As I mentioned several posts back, I had an extremely busy month of September. As I stated at the end of that post, I wanted to share a few pictures from some of my journeys. This first group of pictures was from September Seminar 2007. This second group if from a training trip I took in San Fransisco.

I had the opportunity to take a MIS Training Institute class on Process Flow Auditing. I know that topic doesn’t sound exciting but the class was actually very good. Most of the training I’ve taken in the past has focused on IT and IT security so this last class was a change of pace.

The instructor for the course brought a new perspective on auditing and offered a lot of personal stories from his own auditing experiences. I felt that the class was quite beneficial in that it taught the importance of looking at an entire process not just one portion of a process. One particularly good idea was to have all of the different leaders of the different sections of the process being audited together to get a complete perspective at one time. Not only does this save the auditor time from meeting with multiple people to document their individual portion of a process, but it allows different departments to get an overview on the entire process and hopefully find new and better ways to do things that they would not have known unless they saw the entire process from start to finish.

Before I bore you tears, if I haven’t already, I’ll move on because I could write a lengthy post on what I learned in this class. However, the intent of this post is to share some of the photos I took while on the trip. Since this was my first time to spend any time in California, I tried to take advantage of every moment when I wasn’t in class. Surprisingly enough, in the short 3 and half days I was there I was able to see a lot of different places around the city. Some of the highlights included the Golden Gate Bridge, Muir Woods (just outside of the city), Fisherman’s Wharf, China town, and the legendary San Francisco Apple store.

San Francisco is a unique city. One interesting thing to note is that there are hardly any chain stored or restaurants. You might spot a couple of familiar chains, but not many at all. The city is supposed to have exquisite food, but I had trouble finding a lot of good places to eat near my hotel. I know its just because I didn’t know where to look. The restaurants don’t really stand out. I’m not a real big seafood eater either so that made things a little more difficult

The city was pretty cool as far as cities go (I much prefer being in the great outdoors though). San Francisco was a lot bigger than I expected. Very busy and the streets were hard to navigate. In case your wondering, the city really does look like what you would see in a Full House episode. The cable cars and hilly streets were neat to see in person. Some the the streets are very steep.

Enjoy the slideshow below.

If you have any questions about traveling in San Fransisco, let me know. I was only there for 3.5 days and was in class a good portion of that time so I’ll only know the highlights but I don’t mind sharing what little I learned.