Today is Good Friday so I am off from work at the office. Had to be up a little early as we have a busy day of hanging out at the Pertino offices here in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley, California. So I was up around six thirty. Dominica slept in and spent the day just relaxing in the hotel for the most part. She ordered in food and went for a job around town at some point but mostly just relaxed. This was really a chance for her to see California and to escape any semblance of having to work for a couple of days. Kind of a forced vacation.
Mark, Rich and I got over to Pertino nice and early with Rich driving us around in his rental car. They had a breakfast spread for us and we ate breakfast and watched a presentation on the company. They have only just come out of stealth mode and are still very, very much start ups. So this was an early peek at where they feel that they are going to be going as a company.
We had a really nice day working with everyone at Pertino. We sat in on focus groups and user experience tests and the three of us even got a chance to give a presentation at the corporate “town hall” luncheon where the whole company turned out to talk to us and do a live question and answer session with us. We had pizza for lunch and this time it was deep dish and, again, I was totally blown away by how awesome the pizza was here in California.
By mid-afternoon Pertino took the three of us out to the Computer History Museum which was a really cool “field trip” to get to do. I got a poster and book from there as well which I plan to put up in my office at home. It is a very cool history of programming languages poster showing how programming language families change and evolve over time and what we once had and how it morphed into what we have today.
We went back to the hotel for a bit to relax for maybe an hour or two. We got Dominica who had been invited out for the evening with us and we joined the Pertino team at a bocce ball restaurant right in the middle of town. What a neat idea. So we played some bocce in which I started out well but Dominica’s team quickly crushed my team and we gave up allowing others a chance to play. It was a really neat and interesting way to spend the evening.
A few of us remained and had dinner at the bocce restaurant before heading back to the hotel to turn in for an early-ish night. Tomorrow is our sight seeing day around San Francisco and we have to get packed up and out of the hotel early so we need our sleep.