matt's pictures

The Move

I got back from that trip, woke up the next morning, and picked up a U-Box, which is really a glorified wooden crate. Sophia and I spent the day jigsawing all of our personal possessions that wouldn’t fit in the car into the box, and then taking it to the uhaul location. We spent the night at my folks’ place, and then hit the road in the morning. Shoutout to “Katie”:http://katality.com/ for being there at the buttcrack of dawn to see us off with cupcakes. Then it was, as my dad said, miles and miles of nothing but miles an miles. There was a “20 mile fog bank”:http://photounrelated.com/2013/05/11/getting-to-sf.html in western Oklahoma that broke up before Texas, and then smooth sailing all the way across to Flagstaff that first day. It’s a lot easier to travel when you have a good companion. The hotel I remembered as being “quaint and charming”:http://notuntitled.com/2012/08/04/road-problems.html from my last encounter was sort of run down and the bed was awful, but it was a bed. Woke up in the morning, had a last dose of green chili and eggs before leaving the southwest, and on to Cali. All through the central valley, the almond trees were in bloom. Finally, we made it to our SF accomos, ordered pizza, and passed out.

Posted on 2013-05-15T06:36:26Z GMT

Karaoke and coda (scenes from a good trip part 4)

Put two of my support colleagues in a room together, away from their homes, and there will be drinking. Put three of them together and there will be at least one story to come out of it. Put them all together in one place and there will be karaoke. Add an open bar, and you’ll get the supreme moment of the trip, wherein Tim Littlemore gave the most epic rendition of “Sweet Child of Mine” ever. The next day was rough. Hangovers all around. Sleep on the bus home.

Posted on 2013-05-15T06:05:44Z GMT

Lake Tahoe (offsite/scenes from a good trip part 3)

since a very large edit of these photos has already been on the “unofficial engineyard tumblr”:http://engineyard.tumblr.com, I’m going to do a cliff notes version in an effort to get closer to the present. I’d really like to be posting yesterday’s pictures, or at least last weeks, instead of two months ago (2.5 now; I’m behind on being behind). In short: it was good. I was leaving one team, support, who collectively are the most expert sysadmins and devops engineers I’ve ever known. Also not a few really excellent rubyists. Why would I leave that? A new adventure, of course. I mean, there are reason you tell people (promotion, pay, whatever), and then there’s the real reason, and the real reason is I can’t sit still for too long. New people, new environment, new problems.

Posted on 2013-05-15T05:35:13Z GMT

Night 1: SF

Met up with some dudes at the airport, went to a fancy french restaurant, and had what I’ve come to realize is a fairly normal BART experience, conplete with a balloon animal lady. Yeah.

Posted on 2013-04-28T19:28:54Z GMT

scenes from a good trip

The next morning, I got on a plane to SF, for a company offsite in Tahoe. I got to the hotel and crashed for a bit (as you do), and then went and found my compatriots. Wandered, took photos.