California Fun

Gotta say, while I'm glad to be on my way back home; my time in the San Francisco/San Jose was a challenging and great experience both professionally and personally.

When your life gets uprooted and suddenly you end up moving when you were working toward stability it's odd what little facets of your life you not forget but don't manage to indulge in while you try to acclimate to the new situation. For me it's the sense of being on the road, going to new places, meeting new people, and unexpected experiences.  And this first trip highlighted all of that for me.

Only going to touch on my job briefly as there's a NDA and this blog sure isn't worth my job.  What I will say is that it involves a fun mixture of physical, mental, and social challenges that I think are going to push my limits in how I perceive and interact with the world around me.  That's pretty exciting.

On the otherside, I do a lot of gaming and despite never being to SF/SJ before, I immediately fell into a crowd of like people that were nothing short of a blast to hang out with.  While the MES side of things didn't quite pan out, my time with the Enlightened of San Jose from Ingress made the off time from work a great and killed any chance of turning into a hermit suffering from cabin fever.

For those that don't know, Ingress is an augmented reality game in which unique real world features are made into portals.  A portal can be anything from a distinctive art sculpture   in a park to a bus transit station to a park entrance park sign. There are two factions with different ideologies about the energy that has you fight over that portals are used to created and control.  While you can play solo, the game really excels when you start interacting with fellow players and going to planned events from just going out and getting food during the week to large all day events hosted by the Niantic Team from Google.

The San Jose crew helped make this trip a blast on their own (though plenty of others were awesome as well).  Certainly I could go into the details of the gaming we did but what really matters is the quality of the people I got to meet.  Winona, April, James, Brandon, Cece; just to name a few.  Amazingly friendly, open, helpful people that quickly made be feel at home and like one of the team and not just a visitor being shown around town and my evening full of fun and laughter.

When not hanging out with the Ingress crew, the rest of my evenings out where spent with my new coworkers at a sports bar near the Google campus.  It's pretty much what you'd expect when a new group of people come together; stories, shenanigans, laughter, and a little drama all while drinking beer, playing pool, darts, and on the last night even some karaoke (there is even video).

The coolest work related activity was the performance driving training that caused my stay to be extended.  It was at the Sonoma Raceway and let me say; cars are far more agile than we give them credit for.  The trick is understanding and manipulating the balance of the forces acting on a car at any given moment.  There was usual; control a car in a spin, ABS lane changes, last second lane changes, even slalom; but the craziest for me was the high speed lane change.

Basically what happens is at 50 and rising in 5mph increments you drive straight at a set of cones, and then just as it looks like your about to hit them you get told a direction.  This direction indicates with lane you have to lane change into, hit the brakes as hard as you can; and if that wasn't crazy enough, you have to let off the brake, and do a hard lane change back to center and then come to a complete stop.  It's kind of freaky how close those cones appear to be and you are still able to avoid the accident.

The biggest key is, not being distracted while driving.  Seriously, even something as simple and taking to someone in the car with you, makes a significant different.  They had us do a small little course, one distracted and one non-distracted.  It took me 46 seconds without distraction; 53 with; and it was my second run that got the talking going on so it's not like I didn't know what I needed to do.  Seriously 7 seconds difference just because a guy in the car talked to me.

That's my trip to sunny California and it's whacky adventures.  Long post but I hope interesting read.