23 January 2004

I Love Weekends

Its Friday!!  Hopefully this is a good thing, for the most part life is quiet here.  But the powers that be decided that only one week was needed to test an application of some 50K+ lines of code.  Still confused about that one but I'm convinced it will make a great Dilbert.  Speaking of which this happened to me at a previous job; there's a shockingly low amount of people that would come beg to do business with us.  Ok, got a question for the blogging community; I've decided that my current location (upstate NY, just follow the cold) might not be the best place for me in the long run (variety of reasons, predominately centered around boredom).  If you could go to live anywhere in the Continental US(preferably near a coast of some sort, or mountains) where would you go?  Oh, one more restriction, there's got to be cool tech companies in the vicinity as I'll eventually have to work.  What do I like to do you ask? well I love to write program and write code.  I love to build software, any type of software really.  In the past month I even built myself a little mini compiler/VM contraption ( doesn't do a whole lot yet but give it time) and the start of a computer game.  I even like to do analysis and requirements gathering.  There's just something fun about the software creation process, I've always been drawn to things with lots of complexity & moving parts.  Modern software has no shortage of moving parts. 

So Help me out, where are the coolest places to be/live?

Comments

# Scott said:

duh, Seattle. That's a no brainer.

Coast? check.
Mountains? check.
reasonably warm climate? check
cool tech companies? check.
cool biotech companies? check.
hub of the Pacific Northwest? check. (apologies to Portland)
cool city? check.
fresh seafood? check.

Friday, January 23, 2004 3:08 PM
# joe said:

seattle weather = shite!

Friday, January 23, 2004 3:21 PM
# Scott Sargent said:

That's what I was thinking as well. I wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking anything. Unfortunately in regards to places to live there's no free demo copy. But the combination in Seattle does sound awesome, i think the only strike against it would be I'd have to get directTV to see my NY Giants football games. But maybe that's a good thing.

Friday, January 23, 2004 3:22 PM
# Scott said:

Seattle weather > upstate NYC.

We just tell the tourists that it rains here all the time so they won't move here. For example, the weatherman right now says that it is raining. I'm in downtown Seattle just south of Lake Union and it's just foggy, has been foggy all day. They ALWAYS say it's going to rain, what they mean is "somewher in western washington it's going to rain. That's a pretty good guess, it hardly ever rains hard in Seattle. South and north get a little worse weather than we do. I lived in Kansas for 20+ years, what they call rain here we called a light mist in Kansas. We get less rain/year than Houston or Kansas.
http://www.cityofseattle.net/html/weather.htm

High last summer was 92 low was about 80 I believe.

low this winter was 30 I think on the day we got all the snow, the snow was all gone 2 days later and it was 52.

Seattle also has a Fox Sports Grill downtown and lots of other sports bars, no need to get DirectTV to see non regional football games. If you just hate people, Comcast offers Digital Cable here too, not sure if they'll have the NFL network or not. One can hope. Plus they've got the Seahawks if you want to watch pro football live. (the Giants moved out of their division last year though so no Giants games)

Friday, January 23, 2004 3:53 PM
# Scott Sargent said:

Low of 30 for the winter? no pun intended that's very cool. We had two successive weeks of -10 below weather. The true low for the winter so far has been probably about -18 with windchills approaching -50. All the snow we got was back in early december, now there's just a unrelenting crust of ice and frozen...

Light Mist isn't bad, Its the torrential downpours that I'm not really a fan of. This winter has been especially brutal here, i never thought i'd consider 10 warm (but i do now).

The weather there is sounding better and better.

Friday, January 23, 2004 3:59 PM
# arich said:

I moved to the Seattle area about 7 months ago, and I thought the winter weather would be awful, as well. Horror stories, and such. They're unfounded.

As someone else mentioned, we get less average rainfall than many major metropolitan areas.

What we get here as "rain" is far different from what I'm used to from living in either St. Louis or Dallas. In Dallas, it is torrential downpour for 30 minutes, and then 100 degree weather again. It rains every day, but that umbrella I bought stays in the closet, because it almost never rains hard. (Though when the sun does come out from behind the clouds in the winter, we're like mole people, which makes for some treacherous highway driving. :)

One thing I expected being this far north of the equator was that it would get much colder than it does. I imagined New-York style snowstorms. Not true. We get very mild (wet, but mild) winters.

And if you even dislike the winter a lot, it is all made worthwhile by the incredible summers, akin to San Francisco's wonderful weather (minus the fog), maybe 3 degrees cooler on the average day, and far west enough for it to be light until 8:30pm or later! You can get off work, and still have enough sunlight to do a bit of geocaching, or a few sets of tennis, whatever you desire.

And I haven't even gotten into Seattle's excellent dining (and fresh seafood), attractions, culture, and nightlife. (And coffee, too.)

Or places to get away! Small island towns are a short ferry-ride, you're an hour from either the ocean or the ski slopes, hundreds of hiking trails, year-round ice caves, camping, deep-sea fishing, crabbing, scenic drives, open-air markets, national parks, Mt. Rainier, the list goes on and on. And I assure you - you've never SEEN so many trees. Forget being close to the ocean or mountains - you're close to both.

Oh, and I think we have a few tech companies up here, too.

Friday, January 23, 2004 8:17 PM
# Scott Sargent said:

I think I'm sold. Now I've just got to find a position someplace in or around Seattle & move there. It definitely sounds like a much cooler (as in fun) than where I am now.

Saturday, January 24, 2004 1:08 PM
# Scott said:

Yeah, there is that small start up over in Redmond.

Tell us when/if you get up here. We'll get Scoble to announce a blogger meetup hehe.

Thursday, January 29, 2004 7:43 PM

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