Bear's Log

Last week I was in San Francisco working in our office and I had a blast. Meeting all the people and seeing the different conference rooms was very enjoyable. I think the most fun was actually being able to eat lunch with the crew on Tuesday. Normally the email goes out saying what the lunch for Tuesday is and I have to sit at home and just day dream about whatever food choice is being served :) But this time I actually was able to enjoy it in person: pizza! hehehe, figures when I'm there they have something that I would normally have here in philly :) but it was still fun sitting in the crowd eating pizza with the others.

I also enjoyed being able to work on the tinderbox servers physically. I was able to take care of a number of items on my personal todo list that involved a lot of tedious steps that would have been painful over a remote session :) It helps to now know the actual layout of the room so if I have to walk someone thru restarting one of the tboxes I can give accurate instructions :)

One thing I didn't count on was not being as productive there as I am at home. I was really missing my multiple server with multiple monitors setup that I use daily. While at OSAF I was just using my powerbook, and while it has a nice wide screen - nothing beats four monitors when you are tracking down multi-step problems :)

Another issue that I was expecting was the amount of socializing that had happened. Working from home does have certain distractions, but that is normally limited because it's only a couple of people at home with me. At work I had oodles of people to get distracted by :) But I knew that going into the situation and the socialization was actually part of my task while there.

All in all it was a very successful trip. I got to meet new co-workers, saw the new offices, worked on some physical server issues and enjoyed the trip while still getting some work done ;)