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With the work which brought me to California concluded I find myself with a day to kill in Santa Monica. Following in the footsteps of friends who have previously found "real coffee" in Los Angeles I made the pilgrimage to Groundworks Coffee and chatted with the essential tattooed and pierced barista. When I told her I was from New Zealand, and had arrived via the recommendation of friends, she laughed and said that half of her customers were Kiwis or Aussies desperately in search of decent coffee. I'd already placed my coffee order or I would have tried my luck and requested a flat white! One day I'll figure out what the American equivalent is.
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Coffee and croissant stashed safely away, I'm on the beach wandering towards the amusement park I can see on the pier in the distance. As I climb the stairs up onto the pier my senses launch me into reverie. Families fishing off the pier, girls screaming on the rocko planes, skeeballs bleeping top scores and the sound of buskers blending with the crashing of waves. Having turned a corner to escape the stench of corn dog, I walk straight into a blast of deep fried cinnamon.
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I was fifteen when I got my first job manning the concession stands at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. I took people's money so they could torture goldfish with dimes, knock over lead milk bottles and guess how fast they could throw a baseball. The milk bottles were my typical post and across the boardwalk was a churro stand where I'd buy my daily cinnamon snack. It was a formative time, I spent every spare hour on my Yamaha, exploring the backroads at unsafe speeds, and even on minimum wage I earned more money then I could spend on gas or comics. It also provided my first lessons on the ridiculousness of both corporations and the general public.
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In sharp contrast to those early days, this last week has been spent doing a speaking tour with NetApp. A whirlwind four day affair taking me from New Zealand to San Francisco and New York and then back to San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was my first trip to the east coast so, even though we flew out on the red eye the morning after we arrived, I traded sleep for a couple of hours of exploring. Walking the streets of Manhattan was like browsing somebody else's memories, around every corner was a landmark familiar from a movie or sitcom. My favourite discovery was stumbling across Bryant Park where I'd helped NYCwireless deploy free wifi back in 2002.
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I did enough public speaking back in the heyday of community wireless that I'm fairly comfortable with presentations. However the anxiety struck when I discovered that in San Francisco and Los Angeles representatives from the big effects studios would be attending. My presentation was about the challenges of managing storage for large render farms as well as relating my experience with NetApp's products. Perhaps unsurprising in retrospect, but the most striking thing to emerge, not just from the studios but also from the EDA and games attendees, was that we basically all have the same problems. In fact at two of the presentations people started laughing and said that if they doing the presentation they would have, word for word, written the same slides.
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I often shirk speaking opportunities because I have a hard time figuring out what I have to say that hasn't been said before. This trip was a good reminder that not only do I enjoy presenting my thoughts and ideas, but that people will always take something away from a well told story. I have a few things to follow up with after this which will hopefully result in additional blog posts.
PS. To everybody I missed and didn't see on this trip, I'm hoping to spend a few months in the States at the end of my big trip. New York, Seattle, San Francisco and especially Portland are all on the list! 