Got back from a trip to San Francisco for work, with a short visit to Phoenix afterward. It was pretty nice: got to see a lot of people, played a lot of board games, and had a lot of productive meetings and discussions.
Still, I can’t help but feel like the trip was overall a disappointment. Lots of things that didn’t quite go the way I might have wanted, which really aren’t that big a deal, but meh?
The biggest thing is probably my work laptop. It’s historically had issues bluescreening when on wifi. Predictably, it did the same thing again this trip, except it got worse because it started hard-rebooting sporadically with no error or message. IT provisioned me a new laptop, which worked great until yesterday. I guess it installed a huge package of updates or something, and now it’s bluescreening also, every ~5 minutes, when I’m not using it. It means I dialed in to meetings from my work phone all day, which is unideal, but at least a workaround.
Also lots of other small things, mostly around social events. Wanted to do dinner and board games with friends, but the friends that were interested in board games ended up having conflicts, and everyone else had places to do, so games didn’t happen. Tried to set up a reunion lunch for Auth, but the only people that ended up making it were me and Steven (and we see each other and can go to lunch normally anyway). Isaac ended up being busy with papers and thesis and couldn’t make lunch in Phoenix. Ended up missing dinner with Ty in Phoenix because I didn’t follow up with him beforehand.
In fun things though:
Played board games with coworkers. Yay board games!
Met all of the new people and had a huge team event across auth, identity, and cloud-to-cloud.
Had a going-away party for Alok, who’s switching teams, and saw his awesome place.
Played a VR zombie survival thing with my parents, that was really well done.
Met up with David, Jennie, Matt, and Dorothy for lunch, and heard awesome stories from lawyer and doctor things. Then played Betrayal and got thoroughly owned.
So yay for trips, overall, I guess. Tons more photos are at photos.