nathan jara

Well, I can officially say that I’ve been out west. With my trip to California finishing up yesterday morning, I can also say I really enjoyed visiting the hometown of the Governator. California is certainly a beautiful state. We had fantastic weather all weekend. Clear blue skies and bright California sun.

I really grew to like both San Francisco and the San Jose area. San Francisco is a very rich city culturally. Many different nationalities and cultures come together to form an eclectic mix. From the architecture and make up of the city, you can tell it has been molded by many different backgrounds. Walking through the city, you can see traditional church architecture, modern building structures, graffiti, and contemporary art. Another thing I found interesting, was the layout of the city itself. It’s structured in a very rigid grid pattern. Very different from Pittsburgh of course :) San Jose was great too; it felt very similar to San Francisco, but less city like. It was more town-ish. Both cities feel very new. Which makes sense, seeing as California is one of the youngest parts of the country.

Oh yeah, I did go to a conference while I was there :) The jQuery conference was a lot of fun. We learned about many new concepts and techniques being used in contemporary web development. Several heroes of the web development community were present, which lended to some great discussion and geeky humor :) The time spent was well worth it and I would definitely attend again. Especially if it’s in California.

I had a very good time at the first day of the conference yesterday. We sat in on a lot of great discussions and presentations. It’s been very cool to be a part of this jQuery, javascript, web development community. Taking in the whole experience is interesting to think about. Two years ago when I began doing web development full-time, even a year ago, I don’t think I would have said that I’d be attending, traveling, interested in, becoming an active member of a web development community such as jQuery.

Last night, after the day’s sessions, we were able to catch the end of the Penguins game by streaming the game on-line in the hotel room :) Needless to say, I was happy with the result. Then we drove into downtown San Jose to check out the local scene. We ate at a local Korean restaurant called Omogari. It was great! I’ve never had Korean food before. Very tasty :)  Afterward we walked around the downtown San Jose area. One of the main drags, called Santa Clara, has a bunch of clubs, restaurants, bars, shopping centers, stores, etc. We ended up at Gordon Biersch, a restaurant brewery. They had a sweet patio area outside for a nice drink and chat :)

Today’s conference sessions have been pretty good. I’m not getting quite as much out of today as yesterday, but there have been some very useful tidbits. We’ll be finishing up day two in about an hour and a half or so, then we’ll be heading up to San Francisco for a last party night out. Our flight leaves at around 11.30PM tonight. We’ll be flying to Millwaukee, Wisconson then back to Pittsburgh tomorrow morning.

I had a great day yesterday on my first California adventure. Our training day was very successful. I didn’t learn a ton of new things, but definitely solidified many of the things I’ve already learned about the jQuery javascript library. Training finished up right at 6PM and we decided to walk around for a bit. We couldn’t not visit the local American Eagle store along Market St :)  Then we took a drive out to the Golden Gate bridge. Wow. It was very impressive. We got there right at sunset and I was able to take a bunch of awesome shots. We could see Alcatraz island just off the shore too! Sean Connery wasn’t there though. After a chilly visit to the Golden Gate Bridge, we drove back to San Francisco and found a restaurant called Tropisueno. It was awesome. A really cool authentic Mexican restaurant. I had a chicken dish called Pollo Asado which was fantastic. Afterward, we took a stroll through the streets of San Francisco.

We’re at the jQuery conference this morning at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Research Center in Mountain View, California. We just enjoyed our complimentary continental breakfast along with Starbucks coffee. The conference will be beginning in a few minutes. I’m getting excited, haha. It’s very cool to be hear amongst our fellow web development nerds. I’m anxious to soak up the knowledge :)

I’m in San Francisco, California! Can’t believe it. My first time on the west coast.We left work at 430 yesterday to get out to Pittsburgh International. Traffic on the parkway was thrilling. Luckily we got through it somewhat  painlessly. We arrived at the airport at 6PM for our flight to leave just after 7PM. Going through security was just has fun as I remember almost two years ago when I flew to Europe. Take off your belt, watch, shoes, cell phone, laptop and put everthing in the bins as fast as you can. Walk through the scanner then take everything out of the bins and dress yourself again while not holding up the line as 30,000 people are coming throught the line behind you. Anyway we got through painlessly and I found a Subway and scarfed down a spicy italian on wheat. Our flight left right on time and we were on our way to sunny California! (“sunny California” is best pronounced with an Arnold Schwarzeneggar accent.)

The flight was pretty smooth. One funny thing that happened was when my friend was using his laptop with the pull down table in front of him. The three ladies in the seats in front of us were playing Yahtzee and every time the one shook up her dice, it shook the table and and laptop. Pretty funny.

We arrived in Los Angeles about twenty minutes early. And our connecting flight to San Jose was about 15 minutes late so we arrived in San Jose right at midnight last night. We picked up our rental car, a Nissan Altima hybrid, and drove about 20 minutes to our Hampton Inn hotel in Mountain View. A quick check-in and shower and I was out. :)

This morning we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel and hopped on Route 101 towards San Francisco. Traffic wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, especially since we were travelling during rush hour. What a beautiful state. I saw some palm trees on the way, some what I now call San Franciscan houses, and rolling California hills.

We got into downtown San Francisco a little before 8AM, parked the car, and are now set up and waiting for our jQuery training day to begin! Everyone has laptops open and we are raring to go. I’m excited to see what I’ll learn. And excited to see San Francisco tonight :)

For years, I’ve wanted to better understand the inner workings of the revolutionary marvel that is the automobile. I recently came across this amazing video of a phenomenal presentation describing the complex structure, state-of-the art materials, and performing ability of a new model of a transmission used in the trucking industry. Rockwell International is the name of the company which produced the transmission as they entered the automotive component industry. I could try to provide a summary here, but I certainly cannot light a candle to this man’s impeccable delivery. Some of the terms used may be slightly weighty, but I think you’ll easily pick up on the gist of his presentation.