But I don't think I would move there just yet. It's hard to say based on being there for only a few days but what Seattle offers the Bay Area already has...nice weather (at least while we were there), clean air, and an active lifestyle.
At times I felt like I was driving through parts of San Jose, Saratoga, San Francisco, Oakland, etc. About the only thing that was amazing and made me do a double take every time was seeing Mtn. Rainier. You could put it down as it's a nice place to visit, but nothing to fall in love with...like New York or Chicago.
Soon to be posted are pictures of the trip.
[Update] Sleepless in Seattle pics
The view from the top was awesome! Congrats Dan, Rich, K-dogg, mongolian deathworm, Ron, thecrystalball, Juliet and David. I even saw Clee up there and my cube-mate from work. Small world!
It was a great experience. I'm not saying it was easy...to hike 8.2 miles up 4800 ft. of elev. gain...with absolutely no water coming back down...but it was worth it.
Turn off your computer. Get away from your office. Go climb a mountain!
My humble flickr set of Operation: Mount Half Dome.
[Update] David Ko's photos of Half Dome. Dan's set.
And since the mountain will not come to me, well, then I will just have to go outside and find the darn thing myself.
Seriously I won't be turning on any computer this weekend. Time for me to get my refreshment somewhere else...some open air pleasures, of the planned and serendipitous type. The best part...I'll be waking up bright and early tomorrow morning to climb Half Dome.
I'll try to bring back snapshots.
I met up with Bruce today at the Adobe building in San Jose for lunch. I was a bit disappointed that they didn't offer their employees or visitors FREE lunch. Haha. Well, we talked about what he does at Adobe (some pretty cool stuff—programming and designing—really really cool stuff), some more about business, etc., and got a tour of Adobe. Finally! Danke dabruceski!
Last night I went to a SIG BayCHI event where two speakers talked about "Designing for Ajax". The first guy was Bill Scott (Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!) and he offered tremendous insights about the 7 principles of designing for Ajax. There are tons of good stuff I took tons of notes and I will definitely try to process that. Good stuff.
Then this young kid named Matt Mullenweg showed up and really impressed me with his 12 rules of launching your start-up. Anyway as far as I can remember (I didn't take any notes you see) here they are:
Matt Mullenweg's 12 Rules: (in no particular order)
1. Be your most passionate user
2. Be anal
3. Support (you are your own...)
4. Get off the computer
5. 1.0
6. Have a tagline
7. Know what to do if you are successful
8. Simplify
9. Don't do as they say do as they do
10. Be a painkiller, not a vitamin
11. Measure your success
12. Start strong end strong
BTW Matt started programming 3 years ago and is one of the founder of the open source WordPress blogging software. The guy's like 22.
In any case let me know if you want to talk about his 12 rules in depth and I'll gladly fill in any gaping holes from my recall of it. Oh also if you haven't written a blog yet it's so easy now to set one up. So yeah I totally encourage you guys who are reading this and have not try blogging yet, to go for it. Let me know if you need help!
I thought I'd pop in to jot down a quick "I'm still here" entry as well as to say that Sands and I saw "An Inconvenient Truth" last night. In the tradition of docs like "Super Size Me", "Fahrenheit 9/11", and "When We Were Kings" this one posited some very interesting questions, but remains both entertaining and intellectually stimulating.
Here are some notes from what I learned:
- The previous decade from 1998 - 2005 recorded some of the hottest days on Earth. (Al Gore couldn't have hired a better PR to spin this movie as we in Cali just had some crazy heat wave couples of weeks ago.)
- For 650,000 years carbon dioxide (CO2) level has been pretty consistent. Starting in the year 2000 it jumped A LOT!
- the US produced the highest gas guzzlers while the Japanese produced some of the lowest. Even China is outpacing the US in terms of emission standards and miles per gallons set for their cars.
- Gore's black-and-white point of view is just that. Of course there are lots of gray areas about global warming (as the corporations would like to add) but his main point is still: we have a moral responsibility, no make that obligation, to curb global warming so that our children will be able to survive on this "pale blue dot".
Do yourself a favor. Go see it. It's only $1!!! At the very least it will leave you with a better understanding of the consequences of global warming as well as the diminished quality of life for future generations (our children) should this pattern continue.
