Let the training begin!

Thursday morning we started our training with Jouve. Jouve is a 100-year-old publishing company that has a large group responsible for data conversion and data mining, led by Emmanuel Benoit and a group responsible for XML publishing, led by Vincente Favreau. Training attendees included Denis and Alexandre from Emmanuel’s group and Laurent and Anthony from Vincente’s group. While they were busy learning our new workflow from us, we were learning a lot from them. They immediately saw the value of the fielded information in our Project Properties Form document. They’re already talking about reading the data to at least partially automate stylesheet creation. We think there’s a great deal of potential in working with Jouve.

Other than meals, we didn’t spend any time away from our computers. We were either training or developing training materials. But after we finished the last of the training, Dave went back to the hotel to relax and I went off to buy salt grinders. We met up later for dinner and I took him to a great place called Le Vieux Paris on Ile de la Cité, just a couple of blocks from Notre Dame. Richard and I ate there when we were here on vacation and had an incredible meal and I wanted to share the place with Dave.

We had a memorable meal, but for somewhat different reasons. Seems all of their wait staff was on vacation, so they had relatively inexperienced people waiting on us. I asked about the preset menu Richard and I had, and they had to go look it up. When we said we wanted wine, they sent us down to the wine cellar to pick something out. And then they got Dave’s order wrong (they made two of my boeuf dinner instead of the poulet Dave ordered) so he had to keep waiting while I started eating. A couple of minutes later, the server came out with the second boeuf (again) and said I may as well have that one too. At long last Dave’s dinner arrived. Both meals were enjoyable in spite of everything. We both opted for Crème Brulee for dessert, and not surprisingly, the sugar on top of both was a little past caramelized, but not tragically so. We strolled around Ile de la Cité and Ile Saint Louis for a bit…I pointed out where Richard and I stayed when we were here. We then ambled over to the left bank, then worked our way back to the hotel. The evening air and sunset were beautiful...a great ending to our stay in Paris.