The beginning

Welcome to my new blog!

I am moving out to the San Francisco area to have a new job and a new life. I decided to continue the tradition of using a blog to communicate to friends and family back home (London / DC / PA, wherever that might be). I'll keep it open for now but eventually I'll probably make a rule that only people who don't live in California can read this, that way I don't have to censor my opinions too much about what's going on here.

I've been in California for 5 days now. It's been a very busy week. I arrived in Saturday night and drove a rental car to my friend's house in Mountain View. We went to a party with Microsoft employees (she was a Microsoft X-box employee up until today, when she quit, will now be working at Apple instead). Over the course of Sunday-Tuesday I bought a car!, a new Honda 2010 Fit. First new car I've bought and I really like it. On Monday I started my job. There's a lot I don't know yet and a lot I think I'm doing pretty well at. They seem to be giving me a lot of leeway anyway which is good. The coworkers are really friendly and the work is new and challenging. They were very interested to hear about my expertise in PAVA / electroacoustic system design for speech intelligibility, as it's something they say they don't do often or well, so maybe that will actually come in handy here (but not be as inescapable the way it was at Arup).

Anyway, I have to get way across town early for a meeting tomorrow, so I'm getting to bed. Just wanted to have a first stab at this and let people know a bit about how things are going! Talk to you soon,

Stephen