Wow – it’s been a year already.

This is the first time I’ve been able to take in the full American (Californian) experience. Despite visiting here so often it’s amazing that there’s still a lot you don’t pick up on. The simple things catch you out, like how the hills change so quickly from green to golden brown in summer but so slowly back to green the autumn (aka fall). Then there’s the American holidays, Labor Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day. Independence Day was the weirdest for me, of course being English I couldn’t get fully into things. I did notice that the day is now simply referred to as “the 4th of July”, perhaps somewhat loosing of it’s original meaning.

I’ve been making some great friends and having a lot of fun. Although there’s still people who don’t understand me, with the weird English accent. Not to mention that there’s continually sayings and references that are alien to me. For example to me “Thanks a bunch!” is negative to me, but in America that’s like saying “Thank you very much!”. Simple things still catch me out; since cycling over here there’s been something very different about it which I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Cycling home the other day it occurred to me, I was riding on the right-hand-side of the road! Driving never seems different, but cycling certainly does.
Shopping for food is still a challenge. The food products have different packaging, names and brands. Also some of the food really isn’t available here. It’s a weird thing but I still haven’t adjusted to this, at Safeway or Albertson’s takes me a lot longer than it would to wander around Sainsbury’s for example.

Some of the things I’ve done
*Palm Springs on vacation
*Visiting England for 2 weddings
*Weekend in Chicago
*Weekend in San Diego
*Weekend in Tahoe/Reno
*Snowboarding at Squaw, Tahoe
*Bodie (Ghost Town)
*Yosemite, Jamestown, Columbia (all in CA)
*Las Vegas, NV; for a stag party
*Paradise, California
*Weekend in San Louis Obispo
*Watching races at Laguna Seca

Also attended the following concerts
*Stevie Wonder
*The Police
*Willy Nelson
*And for the anniversary, The Chemical Brothers!

Things that have changed about me.
The Californian effect has started to kick in, my choice of shoes these days is Flip-Flops without a second thought. They’re just a lot more comfortable when its warm, even with jeans too. Also I wear shorts far more, where I would automatically choose jeans the shorts come out. So my clothing has in general become a lot more relaxed as have I. Well a little anyway 😉
The American diet has taken a small toll increasing my weight by about 5 pounds since moving here. Hopefully that can be fixed by more cycling, running and generally better eating.
Something that had always bothered me about America was needing to go to so many places to do shopping. Unless you’re somewhere like San Francisco you have to go to many different places for each type of thing. For example to get shoes and socks it normally requires going to a show store and then on to a department store for the socks. This is why American’s are always saying, “I need to be able to run some errands”. This really doesn’t bother me now, it just seems the norm, running around between different stores. Parking close to the door of every store isn’t required, unlike most Americans it seems I can actually walk more than 10 yards from my car to the store.

Working life in California
Things have changed a lot for me working at Apple during this year. Firstly working for an American company is very different, with the tax, shares, social security, 401k, etc. After just a few months of working in the Core OS team I moved to working on the iPhone. A few months later the opportunity of managing an engineering team presented itself, who was I to turn that down? Over 9 months in that role and its all going very well. We shipped a number of products, even attending the launch events and the team is growing so things are really going well. Looking back on my departure from Transitive in April 2006 I can really see that I made the right decision.