God bless that hippy Craig and his wonderful list of goings on
So the California transition has been scarily smooth so far. My first full week here I had the 5 interviews, the last one offering me a sweet web developer gig. So today was my first day at BioCompare, looks like a great company and fun people.
Also, I hear back Tuesday about the apartment I applied for. A sweet 1BR up in Burlingame, which apparently is a very hot little suburb. The town has a cool downtown area, upscale shops, bars, etc etc. The actual apartment has hardwood floors (which is rare outhere), lots of sunlight, and a huge walk-in closet. And it’s only triple what I used to pay for that big 2BR in Rochester, what a deal!
Now who’s in for Vegas in October? Do it.
What do you want to do with your life? I wanna rock!
So I must say this has been the most productive job hunt I’ve ever done. For every 10 or so jobs I apply to, I get some sort of positive response. These have led me to do 5 interviews last week, two with very positive results (I’ll save rants and raves for later, but let’s just say I’ve run the gamut of interview experiences so far). Hopefully I’ll have paychecks again by early October.
The bars out here get the thumbs up, much more impressive then what I remember, Palo Alto and the suburb bars actually have some life (Stanford playing the big part), so just doing the close bars is quite a blast. The coolest west coast tradition I’ve seen so far is the sports bars being full at 10am for East coast football kickoffs, I’ve even met some other Buffalo castoffs in the Bills corner. Small small world.
And San Fran’s (is that what locals call it? Frisco? The City, help me out here) bars get high marks too. First stop last night was the Rougue pub, with all Rogue beers on tap (hear that banner, rougue!). The goal of the night to meet up with Special Agent Frank Torkel and start drinking beers like it’s UC all over again, good times. We hit up the Columbus ave area, lot’s of people, lots of cool little bars. More exploring to come next week with the Love parade, which is apparently some kind of all day party.
On a completely unrelated note, dear god does “the war at home” suck! Dumb, unoriginal and offensive (and when I say that, that means something). I mean, it’s not as bad as King of the Hill, but it’s still pretty awful.
So I’m here, all pictures are up, sans Nevada* (on Dad’s camera). Yeah, there’s a lot of nature scenes, they were fantastic to view, if you can ever drive across country, go for it. This whole things a bit of a gamble, and I won’t pretend I didn’t have a lot of butterflies about the whole venture. This whole summer in Rochester was a blast and a great time, hard to walk away from all I built up there, not to mention finally finding a great lady friend. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy I’m here, I just have plenty of reasons to go back and visit.Helping this transition is Craigslist, if you don’t regularly check this site you really should. I’ve set up four interviews from this site (and another bite or two from Monster suprisingly). Great little site that not enough people know about (which sounds crazy as everyone in the Bay lives by it). On the subject of website shout outs, check out partyben.com, lots of crazy song mashups & remixes.
*Quick Nevada recap for those tracking my gambling problem. Lost 125 on blackjack, only to make a blistering comeback on 3/6 limit hold ‘em. I broke even for the 2 days.
Greetings from Chicago
Wow, quite a crazy few days. After two days of relaxing and stressing in buffalo, I’m on the road. I actully had some serious jitters for the past two days, thinking of everything that’s staying behind. Nothing like a big gamble…
And since we’ve been on the road, everything’s been great. Cleveland looked great at 80 MPH, and Ohio regained its status as a boring/annoying state. The big surprise (#1) of the day was stopping and checking out Notre Dame, holy crap what a great looking school. Lush grass, beuatiful churches and buildings, very impressive. Hitting chicago and seeing the Science museum (with a jaw dropping authentic german u boat from ww2, just incredible to see), and having Dinner with Dana was a treat. Now I’m in a Days Inn that actually has wifi, so check out the pictures I uploaded (Cross Country day 1).
