Over the next week I’ll be posting about the tour. If this bores the pants off of you just watch for the BT flag and skip.

Tuesday 10/12: First thing Tuesday morning (ok – first thing after I woke up) i made my way via cab to the O’Reilly office in Cambridge. I’d been warned the place was to hard to find: they were right. I didn’t trust the cab driver as he zig-zagged me through tiny suburban streets, the meter running higher as my confidence declined. There’s always a moment in cab rides when I think “Wait. I have no idea where I am and he could be taking me anywhere”. After a few false positives (him “is this it?” me “How would I know?”) we arrived at a simple but mostly unmarked two story office complex. I wandered inside (asking the reluctant cabbie to wait) and soon found a wall of O’Reilly books: I’d arrived at the world of tomes with animal covers.

I soon met Marlowe Shaefer, the fantastic production editor for The art of project management. Production editors are the PMs for the making of books and Marlowe simply kicked ass. There’s something wonderfully bizzare about meeting someone for the first time, despite working with them intensely over the phone for months. After a nice, but quick, lunch with Mike (the main editor for artofpm) and Mary, two O’reilly editors, I grabbed the box of promotional books they’d provided for me and headed to Northeastern University for Talk #1 of 9. I gave the cab driver the address, which he shrugged at, despite pulling away from the curb, and I hoped for the best.