bcm | San Francisco

I moved to San Francisco in the spring of 1996. I left school to find a job in the newly hip dot com scene. I worked as a programmer until 2001, when i moved to Australia for most of the year. I came back to SF in January of 2001 and am floating here for the moment, trying to find some direction.

1996-1997

I worked for a frat brother's Internet startup my entire senior year of college and as a consequence failed out. Faced with the prospect of a fifth year finishing an industrial engineering degree, I hit up my Spacebar friends in SF for a job and surprisingly got a bite from Sega. One TND and weekend interview later, I had a job, and I left Ithaca for good the weekend before final exams.

My first home was a dirty, roach-infested flat above the Maz Deli on the corner of 3rd and Bryant. My chat friend Fixer worked across the street and had just moved into the place a few months before. The cheap rent ($400 or so) and the opportunity to live with somebody I kinda sorta knew were too good to pass up. I lived there for almost two years, enduring an ever changing cast of roommates (9 or 10 in all) and visitors (including some crazy Germans and some chat people from Oberlin none of us had ever met). Probably most everybody lived in a place like Maz when they were just out of college. Lots of partying, little cleaning. I look back on those memories with a mixture of fondness and revulsion.

During this time I worked initially for Sega and then, in the second half of 96, at a tiny little web shop on 3rd Street called Art and Science. I completely bluffed my way into both of those jobs, and I was almost completely unskilled at my trade. This didn't stop my friend from hiring me to work for his even tinier software startup, but they ran out of seed money within 3 months, and I was out of a job again. I again bullshitted my way into a job at Ikonic Interactive, one of the larger web houses in town, down at Spear and Howard, about 4 blocks from Maz. After six months there I had enough real skills to take a software engineering job at Critical Path, where I worked until the autumn of 2001.

1998-1999

In February of 1998 I moved to the Mission, taking over my friend Jim's lease on a 3rd floor apt at 15th and Guerrero. A lot of friends lived in the immediate neighborhood, and for the first time I had cheap eats and dive bars within two blocks of my house. I was very happy there at first, but after a while, constantly chasing bums out of the doorway next to my front gate and saying no to a dozen panhandlers each way to and from work got to be a drag.

Not a lot of interest happened during this time of my life. I worked a lot, geeked at home quite often, and partied some. Most of my friends did the same thing. We were all obsessed with our dot com startup companies. Critical Path went public in the spring of 99, and we all had our eyes on the prize: the end of the six month lockout period in September (October?). I got dumped by my girlfriend of two years towards the end of 98 which contributed to a lot of heartache and beer drinking. It also forced me make new friends.

2000-2001

By February of 2000 I was able to afford a nice four bedroom apartment in Buena Vista, up in the hills in the center of town. The place was pretty new (especially the kitchen) and had more space than I could have imagined using. I embraced the yuppie home lifestyle and filled the place with brand new furniture and artwork. I leased a new BMW 740il and started exploring the city and surrounded areas much more extensively than was ever possible on foot. I used to make my friends laugh by putting Metallica and Phish on shuffle in the 740's cd player. That's something you don't see every day. I also had the opportunity to visit Dublin, Amsterdam, Rome and Venice, both for work and for pleasure, and I finally lost my fear of traveling to foreign lands.

As they say, however, money can't buy happiness, and I soon got extremely bored - with my job, my home, my car, and my future prospects. I looked for an opportunity for change, and when Elly's chat friend Olivia visited from Australia, her stories inspired me to visit that place and check it out for a possible move. So in January of 2001 I went out there, and before two weeks had passed I had a house and was planning a move. I came back (with a brand new digital camera), packed up, had a going away party, and was gone again in just under a month (altho I returned in the summer for the geek convention circuit and a friend's wedding).

2002-?

Towards the end of 2001, the Australian Dept. of Immigration informed me that I wouldn't be receiving my permanent residency visa until at least July 2002, so I decided to head back to SF to spend some time with my friends, enjoy a spring and summer in the outdoors, and do some traveling across the states. I got a place at Duboce and Sanchez and dug in. A lot has happened since then, but it will have to wait for another time.