First Post

I like San Francisco.

To start off with, my flight on Wednesday was greatly improved by Mum’s nervousness at her son flying such a long distance alone. The AA employee took care of me, walked me through immigration (stamped without a second thought) and at boarding said “here, I’ll move you to a better seat on the flight”. Specifically seat 5E, in business class. Business class was… roomy. I’ve decided I’m going to be a nervous and helpless unaccompanied minor more often. Interestingly, when I asked the hostess for “just a glass of water, please” her face brightened and she told me that I was the first person she had served here who’d said please. What are business class travellers like?

After my (economy class) flight to SFO, I chatted to the couple who had been sitting beside me while we waited for bags. Of course it turned out they had been to Ireland and were half Irish themselves and so on. Walking out, a girl laughed and told me “Heard you getting burnt over the Irish thing… where you from?”. It turned out, of course that she was from Limerick also and we both knew James Collins because she used to live in Mungret and other such connections. It’s a small world after all. On reaching Bayside I met Harj and decided I liked the apartment so much I am going to stay a little longer than two weeks. I cancelled my return flight and ate muesli.

Working on Auctomatic is class. Learning Smalltalk is an annoyance, but I can already see it’s a pretty cool language. The first thing I wrote in it was a converter to parse .csv files, because we couldn’t find one. I plan to open source my code for it - I will be the author of the only Smalltalk csv parser on the internet. That gives you an idea of the number of people using SmallTalk. Meanwhile, Patrick’s got the whole Inventory management stuff nailed down pretty well. Our plan for eBay live is to have limited functionality working really well. Well, that’s one part. The other is to have lots of stickers, signs and free food.

Living here is great fun. Bayside is really where it’s at (close up Google Maps photo of our apartment here - kinda scary…). Market Street is only five minutes walk and has food, shops and the Apple Store. From our apartment we’ve views of the bay and its bridge - and it’s not the Golden Gate before you think it! And of course the swimming pool 5 yards from our door :-)

Speaking of the Apple Store - we love it. Not just for the stuff in it, but for the comfy seats and open wi-fi when we’re out and need internet. Day before yesterday, Patrick decided he was constrained by his mere 23″ monitor and bought a 30″. I’m using the old one now - we’ve a little Apple store going in Bayside: