(Transcribed from my notes)
First day at JPMC - nothing to do. No surprise. I actually slept pretty hard last night, and woke up a few minutes before seven, right before the alarm went off. I ended up having to relocate to a different room because the originally discussed room didn't get prepared properly for a new occupant. So I had to hang out while people got yelled at (not in earshot, thankfully). These hotel-like executive apartments are always so sterile. Not that I entirely mind; better no character at all than the wrong kind of character for the first few days. We'll see what I can put together this week for a longer-term place to live.
It may be necessary for me mull over what I want to talk about on this blog by just writing, even if it is rather gratuitous. The other bloggers I know of take a while to hit their writing groove, either by having events in their own lives, recent news, their hobbies, etc. to stimulate them to have an opinion about things. I suppose that Houston will give me plenty to have an opinion about eventually.
I'm already checking out the culture blend here. Just riding the bus to downtown, I saw some signs and stores that cater to spanish speakers. Most public signs are bilingual, it seems.
The downtown her is a bit like the financial district in San Francisco - the space were the tall buildings are is fairly small. Looks like the tallest buildings are under 60 stories. They have an underground mall in the middle of downtown, but I'll check it out later.
[ After Lunch ]
The underground tunnels have shops and places to eat, and they lead to the Houston Center, where there is a large atrium area and tables and chairs like any good mall eatery area. I dodged the more exotic, just to be low-risk about anything that I don't need to complicate my first day. So I ate at Subway, which wasn't too bad. The folks here seem to be from all over. I am not being inundated by texan drawl all around me. Lots of Indians, some Asians, and various different american accents all around. Not surprising, I guess. JPMC is growing rapidly, it appears, which always helps to diversify the work force.
[ Late Afternoon ]
Ok, the runaround for getting myself set up at JPMC is coming to a head. After beating up various desk staff, and having networking folks get the network wire to my desk to go live, I'm almost ready to login and start to think about working. i sat with the other guy on my "team" (only the both of us right now) and got a walking tour of what kind of code and systems they have right now. I was relieved to find that their infrastructure isn't too bad, so I won't have to evangelize about good practices too much. Whew.
[ Early Evening ]
So I think that I'm here until 6pm usually. Consulants/Constractors need some kind of authorization to work more than 40 hours a weekly. I've talked to a few people about getting into a cheaper location more permanently, so I have a small list of places her in downtown Houston that have good services for not too expensive. I seems like such places may cost about $700-$900 a month. I'm not sure I want to like right here in downtown. I don't want shopping to be the most available diversion outside of sports and nascar. I've had an intuition that the best place would be close to one of the universities and the one train that goes downtown. It might have more of the kind of artsy stuff that I'd like to do in my spare time.
Wow, I was asking a helpful guy on the street to help me find the street that the bus back to the hotel runs on, and he gave me a bunch of recommendations on where to look for places to live. The Rice Village area is sounding nice. People have been quite friendly so far, but I'm not sure if that's due to my recent freelance work where I had to keep an attractive persona of if people are just plain friendly. Today is very pleasant - in the shade at least. Oh yeah - it is wicked flat down here. From the 15th floor of the building, you can see far out to the horizon. And there is hardly a bump besides the little dips at the rivers that run through town.
Posted by David Cymbala at April 26, 2004 10:00 PM