June California Trip

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: 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/.

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