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Living in the Bay Area

2008-08-06T02:50:00Z

Commuting

One of the biggest changes in moving here has been my daily commute. In Dayton it very difficult to get around without a car. Technically you can get around via bus, but the area of service is rather limited.

Here, I almost never drive. I take the train to work and frequently take the bus to get other places. About the only place I drive it to our data center in San Jose, and mostly due to how late it is when I tend to leave there. Though after midnight taking public transportation does get a little more difficult.

The trains here are rather nice. There is a Caltrain station a 15 minute walk from our apartment, and the office is 5 minutes from one in San Francisco. I spend anywhere from 20-40 minutes on the train depending on which train I get on. No wifi, but my evdo card works well for most of the trip. I tend to read more than hack though, just not really enough time to get into anything. Also, unless you get on one of the newer trains the seats are rather cramped.

Work

Wikia is a great place to work. I’ve been having lots of fun while working on some really great projects. Next week I’m off to Iowa to start the build out of our backup data center. Not looking forward to switching between the cool dry air of the data center and the 100+ temperatures outside, but starting from scratch and doing it right is going to be a lot of fun.

I’m hoping to start making available a bit of what I’ve been doing. We open sourced our production code recently, we want to get most of the operations stuff up there in the near future. We’re also thinking about opening up our ganglia data, which should keep the obsessive stats types busy. Last I looked we were sampling around 1200 data points a minute.

I’ve got a few ideas for some mini posts coming up, so it shouldn’t be too long before you hear from me again.

Twittering

2008-07-21T00:12:00Z

I haven’t had much time to blog recently, but I have been trying to keep a somewhat active twitter account going.

You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/macros

I'm still alive

2008-05-31T18:09:00Z

Seems like a rather large percentage of my blog posts are of the I’m still here type posts. I really did mean to keep up with it this time. I wanted to keep a nice travel log, but that sort of fell apart once we hit the road. AT&T’s mobile network really really sucks once you get out of a metro area. I wasn’t expecting 3G service, but I was at least expecting something.

As for the trip itself, it wasn’t horrible . We stayed in some pretty crappy places along the way. We spent a day stuck in Laramie Wyoming when our car broke down. Most of the drive across the country is really quite boring. Around Utah it starts to get a little more interesting. It isn’t a drive I look forward to ever making again.

We’ve started to settle in pretty well and find something of a routine. I’ve been trying to get out and get involved a bit in the local community. So far I’ve been to a BayLISA meeting and RecentChanges Camp. I’m going to try to get to a LUG meeting and a few other things this month too. I haven’t yet decided which communities I want to attend regularly yet.

I’m enjoying it a lot out here. I love being able to walk pretty much everywhere. Our office is in SOMA not far from the stadium where the Giants play. Lots of stuff nearby, including the Moscone center. So if you’re ever in town for a conference, drop me a message.

Our route

2008-04-12T15:29:00Z

For those of you interested here is the route we will be taking:

From Dayton to San Mateo

T minus something

2008-04-12T15:16:00Z

We’re finishing up the packing and the last minute errands, we should be ready to leave here soon. The lsat big thing we have is the move out inspection with the apartment people. It has been an incredibly long week and I’ll be much happier when Dayton is a spec in our rear-view mirror.

I’m going to try to post from the road but I have no idea what AT&T’s data network is like along our path so I don’t know if I’ll be able to every day.

Taking a day

2008-04-11T22:55:00Z

We’re not leaving this evening as originally planned. We decided to leave in the morning instead, we’re just too tired to do any driving safely.

We’re still planning on being in San Francisco Tuesday, can’t wait to be done with moving.

In Purgatory

2008-04-11T04:23:00Z

Due to the planned downtime of panacea over the next few days as Sara and I move to California I have moved this blog over to our temporary host. The change went ok given my no sleep triple espresso fueled state.

I’m hoping we have panacea back up early next week, life just won’t be the same without.

A new beginning

2008-01-02T08:54:00Z

Starting over with the blog yet again. Much ugliness and little content to be had so far. I’ve got my old posts stored away in a database and I’ll pull them back out sometime soon.

I’m going to be very busy over the next few days, I just got tired of this thing being so utterly broken.

Oh, I’m giving mephisto a chance this time. Seems like a nice little engine so far. Only mild amounts of trauma getting ruby/gems/rails to be happy.