Moved to San Francisco
8 Jan 2012
Well, finally, me and my wife were able to make the move to San Francisco. We arrived just a couple of days ago, we are staying temporarily in an hotel on North Beach.
I am in love with the neighborhood, feels pretty safe, there are plenty of coffees, bars, and restaurants to go by. We’ve been hunting craiglist to find an apartment in this neighborhood, we hope we can find something not too expensive (although that word is quite meaningless in this city).
We tried going to some open houses down to Mission District, but as soon as we got off BART (on 16th st and Mission) and walked for a few minutes, we came back, I may be a big pussy but I didn’t feel very safe and it was 12pm. I wouldn’t be very comfortable with my wife walking down those streets alone or at night.
Tomorrow I’ll be finally working at the office, is incredible that I’ve been working for this company for two years and few months and I still haven’t worked in the actual office yet, being an independent contractor from Mexico and all. I am becoming a full-time employee because of the move of course.
I can’t wait to finally get settled, and start hunting for coding-oriented events, and start meeting people and places.
All text Linux
13 Dec 2011
I bought an Acer Aspire One D255E a few months ago. I wanted a netbook for very specific reasons:
- I wanted something very small, I have a 15 inches Macbook Pro and the thing is very unwieldy for a laptop. I found I didn’t play around or code more because I was lazy to carry that laptop around, I wanted something so small that laziness wouldn’t be an excuse.
- I wanted something with a decent keyboard to be able to type fast and code on. Again, I didn’t want comfort to get in the way of coding or writing.
- I wanted to run some flavor of Unix in it. Linux or FreeBSD.
- Have a text-mode ONLY Unix installation. (This was not at goal at first, but now it is ;)
Yes, text-mode only. No stinky windowing system. No fancy browsers. No fancy terminal apps. Yes, I wanted to man-up and go back to good ol’ text-mode, armed with bash and emacs and the whole stack of compilers, interpreters at their core.
That actually got interesting when I was trying to test how this post was going to look like while typing it in emacs.
Now, with the netbook at hand, I tried FreeBSD and several flavors of Linux before settling with Arch Linux, again for some very specific reasons:
- I don’t like installing hundreds of packages as part of the initial installation or having to install Xorg and a huge desktop. (I am looking at you Ubuntu!)
- The wireless network card driver worked out of the box with the minimal installation. I didn’t have to do any kind of messing around or having to connect using the ethernet card at all. Huge win.
- Its philosophy is exactly what I like, lightweight, minimal. That is, it installs only the needed packages to have a minimal working linux installation, of course, you may install more, but you don’t have to, also, it’s based on a rolling-release system, which allows for constant, small updates, I don’t like using old software.
I just say I love it, I got particularly inspired while reading Rebel Code: Linux And The Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody, very interesting book.
The City By The Bay
29 Oct 2011
Just a few days ago, an H-1B Visa application has been filled to the USCIS on my behalf. That means that if everything goes well, I will be moving with my wife to San Francisco, the city by the bay.
This is a pretty exciting move. I cannot wait for it to happen although there is quite a bit more of paperwork to get done before that. I’ve read everything I could find about the city, in books, blogs, etc. We’ve been in vacation there too. I’ve found that people have very polarized opinions about San Fran. Some people are deeply in love with it, some people really hate it.
I find that amazing. If a place can arise so heated emotions it’s a place definitely worth checking out.
I am particularly excited for several reasons, for one, it’s in Silicon Valley, a place where technology is something you can talk, see, discuss, and practically eat. A dream come true for a guy like me.
The climate is a nice addition, I live in a place that can get as hot as 119.3F (48.5C) degrees and as low as 24.8F (-4C) going to a place where the average climate is around 59F (15C) is a welcomed change.
There are other several things that I look forward to: the culture, the access to a lot of different food, beers, wine, music, people, mindsets, flora, fauna, beaches, sports, meeting new people, building new stuff, learning new things, driving new cars, getting new habits, living in an apartment with a view, a very long etc., moving to a new country is a breaking change, a very exciting one.
This is possible thanks to my current employer, INgrooves, which as soon as they learned about my strong desire to move to San Francisco, in the interest of my happiness and my wife’s, they made possible the move. Something I will always be very thankful for.
