Post Mortem: SF Week Two, Topspin Week One

I just finished week two in San Francisco and week one at Topspin Media and and I thought I would summarize what went down.

This is round two for me living in San Francisco and things are a tad easier this time. Granted the first time I was also moving from a far-away country (Canadia) and there was a lot of process involved – thankfully this time I got to skip all the red tape.  Also lucky for me I have friends in SF like Angela Baxley that took me in so that I had plenty of time to find a place to live.

I had big plans to relax and take things easy during my first week in the City by the Bay because I needed to mentally disengage from the Borg and get prepared for switching gears to a totally different environment.  That was the plan but I hate feeling unsettled so I went gang bangers trying to find an apartment and a roommate.  At first I wanted 1 bedroom and live solo, but the pocketbook didn’t agree.  I still own a house in Seattle that I pay a mortgage on and the idea of living paycheck to paycheck didn’t excite me too much so the logical conclusion was to pool my money with some poor sap and get a two bedroom.

After posting an ad on Craigslist and  using my friend network, I came up with quite a few roomie options.  BTW: I highly recommend casting a wide net when looking for a roommate and/or an apartment. Add a status on Facebook, Tweet a couple of times, send emails to friends, post an ad on CL, and attend a Roommate meetup.  I met up with two different girls that already had apartments, but I felt uncomfortable moving into someone else’s place because I would always feel like a guest, so I decided to find a roomie with a similar budget and requirements and then look for a place together.  I found my new roomie, Eva through Craigslist, or rather she found me through my ad that she responded to.  We decided to meet while looking at a couple of apartments so we could get a feel for what the other likes and chat at the same time.  We pretty much instantly had a connection and lots of similarities including age, the love for the outdoors, and exes.

Our criteria included a budget of $1600/each, near enough so I could walk to work in Potrero, parking for Eva’s car, and would accept Funston and her cat.  We looked at some amazing places and then came across a place in the Mission that we both fell in love with right away.  It’s the upper floor of a house that is fully gated and has both a frontyard, backyard, and a driveway.  It is amazing.  We didn’t think we had a chance in hell of getting it because there were a lot of applicants, so we decided to keep looking.  At one of the places we looked at we met a guy named Dave that was looking for a roommate so we decided to try and look for a 3 bedroom place with him   The three of us looked at some places together but while out viewing, Eva and I found out we got our dream place in the Mission and we just had to accept it.

As of the 15th of August I will be a resident of the Mission.  I have lived in the Haight and Potrero Hill previously so this is a great new experience.  I can’t wait to move all of my belongings from Seattle and settle in.  I know that Funston really needs to have a home because he has been quite stressed with all the traveling and living in strange places.

It was a huge relief to get an apartment the day before I started at Topspin Media and I think it made it a heck of a lot easier to focus right away.  My first day started exceptionally well because I walked to work in the sunshine.  I had my iPod blaring a hip hop mix, my sneakers on and pretty much beamed from ear to ear for the entire 15 minute walk.  When I arrived at the Topspin office my desk was ready for me and I already had my Macbook Pro because I had picked it up a week earlier.  I met a couple peeps that were already in the office and did some more setup on my laptop.  I navigated around the web centric document management system (very cool that everything is in a wiki) and tried to setup Entourage against Gmail.  (If anyone knows a good way of getting the Calendar to sync, please let me know).  I participated in a video teleconference (VTC) with the peeps in Santa Monica and was comforted when I found out other companies besides Microsoft have a crappy VTC experience – is there any reliable hardware/software out there????

After I spent a couple of days getting a lay for the land, I felt comfortable enough to start putting a program management plan together.  The good news about working in software, specifically the web since ’95, is that its very easy to get up to speed with any sort of software being being built and recommend a process to manage the resources and get things shipped.

Some of the differences that aren’t good or bad, just different from working at Microsoft and my other previous jobs include:  working together in a big open workspace and hearing everything that is going on which can lead to getting involved in everything and anything that may or may not be work related.  The flipside of that is knowing pretty much everything going on and not having to repeat conversations.  I like it better than being closed up in my office at Microsoft as I like the collaborative feel of an open floor plan.  For real-time communication between San Francisco and Santa Monica, Topspin uses IRC and I can’t believe how much better it is to communicate than e-mail or even IM.  I was planning on writing a post about Chatterous because I was using it almost the same way for BarCampSeattle and with my Social Productivity team at Microsoft and I highly recommend both it and IRC for collaborating with remote associates.  The Colloquy client is really easy to use and you can also have private conversations if need be.  The last thing would be working with way less resources than I’m used to for building similar services but for some reason the same work gets cranked out in less time.  This is a mystery to me that I’m baffled by and will definitely get to the bottom of.  I know that large organizations like Microsoft have overhead and more dependencies between software components, but it is quite staggering.

I’m really excited about all the musicians that are already using Topspin including David Byrne and Brian Eno’s new “Everything That Happens Today” release and all the others in the pipeline.  I really look forward to meeting some of the artists because it was obviously a motivator for me to take the job.

To sum things up, I can’t be happier about moving to San Francisco and I’m ecstatic about working at Topspin.

Namaste

Filed under: life, Uncategorized, first week on the job, life, postmortem, San Francisco, summary, topspin

Breaking Free From the Collective

It’s been exactly 8 years and 20 days since I started at Microsoft, or the Borg as I affectionately like to call it.  Today, like Seven of Nine, my link to the collective will be severed.

There’s a 7 page list of things I need to do in order to break free from the hive including handing over my corporate Amex, computer equipment, Prime card, parking pass and my ”blue badge” with that innocent picture of me taken on my very first day. 

Although I will be giving up a ton of amazing benefits such as a free gym membership, the Connector, discounts galore, and of course the zero co-pay medical benefits, it is really not what I am most going to miss.  I’m going to miss things like my Canucks alias – I was the distribution list owner for it and it helped me keep feel close to my Canadian roots - I even became the liaison of sorts to the Seattle Canadian Consulate.  I’m going to miss the Microsoft Diversity Leadership team where I felt like I was actually making a difference in changing people’s minds about women and underrepresented minorities.  The Microsoft Equestrian group was a huge asset to me with all my horse related questions and extremely supportive when I had to make hard decisions about finding new homes for my rescue horses.  Women are still a minority at MS, so I am going to miss the girl power like my “Office Live Mashup Grrrls” – we built a small business application in a matter of days and presented to the Windows Live VP.  Free, no worries travel FTW - Microsoft sent me to India twice, Japan and around the US to conferences like SXSW which I actually think gave me a new tine in that fork in the road I was at and ultimately why I am writing this post today.

Not to be trite, but because it is 100% true, I am thankful for the friends that I made.  I’m not going to talk about missing them because it is way too easy to keep tabs on everyone through Brightkite, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, etc.  I will however miss hanging out with them during the day and when a coffee run or a quick behind the door life-update is necessary.  I will definitely miss working with only smart people.  Maybe not always street smart, but definitely smart.  The interviewing process at Microsoft is effective.

I have been trying to think of things that I won’t miss, but honestly, they are all very trivial.  I do however, have a lot of hope for Microsoft’s future.  I hope that teams like the one I was on, Office Live, figure out how to be leaders in their space and not followers.  I hope that VPs such as Ray Ozzie , who I think is one of the few leaders that will breathe new life into MS, breaks free from his previous lives of Lotus Notes and Groove and takes some forward thinking risks.  I want Microsoft to be part of the community instead of dictating to them.  Most of all, I hope that one day people in the tech center don’t cringe when I tell them I used to work for Microsoft.

So today, I break free from the collective, but like Seven of Nine, I’m sure I hope that I will keep some of my cybernetic implants because there is really no better training in the world for building software and program management than Microsoft.

What’s next for me?  Definitely staying with the interwebs, but adding some entertainment to the mix.  My Voyager is Topspin.

Filed under: life, borg, collective, last day, Microsoft, quit, resigned, seven of nine, topspin