It was relatively quiet at the office today, and there were problems with getting logged into the KB to write articles, AND I didn’t have a ton of other work in front of me so I took the opportunity to do some research on CSS and HTML Standards. CSS is blowing my mind. It’s incredibly fun stuff when combined with HTML. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to open many very large doors for me in site development down the road. I’m going to play with some new tricks I learned today.

Oh, incidentally, I found a neato trick that Netscape can do that I’ve simply never noticed before.

1. Go here in Netscape 7 (even Internet Explorer can’t pull off this trick because it’s “compliance” to CSS is very loose…)
2. Once the page loads, go to the View menu
3. Go to “Use Style”
4. Choose one of the other listed styles associated with that page, and sit back and watch… Read the article too. It’s incredible what CSS can do, and it’s sooooo simple really!

Oh, and I also got in touch with a few of the other peeps from back in OK today. Damn good to hear from y’all! Well, I’d better try double check a few things and see if I can get some work done. Later.

I’ve had a few emails arrive from unexected people back in Oklahoma lately. It feels great to hear from them! I didn’t know some of these guys emailing me as well as others, but it’s incredible to hear from home. ‘Nuff said…

I had several meetings today, and missed one that I considered VERY important because, well, I thought it was tomorrow… I was working, I just missed it… I’ll try to make up for it tomorrow, but I don’t know if I can. Oh well, I’m working hard and actually starting to get things done. Hopefully tomorrow will be as good as yesterday and today. I feel stupid compared to the people out here, but I’m in a different groove all together, and I think I have information they might sometimes overlook. I’m not a coder with experience in the things they are doing, but I tell them about the “common” people and how they are using the product these geniuses are designing… I’m not sure they always like to hear what I’m saying, but I was hired to tell them these things, so I’m making a GO of it.

The coffee here is great! Everyone knows each other by their first name and they are all from very different parts of the world. It’s an incredible environment and I hope I can stay here for a long time (or at least be tapped into it for a long time)!

Later.

Not much happened other than work today. I had my friend over yesterday for celebratory Memorial Day grilled NY Strip steaks with giant baked potatoes, salad, cheeses and crackers’s, and a bottle of nice Aussi wine – Penfold’s Shiraz Cabernet. It was yummy, but I think the wine affected my digestion during the night because, man, I woke up at 4:30 needing to poop somethin’ fierce! I felt it alllllll day long… I’m not sure if it qualified as having been “visited by Big Charlie” but it wasn’t very pleasant. I remember why I don’t drink red wine very often now………

Anyway, work was long and tedious today, but I got a LOT done. I started posting my first articles in the Knowledge Base, and sent about a million emails. Call me a spammer with good reasons. I didn’t finish everything I started but I didn’t go into the day thinking I would. I had to just get the ball rolling on a few things really. That was my main goal and I accomplished that with flying colors. I think I’m doing ok. I need to talk to my boss and find out how she thinks I’m doing, but I’m trying harder and harder to seek out the work that I think is expected of me. Hell, I’m just trying to seek out work! Job security is a good thing and California is expensive. I think that so far things are going somewhat better than expected.

I went across the Bay Bridge this morning with a friend, the goal being IKEA! If you start with Super Wal-Mart, strip out the food, add more furnishings and houseware type items (and furniture!) and then put a second story on it, you start getting the idea of what this store is all about. To keep prices very low, they only build these stores in port cities so there’s no extra shipping charges getting the products inland. Amazing stuff. I got beer glasses.

Then we went into Berkeley and walked around on Shattuck to find someplace to have lunch. It was Commencement at the college, so the streets were packed. We got a few blocks into downtown, and found a little diner called Mel’s that had been around since the late 40′s so we went in and got lunch. On the way back to the car we saw a billboard that said, “Gravitate Toward Jupiter,” and then we also noticed “Jupiter” was just across the street from where we were standing. It looked like some kind of club, or pub or fancy restaurant, but we couldn’t get a handle on what the heck it was.

Soooo, we crossed the street and checked it out. Turns out we should have eaten there. Jupiter is a brewery and restaurant serving gourmet pizza. Woah, it smelled sooooo good in there! Anyway, we decided to have a beer, and went out to the veranda behind the place. There were trellis’s overhead grown thick with flowering vines. We could smell feta cheese and garlic everywhere. It was very cool. Also, there were other restuarants sort of sharing the space around the veranda/courtyard area so we got to smell the aromas from them too. We decided to go back and do the lunch thing at Jupiter in a couple of weeks and also hit some other places that we noticed on this first trip.

I didn’t take my camera *unfortunately* because on the way back to Mtn. View we went southward down Highway 1. But to get to H1 we had to go through Pacifica, home of the “fog.” It’s strange because as it was described to me there are micro-environments around the area caused by the hills and mountains and Pacifica is foggy during the summer, then it clears up through the winter and gets cold. Though the view of the ocean in some strategic places was very very cool, I think I liked the heavily forrested areas and cliffs the best. The fog extends down the coast for I’m not sure how far, but when we got to Half Moon Bay we turned back eastward toward Mtn. View and as soon as we crossed a particular hill the fog simply disappeared and we were back in sunny and beautiful California.

Oh, I forgot to mention that before we got to Pacifica and the fog, we drove through a little area that my friends’ parents lived years ago called Piedmont. Back in the 50′s or so their house cost a whopping $3,000. Nowadays they go for well over a million. It’s a great place though with winding roads going up and down the hills. The landscaping all over California is incredible, but this area takes the cake. It’s completely overwhelming. The High School in Piedmont looked like a Country Club in Tulsa…

All in all, a very nice trip to the city. I have to say that I’m glad I’m in Mtn. View and not the unbelievably packed streets of the city itself.

It’s an amazing thing going from a technical support/helpdesk environment to an environment in which the ‘builders’ of the product live. I’m still trying to figure out what roll I play after two weeks of employment. See, a product is being developed in the “open source” environment, then converted into a “publically consumable product,” but is controlled in the end by a corporate mega-being that came from another planet… Still, with all that, I got Admin rights to the knowledge base today! Woo Hoo!

I’ve seen a lot and done a little since I arrived in sunny, disgustingly beautiful California, but since I’ve been here I’ve driven myself nearly mad meaning to stop and take a picture of the strangest sculpture you might ever see at a combo bus/train stop. Today I finally did it! I’m not sure who made it, or why it was chosen to be at this particular stop, but if I ever find out I’ll write it down… I’m planning to upload a bunch of other pictures of things like where I work, where I live, from around Mtn. View – just “stuff” – over the Memorial Day weekend, so once I finish, I’ll make a link to the page on the right hand side above Cali-Bound and call it something like “Cali-Life” or “Cali-Entrenched” or something like that… Later.

I’ve been in Californa now for 3 weeks, and the thing I didn’t prepare for (and probably couldn’t prepare for) is the weather. The Bay Area and specifically Mtn. View has the most temperate, mild, unchanging, beautiful weather I’ve ever seen. I spent my early childhood in Missouri and most of my adult life in Oklahoma, and I’ve been to Florida, Massachussetts, Jamaica, and Mexico, and all places have at least some variation in the weather – good or bad… But around here it’s always just, beautiful. It’s disgusting.

Yesterday morning it was cloudy and I hoped it would rain just to see something different, but it cleared up in an hour or two and was sunny and nice again… What I wouldn’t give to see a thunderstorm right now. It’s tornado season in Oklahoma right now, and they’ve had an incredible number of them this season. OK city was hit hard a few weeks back. Tulsa has been luckier, but has still had their fare share.

Oh well, I’ll get over it I guess… Gotta get back to work now.