught specific rhythms to play and how to take simple direction, then all 150 of us (a lot of folks skipped-probably too burned out after the week!) went to a ampitheatre and played.  It was a fun outing, but was too long - so by the time the buses took us to dinner, we were READY.

Back to the DOCUS area near Belem, to another terrific restaraunt with years of candlewax creating cool centerpieces to the bars, and a scrumptious buffet dinner, followed by a live band until past midnight.  Not a bad party to end the event!

After packing up my equipment for shipment back to the states, I'll have most of Friday to explore - I think I'll hit Sintra - more later!