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fornicalia report
Feb. 27th, 2004 12:18 amOkay, so I've been out in California for 4 days. Most of you don't know that? Yeah, I've been summoned to the corporate overlords in Alameda CA, and it has largely failed to suck.
Flew in Sunday evening 10:30pm (1:30am EST), got to bed around 12:30, had to meet the bus at 6:15am to go down to San Jose for the Company Rally. I carefully set the alarm on my PDA, but fuckt up resetting the time zone, so I overslept. Fortunately, the bus didn't actually leave until 6:30, getting to SJ at 7:20 for a 9:00 event. Go figure. But a couple people I'd been looking to meet (out of the 750 who were there) just happened to sit down at the same table where I was having coffee.
Morning was executive rah-rah, about our earnings announcement (first profitable quarter in almost 2 years), new product announcement, new partnership announcement, new pricing plan, etc. Afternoon was a "team-building" treasure hunt with web-enabled cellphones (e.g. find this place, find this thing at this place, and enter something about this thing to win points). It was actually more fun than I would have expected.
Tuesday & Wednesday were a Coding Camp, where they brought a dozen developers, roughly one from each of the technology lines in the new release, together to play with each others' bits. There are a lot of rough edges yet, and a lot of contusions were had, but we all learned something, if only how real developers use our products.
After that was over, I ran into a cow-orker who had done a cross-country bike trip a couple years ago, and we spent about 2½ hours comparing notes and catching up on company gossip. By the time I got out of the office, it was 10pm, and most of the restaurant were closed. I ended up, more by accident than design, in Oakland's Chinatown, at the Legendary Palace, a surprisingly good restaurant, very off the mainstream. I mean, they had ducks' tongues. Ducks' tongues.
Tonight was another company event at a pool hall, with pizza and wings and beer and more beer. I was inexplicably the last person out, so I took the leftovers back to work, and headed over to the Pacific Coast Brewing Co in Oakland, for another beer. There I ran into Z! and half of the White Rats Morris team, who were having dinner after practice. This kind of weirded me out, because Z! still has a house in Maryland, and I think of him as an east coast person, but he apparantly spends 99% of his time in the South Bay. The other synchronicity is that White Rat have been invited to a May Day morris festival in southern England, and I'm going to be biking through southern England around May Day.
Lest I forget, the Pacific Coast Brewing Co has, in addition to their own beers, Fat Tire. Ah, Fat Tire, the darling (at any rate, my darling) of the bike trip last summer... Stayed there until last call (the incredibly advance hour of 11:30pm).
Saturday, I regret that I'm going to miss the Hot Foods party, but I'm going to do 3 hours of aikido with the Golden Gate Kokikai, in preparation for my brown belt test, and then I'm going to visit my dear aunt and uncle near Santa Cruz. I take the red eye home Saturday night/Sunday morning, and I'm home in time to ride.
I have a notebook that I tend to only use when I'm travelling. On the very first page, dated almost exactly two years ago, is the notation "IHTFP". Just to remind me that business travel isn't a reward. But at that time, I was out here one week a month. But that was a while ago, and I've actually had a really good trip so far. I got to meet the manager I was working for for a year, after I'm no longer working for him. I got to meet a lot of people from a lot of the other offices, who are working on really cool stuff. For once, it seems like the company might not be in "controlled flight into terrain". It's okay.
Flew in Sunday evening 10:30pm (1:30am EST), got to bed around 12:30, had to meet the bus at 6:15am to go down to San Jose for the Company Rally. I carefully set the alarm on my PDA, but fuckt up resetting the time zone, so I overslept. Fortunately, the bus didn't actually leave until 6:30, getting to SJ at 7:20 for a 9:00 event. Go figure. But a couple people I'd been looking to meet (out of the 750 who were there) just happened to sit down at the same table where I was having coffee.
Morning was executive rah-rah, about our earnings announcement (first profitable quarter in almost 2 years), new product announcement, new partnership announcement, new pricing plan, etc. Afternoon was a "team-building" treasure hunt with web-enabled cellphones (e.g. find this place, find this thing at this place, and enter something about this thing to win points). It was actually more fun than I would have expected.
Tuesday & Wednesday were a Coding Camp, where they brought a dozen developers, roughly one from each of the technology lines in the new release, together to play with each others' bits. There are a lot of rough edges yet, and a lot of contusions were had, but we all learned something, if only how real developers use our products.
After that was over, I ran into a cow-orker who had done a cross-country bike trip a couple years ago, and we spent about 2½ hours comparing notes and catching up on company gossip. By the time I got out of the office, it was 10pm, and most of the restaurant were closed. I ended up, more by accident than design, in Oakland's Chinatown, at the Legendary Palace, a surprisingly good restaurant, very off the mainstream. I mean, they had ducks' tongues. Ducks' tongues.
Tonight was another company event at a pool hall, with pizza and wings and beer and more beer. I was inexplicably the last person out, so I took the leftovers back to work, and headed over to the Pacific Coast Brewing Co in Oakland, for another beer. There I ran into Z! and half of the White Rats Morris team, who were having dinner after practice. This kind of weirded me out, because Z! still has a house in Maryland, and I think of him as an east coast person, but he apparantly spends 99% of his time in the South Bay. The other synchronicity is that White Rat have been invited to a May Day morris festival in southern England, and I'm going to be biking through southern England around May Day.
Lest I forget, the Pacific Coast Brewing Co has, in addition to their own beers, Fat Tire. Ah, Fat Tire, the darling (at any rate, my darling) of the bike trip last summer... Stayed there until last call (the incredibly advance hour of 11:30pm).
Saturday, I regret that I'm going to miss the Hot Foods party, but I'm going to do 3 hours of aikido with the Golden Gate Kokikai, in preparation for my brown belt test, and then I'm going to visit my dear aunt and uncle near Santa Cruz. I take the red eye home Saturday night/Sunday morning, and I'm home in time to ride.
I have a notebook that I tend to only use when I'm travelling. On the very first page, dated almost exactly two years ago, is the notation "IHTFP". Just to remind me that business travel isn't a reward. But at that time, I was out here one week a month. But that was a while ago, and I've actually had a really good trip so far. I got to meet the manager I was working for for a year, after I'm no longer working for him. I got to meet a lot of people from a lot of the other offices, who are working on really cool stuff. For once, it seems like the company might not be in "controlled flight into terrain". It's okay.
