The Last 48 Hours

I’m sitting in my temp housing, watching the sun hover over the water, and amazed that it’s 8:45pm and it’s still, um, rather bright out there. I’m without an active ‘net connection (and I think I hosed something else while trying to get the notebook on the LAN at work today), I’m out of Rainier cherries, and I desperately miss my cars and Teva’s [insert any sort of thing here]. However, as a change of pace, I’d rather focus on what’s been good that has been going on.

If you talked to me tonight, I know I sounded pretty bummed. I’m a little tired, seeing as I was in work by 7:30 this morning, and left after 5. Also, the truth is that when something isn’t working on my notebook – or if I can’t get on the ‘net reliably – I get cranky. Right now, both things are true: I think the notebook is hosed and I have no way to get online!

And even though I sound bummed tonight, I’m far from it. It was a cobalt sky today: no clouds for just about all of it, I was in shorts, and there’s more of the same over the next two or three days. I saw one set of mountains out my window when I woke up and was greeted by Rainier on the highway, on the way to work, this morning. I spent the day working with my team, which is a great group of people. I rediscovered that giddy feeling that you get, when you uncover something that is misbehaving, in a new product; that feeling was only heightened when it was reproduced by someone else and I remembered that I don’t have to fix it!

At work, the resources are… mind boggling abundant. Once of the reasons why this wasn’t a “Last 24 Hours” post is because I couldn’t find or activate 75% of my brain last night. I mean… Oi. I don’t think that I can describe it accurately enough. In your mind, think about how large you think the Internet is. Now shrink that down so that you only include sites that you actively use and/or find useful. Got it? Now take that size of the ‘net and fill it all of those useful resources. That’s about as good as an analogy as I can make… it’s a huge set of resources and every bit of it good.

There’s also a nice bit of traffic here, but it’s for shorter distances and less regular than what I had in CT, so it’s more than a fair trade off. It also seem to only amass during traffic hours and not on the weekends, and that too is better than the northeast. Of course, a good deal of my travel time has been spent getting lost within my own company’s campus. You gotta remember that I’m in one of the first buildings, so it’s a small secluded section of the main campus. It’s not one of the first four but pretty close to it. The hallways were all designed to be alike; so were all of the roads and driveways. Tonight, I got out easily – first time! – and bopped over to the company store and then moved over to 520 to head back to Seattle. Which is where I found some traffic waiting for me.

And on Seattle, the more time I spend down here the more comfortable it feels. I probably won’t stay down here, though, long term. It’s too expensive, honestly, and the Market closes too early to make it a big draw. I think the mini-malls of Redmond are a better fit than the blocks of Seattle, but I’m enjoying the experience just the same. Besides, I’ve never spent more than a few [drunken] nights in most of the major cities I’ve been in, so this is a first on many levels.

So, depending on the time of day that you talk to me, you might get a blast about why the LAN is pissing me off or that I’m amazed at how much money I’m going thru just on coffee (without Dunkin’ Donuts handy, my coffee expenses have tripled, but my Diet Coke costs have dropped to $1/day, so it might even out) but take that as a comment of the moment. I’m working for The Company that any Windows programmer should want to work for. The company makes for an all around great place to be and the people just “get it”… having worked in situations where your paychecks bounce and your manager wants a new web site to be “webby but not too webby”, I believe that I’ve hit the happy zone.

Oh yeah: the company museum has been upgraded/changed a bit since the last time I was there – always a neat place to visit for other Geeks out there.


2 thoughts on “The Last 48 Hours”

  1. AWESOME mate! The sun really is hard to get used to. I was in Toronto and moved up here to Winnipeg, and the difference in sun seems so huge. It’s bright from 5:30 to 11:00pm. Crazy.

    Keep up the updates, I’m really enjoying hearing about it, since I was one of those ‘hopefuls’ right along with you ;-)

  2. Updates? Here’s a small one: the T41 is active at home AND at work. Last thing to try is the accessing work at home bit, but I think I’ll wait until *I* own the access point before I attempt that… w00t!


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