Rain In Cupertino

It was actually raining in Silicon Valley when I arrived after my seminar at Redmond, Washington. It continued to drizzle the next day when I went through six interviews with the Microsoft SVC division at Mountain View. While I was in Cupertino during the summer of 2005, the valley didn’t rain for the entire three months. I drove to Apple campus after my interviews and stopped by DA3 to visit the Server people, specifically my former co-workers from the Apple Remote Desktop group.

I called Mike Margolis outside of DA3 to let me into the building. While I was waiting for my escort, Jussi came out of the building and he barely recognized me. He wore his favorite gecko shirt (but no matching shorts this time). We exchanged a few words. Upstairs, I met senior engineer Mike Stein (who recently got married in China) and Rob Cavanagh, ARD’s tester and lovable cynic. The project I worked on will be released sometime in the next few months, and I’m pretty excited. I found out that my former manager Robert is leaving Apple for good, and at the moment he no longer works with the ARD group. There were a few other people I wanted to visit, but there was simply no time. My flight was set to leave bright and early at 725h Wednesday morning. Sorry Jonathan...but I think you are coming back to Tallahassee at the end of March. If you are, I promise I’ll make it up to you then.

Dan Keen, Mike, Jason Townsend, and Joe Engel (the otter man) came along to the impromptu dinner. Joe complimented my bear hat and said that he likes it better than my panda hat because it looks more like an otter. Today incidentally is Joe’s birthday, he turned 25. :) I requested to eat at my favorite ramen restaurant in Mountain View called Ryowa, where a large bowl of very good ramen is served with slices of tender pork, seaweed, miso, bamboo and mushrooms. All this for only 6.50, which is cheap...for California. In Taiwan I can get the same item for little over a dollar. I used to go to Ryowa whenever I rode the Caltrain, because it is located within walking distance from the train station. It is also a tiny little place, hidden within the main downtown area. Afterwards, we went next door to a little cafe and got some bubble tea. Taiwanese people were everywhere, cheesy Chinese pop music played in the background and I ordered my drink in Mandarin.

AZN Yuppie Pride, baby.

Afterwards, we returned to campus and said our farewells.

What a weird and tiring trip, sunny in Seattle and rainy in Cupertino. Even though I’ve only been in touch with these people at various times throughout the year through IM and Facebook, that night it felt like I hadn’t left Cupertino at all.