• A [[trip]].
  • I'll be in [[Seattle]] and [[San Francisco]] during [[April 2023]].
  • For [[work]].

[[2023-04-16]]

Writing this on the plane before taking off from ZRH. I'll have a stopover in Toronto before travelling on to Seattle, where I will stay until next Sunday 2023-04-23.

I plan to use some of the time to work; I'm way behind on summit preparation and I hope to catch up a bit. But I will also try to just enjoy the flight generally.

I ended up reading two chapters of a book, reviewing three documents and sleeping about 1h in the first flight. Not bad! Now about to take off from Toronto. I feel like I will crash soon but I'll try to keep going.

[[2023-04-29]]

Overall impressions

As half-expected I ended up not writing much during the trip. Usually one thing leads to another and I try to focus on being present, in particular around friends and other people I like, instead of writing in the Agora. Remaining connected with friends back home is also a priority, as it was in this case.

Overall I'm happy with the result of the trip, and also definitely happy about going back home. The summit went well, and meeting people face to face is always interesting and remains important w.r.t. being able to effectively work on current projects and generate ideas and plans for new ones.

During the trip I referred to my visit often as my [[farewell tour]], half in jest -- but with some degree of truth. I don't know what will happen, but thinking about it in [[multiverse]] terms (my default framing as of the time of writing) I'd wager that in a significant number of timelines this was indeed my last US visit, either because I die before the next occasion, or I get laid off, or corporate leadership cracks down further on travel. In this timeline though (which one?) maybe I will be back to the US as early as next month, although in that occasion it would be to the east coast. In this other one (which one?) maybe I will be back to the west coast again by the end of the year even, or more likely in [[2024]], in particular if I'm still employed by Google by then and the company has returned to a more "reasonable" (from my point of view, and that of many others) travel policy.

[[Seattle]]

In Seattle I stayed with my friend [[Chris]] and it was again awesome. We watched the last episode of [[Picard]] and he introduced me to [[Voyager]] and, well, [[Seven of Nine]], for which I am thankful :) I plan to continue watching Voyager from where we left off, episode three of season four. During the days we mostly focused on work (it was summit week); on Friday we even had a work meeting together with other people with Meet (where I work) and P&S (where he works) as there's interesting interactions due to a new project.

On Saturday, which was really my only free day as on Sunday I had to travel to San Francisco (Sunnyvale), we walked through Seattle Downtown, or rather through Capitol Hill. We means [[Chris]], [[Olof]] and later [[Patrick]]. We went to a very nice bookstore that [[Angelina]] spotted remotely and I had somehow missed on all my previous visits. From there we walked up to [[Volunteer Park]], which I thought has a lovely name. We intended to see the graves of [[Bruce Lee]] and [[Brandon Lee]] but got there too late (meaning after 16!) and the cemetery was somehow completely closed; back in Switzerland they don't really close so that took me by surprise. I suggested climbing the fence but people were not into breaking the law (fair; that was probably the right call), so in the end we just walked around and enjoyed spring and then we went to a bar called [[The Lookout]] where we met with other friends. I met Chris's friend [[Nick]] and his partner, who I thought were cool.

On Sunday on the way to the airport I had an interesting conversation with the [[Lyft]] driver. That happened several times this trip; this kind of spontaneous connection is a seemingly good side effect of the lack of public transport in many US locations, although I'd wish it wasn't so asymmetrical -- meaning mediated by a user/provider relationship, in particular one where I know the person driving me is not well compensated. It turns out that Lyft takes a way larger slice of the pie than I thought -- more than 40%, sometimes more than 50% -- and on top of that the drivers can't easily tell how much Lyft charged for a trip, only what they receive. IMHO this makes Lyft ripe for disruption by an ethical competitor (hopefully a distributed cooperative of drivers, or a federation of local cooperatives? or at least a less greedy corporation), but in practice of course I don't know enough about the domain to be able to spot the difficulties beyond those typical of a [[coordination problem]].

[[San Francisco]]

I say San Francisco but I really mean [[Sunnyvale]]; I didn't set foot on San Francisco this time. I didn't really have time considering the distance between San Francisco and where I was staying, and the fact that I was flying out on Friday and intended to work every day. On previous visits I stayed in San Francisco proper and took the shuttle, but for a short purely work-oriented visit it didn't make sense, in particular given that Google is running fewer shuttles.

I stayed half an hour's walk away from the campus my team is in, [[Moffett Place]]. The walk was pleasant enough but sometimes adventurous -- I kept searching for a better option that didn't require so many sections without a sidewalk walking by the highway, but after getting sidetracked a few times and ending up in nobody's land (meaning empty parking lots cracking, surrounded by run down buildings and overgrown grass) I just became more comfortable with walking on the curb.

On Sunday when I arrived I had [[Pav Bhaji]] for the first time ever, and I found it a memorable and recommendable experience.

(Last time I was in [[San Francisco]] I saw the [[Agora]].)