This past Monday, Seth and I headed to California for the week to get some work done. We didn't have hotel reservations that we knew of, and had a mess of things to clean up in the datacenter, so we drove the rental car straight from the airport to the office at around 11am on Monday and got started.

Monday

We spent Monday in the office, getting some face time with the new office IT guy ("chicks" is his username which is the source of much hilarity) and meeting with some people that we have ongoing projects with. Lunch was at Dittmer's Gourmet Meats and dinner was 4x4s at In-N-Out. We ended up crashing at Jesse's house after sitting in his hottub drinking Micky's, and watching Apocalypse Briggs (part 1 here, additional parts in "related videos"). It's nice sharing rooms with Seth because he likes sleeping on the floor which means no complicated figuring out beds/couches/etc. A pillow and a blanket, and he's set!

Tuesday

Pretty early on Tuesday, we headed directly to the datacenter, stopping at Le Boulanger on the way for tasty breakfast sandwiches. After getting our hands added to the biometrics system, we began sorting spare parts, getting rid of trash and server packaging, and removing wires that weren't plugged in to anything. 2 people from Virident Systems showed up with a box for us to install that we're doing some experimenting with, and things are looking pretty good so far with that. They took us out to eat at a Malaysian place that was pretty good, and our afternoon in the datacenter was more cleaning up. We drove to Thee Parkside in the city for beer and $2 tacos with some of the Gallery crew, and headed over to Digg with Robert for a few more beers. Afterwards, Seth and I drove Bharat back home and slept at his brand new house in Menlo Park. Digg HQ:

Wednesday

We started off Wednesday morning dropping Bharat off at work at Google, and getting a quick tour of Google HQ for Seth. After that was another datacenter day, interrupted with a trip to the office for some Japanese food for lunch. The grand total of trash we cleaned up filled up a 48 gallon plastic bin, and we began fixing labels on machines, noting rack locations in our ZenOSS installation, and properly labeling all the outlets on our PDUs and what they are connected to. Aside from everything looking a _lot_ better, highlights of the day included finding a machine we didn't know about with 32G of RAM (now a OpenVZ box doing a lot of things). For the evening we headed up to Lila's place in the hills of Los Gatos where the SugarCRM IT crew enjoyed beers and pork ribs, and Seth and I slept in a spare room there after staying up long past the always amazing sunsets:

Thursday

After the crazy drive back down from Lila's, we headed to the datacenter for the morning. It took us about 4 hours to finish things up including rewiring all the cat5 in one rack and mostly wiring up a new rack of machines (still waiting on the switch and PDUs before that will be done). Back at the office, we had a very late lunch of more 4x4s at In-N-Out because they apparently couldn't make us 5x5s. I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on some of the ticket backlog assigned to me since we'd been busy all week doing other things, and around 6:30 we drove up to Igor's place and got to see "mini beast", Igor's newborn. Several other SugarCRM people met up with us to head to Whiskey Thieves for some whiskey sampling. At some point, Julian and I put a few dollars into the Area51 machine there and ended up with 5th and 6th place on the high score list, and he told us "The Japanese Fan Story" which you should get him to share if you haven't heard it yet. Afterwards, we stopped by The Owl Tree and ended up at Cocobang for some super spicy Korean BBQ chicken to finish off the week. A week's work:

Friday

Friday morning was back to the airport to fly home. It was another crazy exhausting week in California and while we got a lot done, I'm definitely glad to be home. Delta helped us out because both our flight our and our flight back took ~45 minutes less than expected. All meals not described above were either not eaten, or consisted of cherry coke and taquitos from 711. Now that I'm home, it's time to hunt down some people to pay their hosting bills (Eldon- While biking today I saw you on your bike so I know you are alive!) and mow the grass. Pictures from the week are at http://ckdake.com/gallery/2009/june-california/.

SugarCON was last week, so I was in San Francisco, California to interact with some of SugarCRM's customers and other employees. We did a good bit of socializing which is partly captured in this photo album of pictures from my little camera, but I took a lot of pictures with the big camera and some things are worth pointing out here. Tuesday evening was the SugarCON boat cruise around the bay, which had some awesome views including:

Wednesday after SugarCON ended, a few of us went to a shooting range for about an hour and took a few pictures inside. (I took this 365 picture on the way there.) San showed up on Thursday and did a bit of San Francisco exploring on her own, and after a boot-camp with some SugarCRM partners, the IT team and most of our significant others headed to Lake Tahoe for a few nights away from the city. The lake was a short walk through the woods from our cabin, and of the Lake Tahoe pictures I uploaded, these capture it pretty well:

We didn't do any winter sports other than throwing a few snowballs, but it was nice to have casual conversations with work people over beers or in the hot tub instead of on IRC. (Also, FYI, when you see "tonemapped" in a URL of a picture here, its a tonemapped HDR image resulting from a combination of 3 images that gives more details in highlights and shadows than a single image would, sometimes more accurately producing the look of a scene and sometimes just making it look awesome.) On Sunday, Jesse, Seth, San and I headed back towards the cost with the hope of reaching Point Reyes before sunset. On the way, we stopped a few times. First for a bathroom break and some pictures including:

Then, at a Point Reyes visitor center on the San Andreas Fault to walk along the "earthquake trail" and break open our 1.5lb bacon and cheese sandwich on the fault line:

Even though we made it to Point Reyes lighthouse before sundown, it was after 4:30pm so the visitor center and lighthouse were closed. Regardless, some great views:

We arrived back in San Francisco under the cover of darkness, and got in some exploring the next day before heading home including Twin Peaks, Fort Point NHS, and the Golden Gate Botanical Gardens:

More pictures from everything are in these albums:

• SugarCON Boat Trip
• Shooting in CA
• Lake Tahoe on Saturday
• Point Reyes
• Exploring San Francisco
• SugarCON etc

All in all, it was a pretty good trip but after 10 days away from home, I was glad to be back!

So I'm in San Francisco at WWDC this week. After spending Friday and Saturday in Menlo Park hanging out with Bharat ("The Gallery Guy") where there was eating and doing Gallery things.  I took pictures of his son's freakin huge tonsils shortly before they got taken out. Then it was off to SF saturday night and I checked into the Adelaide Hostel.  Sunday morning was WWDC student stuff and that night was meeting with all kinds of company reps.  I have some business cards and asking of emailing resumes to some people from NVidia, Apple, Microsoft, and that sort of thing. Apple has been providing food the whole time so except for the 6$ of pizza when I got to SF it's all been included.

Monday was the big keynote with Steve Jobs and I'm sure a lot of you have heard a lot about it.  OSX runs on Intel architectures now and Apple is making the big switch. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out 2 years from now.  I still need a new laptop and if Apple doesn't do something cool soon like dual core G4s then I might have to go with a IBM Thinkpad T43 with linux and save my next mac purchace for a desktop.  As a registered Apple developer I get a once in a lifetime pretty hefty discount on a system and it shouldn't be used until I get something sweet..

After that it's been classes on things and eating and talks from people like Tim O'Reilly of  O'Reilly Media. He's all talking web 2.0 which is stuff like map, traffic, weather, etc data supplied through web services through companies like Amazon and Google.  All the stuff I did for senior design is XMLRPC crazyness and it all fits in, and turns out the guy that wrote iPhoto2Gallery is also here and I've been emailing him about using the XMLRPC in his program instead of the crazy old Gallery Remote protocol. Also kinda cool is getting to play with OSX running on Intel P4 boxes.  They could handle such sweet apps as Quartz Composer which my PowerBook can't handle. QC is about the coolest thing ever but from what I can tell theres not much public info about it.  Heres the basics of what I could find. You should use a mac with the 10.4 dev tools on it and play around. Its spiffy. Oh yeah. I read a book today:  "Terminal Man" by Michael Chichton and I bought a new cd: "Atticus: Dragging the Lake 3". Both were pretty cool.

More classes to come this week and Friday afternoon I head off to Los Angeles to hang out with Ashley for the first time in a long time and hang out with david for the first time in a week or so. Then Sunday its back to atlanta where I'm gonna be workin and biking and getting my hangin out on.  If you exist you should join me.