It's time to fill you in on the past few days that I haven't posted here. On Friday I flew from Houston to San Jose airport where Bryan kindly picked me up and took me to In-N-Out for a delectable burger. Bryan had a good chunk of free time so he decided to show me some of the geeky highlights. Of course, I'm talking about Cupertino, California where Apple has its headquarters. After a brief jaunt to the company Apple store to purchase the "I visited the mothership" shirt, we headed out to take a glance at Google and Yahoo! HQ before my final hotel destination.
Saturday began at 11AM when Bryan picked up Phil Freo, Dimitry Bentsionov (both also Y! interns) and I. Bryan explains the details here, but we ended up at a car meet for rotary engine powered Mazda RX model cars (Bryan owns a slick RX-8) on Treasure Island around 1PM. After a few hours in the sun, Bryna dropped the three of us off at BarCamp at Microsoft's offices in downtown San Francisco. The timing was a little bad as most BarCamp attendees were at BloggerCon but I was still able to meet some cool people I've met online before. Those include Flock's Community Ambassador Will Pate, web/tech advocate Chris Messina and his partner in crime Tara Hunt as well as Kevin Burton from TailRank and Tantek Celik, Chief Technologist of Technorati. Sometime in between then Will Pate had taken us out for a bite to eat at the old train station across the street. We left BarCamp in time to catch the 9PM Caltrain to Mountain View, where Will showed us Flock headquarters.
My first impressions of California are great. I love the surrounding environment and how well-developed the tech community is. Wherever I looked, there was the headquarters or main offices of a large company. For example, I spotted Maxtor right across the street from Cisco Systems, Lockheed Martin across from Yahoo!, etcetera. I would love to move out here after I graduate. In the meantime, I have a feeling I will be enjoying my stay. News of my internship with Yahoo! also made its way around the blogosphere quite rapidly: About.com, blogHelper, ProBlogger and Houston MetBlogs. Now back to your regularly scheduled tech content.