So Courtney came out to Seattle, and after a grueling weekend of searching we finally found a really great house to rent. It’s in West Seattle, or maybe White Center, or possibly Burien. I’m not sure what area Seattlites would call it, but I’m going with West Seattle.
We got a nice, 2 bedroom + office place with a fenced back yard for Sonja and a 2 car garage for me. Hooray!
During my Seattle visit I got to visit the Microsoft campus to meet with a friend of my boss. It was pretty amazing to finally see a place I would have once considered Mecca. When I was a kid I thought DOS was the best thing ever, and I Bill Gates the best programmer in the world. My feelings on that subject have changed some over the years, but I still don’t discount the amount of work that comes out of MS.
It looks like it would be an awesome place to work. We had lunch in one of the cafeterias which basically resembled your average Vegas casino buffet. As far as I could tell my plate of chicken, rice and salad cost $5. I didn’t pay, but I think that’s about what it was. And drinks are all free. There are giant drink machines in the hall outside the cafeteria.
Everyone I saw seemed upbeat, and the dress code appears to be “Whatever…”. The buildings were all very nice and everyone seemed to have an office. When a programmer is a little boy (or girl) instead of hearing stories about Candy Land where everything is made of candy, we hear stories about Microsoft where “Every programmer gets an office with a door on it!”
I also got to visit the Microsoft employee store. The discounts are sick, which makes some sense, since the real world prices are sick. A copy of Visual Studio went for $50 and the various versions of Office could be had for anywhere between $30 and $60 or so.
The rest of my Seattle visit was mostly spent finding a place to live. Most nights I was there I would drive over to West Seattle, call Courtney and then drive around visiting houses and talking to her about them. It was frustrating, mainly because very few places allow pets, and also because I got screwed out of the perfect house.
So now it’s just under 2 weeks out that we’ll be moving to Seattle. I have really mixed feelings about the whole thing. I am incredibly excited about living in Seattle because of all the great things there are to do, but I am really going to miss my brother and my friends in Kansas City. It’s a really good opportunity though, and I am pretty sick of Kansas City, so I am ready to go.
I like KC, but honestly, for someone who is active and not raising a family, it’s a dead zone.
So that’s that for now. I’m going to be really busy over the next two weeks getting packed and trying to figure out how I’ll fit all of my stuff and all of Courtney’s stuff into a 24′ truck.