bjarvis | Feb. 2nd, 2009

Feb. 2nd, 2009

I arrived at my employer's offices in Foster City before 9 AM today. That was a mistake: it seems most folks here stroll in after 10 AM so there was no one here to meet me. At least they had publicly available wifi in the lobby so I could catch up on LJ and reading while waiting for someone to arrive.

Eventually, my director came by to collect me and performed a series of introductions to various people on the extended team. I already knew most of the people via email but it's nice to have a face to associate with them. As expected, I'm seriously overdressed for this office; shorts, t-shirts and faded jeans seem to be the law of the land. I'm more comfortable in business casual: my clothes help me delineate between my work life and home life.

My director then gave me an hour-long presentation on the systems architecture: this was one of the things I most desired from this visit, a representation of some kind where all the little ones and zeroes flow or reside. This is one facet but I still need to know on which hardware all of these apps reside, where geographically they are kept (DC or California) and how the responsibility for the care of the apps and systems are distributed among systems engineering (my team), network operations, software engineering and anyone else who might have a stake in this.

I had nearly two hours with one of the other people on my team about staging and deploying software rollouts to production and non-production servers. It's a convoluted process but I have a vastly greater sense of what is involved than I did previously, so that's a second major coup of the day.

I received my RSA token, the random number generator which will allow me to log into equipment remotely and securely; I also got myself added to the California jumphost. Now a stack more of equipment is accessible to me.

Just before I left DC last week, I was notified that one of our clients would require all of us to be fingerprinted and tested for drugs. This was never required for working with hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages at my prior firm but a client once-removed from my employer demands it. Go figure. I have a mid-morning appointment in downtown San Francisco tomorrow to have the fingerprinting completed. The drug test would be in Palo Alto but I have no contact information for that yet.

I may yet come to enjoy working for these people if I can continue knocking down these barriers to productivity.

It's been a very relaxing past few days, filled with fun, adventure, food and friends.

Settling into the hotel was pretty easy and I've been able to navigate my way around the roads, streets and transit systems fairly effectively thanks to advice of friends, Google Maps and a GPS-enabled Crackberry.

Saturday afternoon was largely spent in the fuzzy presence of

low_fat_muffin, Dave and

kateydog, touring portions of the city in the MuffinMobile, hiking up a hill for some wonderful vistas and vegetating at Le Tour Muffin before dinner.

We met up with

bibliocub and

sfleatherbear for a tasty dinner of everything I could never cook with my dearest husbands present --I'm sure they were busy indulging themselves back home in every excess I couldn't tolerate-- before we went out for ice cream. Click here for

low_fat_muffin's more detailed report with photos.

Sunday began with dim sum in Millbrae with

allanh, Randy,

snousle and

westwind_mv:

allanh and I headed towards San Francisco (with a brief stop at a lovely candy shop) for C1 and A2 classes with the Midnight Squares and a club business meeting. I danced a little in at both levels until the late afternoon/early evening.

allanh headed for home while

sfleatherbear and

bibliocub took me back over to their neighbourhood and to one of their preferred restaurants for dinner. I had a huge platter of pasta and chicken. Mmmm... wheat. :-) Later in the evening, they drove me over to a BART station and sent me on my way back to Millbrae where I collected my car to drive back to my hotel. I checked email quickly, then called it a night in preparation for my first day at my employer's headquarters.