![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
California dreamin'
Apr. 9th, 2003 12:09 amSo, managed to get out of Boston before the (not much after all) snow hit, and into Chicago without trouble, since the snow had already passed there, and on to San Francisco with no trouble. Yay. Waited an age for my luggage, then it took another age to get to my rental car. Once I had that all squared away, I was on the road.
Traffic through the city was nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be, but it still took me a good 2 hours to get to Santa Rosa. I realized pretty quickly as I was driving up here that I'd forgotten how completely beautiful and gorgeous the bay area truly is - the combination of hills (mountains?) and the ocean just can't be compared to anything we've got on the East Coast. Sadly, with traffic and trying to drive when I didn't know quite where I was going, I didn't get to look around nearly enough.
Got here without incidence, wandered around Santa Rosa's "Railroad Square" area, found yummy Italian food for dinner, and vegged out for the rest of the night. Headed for the paper bright and early this morning, met the folks I'm training, and went through the training session. The morning session went very well, the afternoon session was tougher, as we were trying to find a way to make their system do things that our SQL version does very well and easily, but our Xbase version doesn't do so well at all. I think we've figure out a way to make it work, we'll know for sure tomorrow afternoon when we start creating users.
Broke the two sessions up with going to lunch at a yummy Mexican place (despite a weird overflowing toilet in the ladies' room), which always makes me happy (Mexican food, not overflowing toilets). We ended up finishing for the day at about 4:30, and I decided to go wander around the downtown area, since they'd said there were a few bookstores nearby, and I had some shopping to do. Found Leaving Cold Sassy and Tender at the Bone (which Elaine had recommended to me) at a used bookstore, for about half the price of new, got myself some iced cafe mocha, bought a little baggie of bath salts for soaking in, and a magnet that made me almost pee myself laughing (words can't do it justice - y'all will need to wait until I get home and can take a picture of it).
I found I really liked downtown Santa Rosa - lots of interesting looking shops, a good range of restaurants, from just above hole-in-the-wall to high-end fancy looking, sidewalks with nice benches, enough traffic that it felt lived in, but not too much, generally just all around nice. (I've definitely decided that a walkable pleasant downtown area is high on my list of things that I like about certain cites, and proximity to mountains is another. Now to find someplace that has both those that I can a. afford a house that I'd like close enough to downtown to enjoy it and b. find both Wiley and I jobs, preferably ones we'd like as much as the ones we've got now. Yeah, I know, fat chance.)
Met the folks from the paper for dinner - the IT guy I'm working with and his wife, one of their higher-up photo guys and the guy I'm training from their sister paper, and we ll had a lovely dinner at the same place I ate at last night (I really didn't mind, the food was just that good). Came back to the hotel, had myself a good talk with Wiley and a long soak in the tub with my new book. I really should get to bed though, because we're convening earlier than we did today to help ensure that we have enough time to do all the upgrades and whatnot that we have to do.
I've booked myself into a hotel right smack in downtown for tomorrow night, and I very much hope the plan doesn't backfire. I'm walking distance from the sushi restaurant that Kieron recommended, and from a couple other places I'd like to check out while I'm here. In an ideal world, everything will install/upgrade tomorrow without issue, and we'll be able to do the client side training in the morning. Then we'll do the Scrounger thing at 11:00 as planned, and set up user accounts after lunch. In an ideal world, we'll wrap up here around 3:00 so that I can hit the road, and make it back to the city before the bulk of rush hour hits - I'll park at the hotel, check in and go walkabout for the early evening, wrapping up with dinner at Sanraku. Please cross your fingers for me, I'd really like to have a nice evening in San Francisco. (Miss Arwen, if you see this and can think of any serious gotchas going from 4.0.167 to 4.1.006, please call my cell and let me know?)
I hope hope hope that this all works according to plan. Please God?
Traffic through the city was nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be, but it still took me a good 2 hours to get to Santa Rosa. I realized pretty quickly as I was driving up here that I'd forgotten how completely beautiful and gorgeous the bay area truly is - the combination of hills (mountains?) and the ocean just can't be compared to anything we've got on the East Coast. Sadly, with traffic and trying to drive when I didn't know quite where I was going, I didn't get to look around nearly enough.
Got here without incidence, wandered around Santa Rosa's "Railroad Square" area, found yummy Italian food for dinner, and vegged out for the rest of the night. Headed for the paper bright and early this morning, met the folks I'm training, and went through the training session. The morning session went very well, the afternoon session was tougher, as we were trying to find a way to make their system do things that our SQL version does very well and easily, but our Xbase version doesn't do so well at all. I think we've figure out a way to make it work, we'll know for sure tomorrow afternoon when we start creating users.
Broke the two sessions up with going to lunch at a yummy Mexican place (despite a weird overflowing toilet in the ladies' room), which always makes me happy (Mexican food, not overflowing toilets). We ended up finishing for the day at about 4:30, and I decided to go wander around the downtown area, since they'd said there were a few bookstores nearby, and I had some shopping to do. Found Leaving Cold Sassy and Tender at the Bone (which Elaine had recommended to me) at a used bookstore, for about half the price of new, got myself some iced cafe mocha, bought a little baggie of bath salts for soaking in, and a magnet that made me almost pee myself laughing (words can't do it justice - y'all will need to wait until I get home and can take a picture of it).
I found I really liked downtown Santa Rosa - lots of interesting looking shops, a good range of restaurants, from just above hole-in-the-wall to high-end fancy looking, sidewalks with nice benches, enough traffic that it felt lived in, but not too much, generally just all around nice. (I've definitely decided that a walkable pleasant downtown area is high on my list of things that I like about certain cites, and proximity to mountains is another. Now to find someplace that has both those that I can a. afford a house that I'd like close enough to downtown to enjoy it and b. find both Wiley and I jobs, preferably ones we'd like as much as the ones we've got now. Yeah, I know, fat chance.)
Met the folks from the paper for dinner - the IT guy I'm working with and his wife, one of their higher-up photo guys and the guy I'm training from their sister paper, and we ll had a lovely dinner at the same place I ate at last night (I really didn't mind, the food was just that good). Came back to the hotel, had myself a good talk with Wiley and a long soak in the tub with my new book. I really should get to bed though, because we're convening earlier than we did today to help ensure that we have enough time to do all the upgrades and whatnot that we have to do.
I've booked myself into a hotel right smack in downtown for tomorrow night, and I very much hope the plan doesn't backfire. I'm walking distance from the sushi restaurant that Kieron recommended, and from a couple other places I'd like to check out while I'm here. In an ideal world, everything will install/upgrade tomorrow without issue, and we'll be able to do the client side training in the morning. Then we'll do the Scrounger thing at 11:00 as planned, and set up user accounts after lunch. In an ideal world, we'll wrap up here around 3:00 so that I can hit the road, and make it back to the city before the bulk of rush hour hits - I'll park at the hotel, check in and go walkabout for the early evening, wrapping up with dinner at Sanraku. Please cross your fingers for me, I'd really like to have a nice evening in San Francisco. (Miss Arwen, if you see this and can think of any serious gotchas going from 4.0.167 to 4.1.006, please call my cell and let me know?)
I hope hope hope that this all works according to plan. Please God?
