3:15 AM - I give my honnie and kids a kiss and head out the door. I've got a bit of driving to do, and I don't know what the delay will be at the airport once I get there. I'm excited for the new job today. I know it'll be a while before I actually hit the ground running, but that gives me some time to brush up on some reading on the plane I need to do for work. Jen's headlight went out last night and I needed to re-splice a plug on it since she's heading down to Phoenix tomorrow at night.
5:30 AM - Security went a lot longer than I thought, so it was a good thing I got their earlier. I got worried because they had overbooked the flight. I was offered a $300 voucher if I wanted to wait until later, but I explained it was my first day on the job and I need to get their earlier rather than later. The ticket gal smiled and worked her magic to get me a boarding pass. Next time I'm taking advantage of my web checkin options. 8^D
After a battle with some traffic, I finally make it to my hotel. I figure it'll be better to check in there first since I know I'm going to be slinging code and getting into things right away at work. Typical to Washington weather, it is abou 60 degrees with a light rain. Kind of nice change in pace for things. I like the change in weather.
However, THESE are the shoes I wore for the trip. I guess you really can't take the So. Cal. out of the boy after all. 8^D I have a pair of nicer shoes that will match my pants tomorrow for the meeting, but I guess I'll get my feet a little wet and give some folks a laugh. C'est la vie.
Of course, Rylee and Haylee gave me their special friends to keep me company on the trip. They'll watch over the hotel room. Time to get to work!!!
Hazzah! I step into the office and it's good to see some old/new friends again. I really bond well with the team here at Fresh. We exchange some greetings and it was like I never left. Steve is the lead developer and my guru, so we immediately sit down and start talking about the meetings we'll have over the next few days. Oh, and there's two meetings today with T-Mobile I didn't know about, so I gotta brush up on my skills quick! In the meantime, Jeff brings by a couple of bottles that are being given out at the social media conference they're hosting at Microsoft's campus on Friday:
Elisha our designer did some SWEET work with getting the logo's just right, and apparently Jones soda does promotions this way. We have green apple flavor and vanilla bean flavors. I'd love to take these home on the plane, but security won't allow it. Maybe I'l just have to drink them. For the record, that coffee cup has water in it, but I had a good sized straight up coffee BEFORE that.
So now things move into a blur. I pull up my Win7 virtual machine to pull down the .Net project I had been doing side work for before I got the full job. I also need to get a few things installed on the primary Mac instance since there are another 3 PHP based sites I'm gong to work on, and we want to make sure they're running locally on my computer before I leave on Friday. Steve is a shell guru and I'm starting to pick up the power of the command prompt once again. I'm learning cool things like the "brew" package installer for OSX and we're talking about setup and PHP glitches along the way.
All of the sudden it's time to leave for the T-Mobile meetings. One of them has been rescheduled, so it's just the debug meeting. Apparently one of the sites that we recently pushed out is experiencing odd timeout behavior. After LOTS of command line mayhem, with simultaneous logins to the server to track the timing of things, it's really starting to look like there's a proxy server issue or something going on with the network traffic. Steve tells them he'll detail a message out for them on what to send to their IT folks and hopefully that will resolve things. Just another job well done.
We get back to the office and spend the next few hours working on getting one of my other sites online. There are a lot of dependencies and unique configurations to customize, and stepping through all the glitches is a TREMENDOUS learning experience. Never stop learning right?! Eventually it gets to be about 6:30 and everybody is calling it quits for the night. I'm going to meet Steve in the morning to talk about the client we meet with tomorrow before we head over. I'm a morning person anyway, so I'll have some time in the morning to tweak up my sites a bit more on Kierkegaard (the laptop).
I pick up a sandwich and get back to the hotel in time to talk with the girls via Skype before they go to bed. I think they've grown a few months just in the day I've not seen them. They're looking tired, so we make it a short call, and Jen says she'll call back later after they've crashed.
By evening/night the sky has cleared up. It is gorgeous up here with all the lush green land. Eventually it gets dark and the night skyline becomes visible. On the side here is the cityline, and on the back side from the hotel is the "country line". Pretty amazing.
Jen calls me back up and we enjoy a bit more of the night just catching up a bit while she works on "Chadder" for VBS. It truly is a marvel at how technology can keep people close like this. Sure we're not face to face, but video does so much more than a phone call for connecting. We're both pretty beat, so we call it a night. I'll talk to everybody in the morning again before I head out.
All in all this day was busy and amazing. There's so much to do here at Fresh that it can be overwhelming at times. But the team is awesome and we have the tools we need to get things done. I'm excited for the next few days ahead with the team and then continuing to work with them from home. I'm extremely happy I've made this change, and things can only go up!