Its bound to happen one of these times...

I'm out in Cali for another vacation. I think this is my 4th time to the west coast this year. I've got a pretty busy weekend ahead of me.

I'm meeting up with Carolina and Sonja Selena Duarte for Sonja's farewell party in Palo Alto. She has joined the cast of Blast! and will be leaving for Japan next week. Great news for her.

I'll be meeting up with Ma, Cory and a whole crew of engineers several times this weekend. That should be interesting.

The trip started off not so well. I ended up missing my first flight ever. I was supposed to go to SJC at 6:10. I got the next best flight to San Francisco at like 7:30 which put me here a bit later. Also made me miss a meeting with Carolina tonight. I was going to try to meet up with her for dinner or something if I got in at a reasonable time. So much for that.

So I'm in this Marriott Suite and its pretty large. I may have overpaid for the hotel. oops. I'm picking up Kathy tomorrow at the airport and we'll be staying at another Marriott in SF in or near the South Park area of SF. That will probably rule.

We have a full weekend of things to check out (http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=104998986066977447486.00000112bf473213e3573) so it should be quite excellent.

I gotta go find a local pub.

San Francisco and my new goals

I got a chance to go to San Francisco a few weeks ago. I'll tell ya, it is now my favorite place in the entire continental U.S. (thanks Jason for the accurate portrayal of my feelings). The place was outstanding. There were two things in particular that were just perfect.

1. Jobs - In terms of technology, this is where its at. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, VMWare, Twitter, etc. are really driving so much of what is important to me. Hint Hint: This is why I went out there.
2. Biking - Someone described this as the most biker friendly area in the country. I'd buy that. There were bike lanes on so many of the roads that I went on. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a massively inefficient way of getting from point A to B in that area.

Of course, I had to meet up with my cronies. I got to grab a beer or 2 with Cory the night before my "meeting" which was awesome. He is living the life. So much great stuff going on for him. He will be world famous some day I'm sure.

Met up with Jon Ma as well. He is a clown. We got completely annihilated twice there in what I would call some of the most successful nights of drinking I've ever had. So many absolutely hilarious memories I can't even believe it. Also pictured are Jinen, Slin and Dileep. Son.

I also got so see the lovely Carolina and Sonya Selina Duarte from my Glassmen days. Oh the memories :(. Sonya knows about the horrible pictures that came out of that night. I totally made Carolina cry, but in a good way, it was awesome.

On the way out there, I ran into a friend from LM ELDP. That was outstanding. We talked the entire flight out there. He is up to some REALLY big things. Best of luck to him. While talking to him, we ran into a girl who was interviewing at Facebook. Pretty cool stuff. She was very nice. Turns out she got the job, so she will be leaving the DC area very soon for the greener pastures of Palo Alto. Speaking of that, Facebook has a pretty fun job application process.

So basically it was like the best weekend in a very long time. I fell in love with the area and I would love to get out there more.

Onward, I've been biking quite a bit lately. I think I'm getting out about 3 times a week which is pretty decent for me. I went out on a group ride a week or 2 ago and we were out for about 6 hours. Sadly, due to like 4 flats and horrible road conditions, we only covered about 55 miles. That sucked. I was so hungry.

I'm going scuba diving next weekend. Stoked.

I've got nothing else.

How to know if your job is making you unhappy

Just a quick blurb, I saw this article and it mentioned how to "Know when it's not about your job". I thought the list they gave, which briefly states the definition of a good job, was quite interesting. Here are my initial thoughts on each point:

1. Your job stretches you without defeating you.
   
   • What if your job doesn't stretch you at all? All of the decisions being made are driven to such an esoteric end so deeply that even the customer for which these decisions are made doesn't even care.
     
2. Provides clear goals
   
   • What if when you ask for detailed requirement or undetailed requirements or informal requirements or an e-mail asking what the customer wants and you are ignored time and time again? What if every time you finish what you think is expected they take things in a whole different direction which requires a rewrite? Maybe this is agile development.
     
3. Provides unambiguous feedback
   
   • Maybe not unambiguous, but what about entirely contradictory feedback. One day you are being praised for your work because it far exceeds what the customer wanted (probably because I didn't know what the customer wanted) and you are asked to present progress to the customer, the next day the entire effort is stopped with zero explanation. That's bunk.
     
4. Provides a sense of control.
   
   • Pretty much entirely laughable at this point, being tossed around from project to project with no hope at all of attaining any career goals leaves one with little sense of control.
     

So all in all things are going well. HA HA

Best Saturday ever

Yesterday the Capitol Hill Bikes shop in DC had a demo day. I got to try a few decent bikes. I tried the Cannondale CAAD9 Optimo 3, the Cannondale Synapse 1, and the Bianchi Via Nirone 7. It was pretty decent to try the bikes, but the responses they were looking for when we discussed the bikes were basically not what I know about bikes. I thought that was weird. Basically I don't know what I'm doing on a bike to know how it flows and grips the road and what a hard ride is. So I think I'm going to start riding as much as I can. I'll see if I can ride even if I don't have 4 hours to set aside. Each of the next 10 days looks like they will be warmer than the last so I'm cool with that. I think I can get quite a few rides in there.

On that note, I got my GPS back.

A few weeks back I signed up for meetup.com. Its a site where you basically just meet up with people wo do things that you like to do. I've joined 2 groups. One for biking in Gaithersburg, they do rides all over Gaithersburg, Monroe County and DC. I also joined another group for playing ultimate Frisbee. I found that they were playing yesterday so I met up with them (go figure). It was awesome. We played on the mall while people were walking around (and through the field). People would stop by and watch us play and take pictures. For one of the first times since I moved down here I felt like I was local. It was pretty cool. I'm definitely going to play with these guys again.

Later that night Joel had a cookout/housewarming/Tina'sBirthdayParty. It was awesome. It had been awhile since I had seen many of those cats. I ended up making plans with people to play Ultimate, and do like 2o happy hours. So that'll be awesome. We carried on a running joke about my 3rd nipple and my pig liver. I was also able to vandalize the cupcakes that someone brought in by rearranging them to spell "Joel Sucks". I laughed.

So it was a good day.