San Jose...Again

Yes, it's yet another trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. This time, I'm headed back to AMD HQ in Sunnyvale, California.

This time, I'm only here for a few days. I've recently taken over some new teams at work and I wanted to meet some of them face-to-face. I like for the members of my organization to actually "know" who they work for, rather than some faceless person that just sends them e-mails all the time.

Since descriptions of these meetings don't make good blog posts, I will write about some other places that I visited during my trip. I didn't have a lot of spare time, so I was lucky that these places aren't too far away from AMD headquarters.

First, I made sure to stop by the ultimate electronics store - Fry's. I've talked about Fry's before, but wanted to give you a little peak. Warning - this is geek central. But, if you're reading this blog, you already know what you're in for.

To begin with, the decor of each Fry's is somewhat unique. The entrances/building architecture for each store has a different theme:

This was near my apartment in Burbank

Fry's is designed especially for people like me. Everything that you could possible hope for that has an on/off switch. The variety of the merchandise is amazing. Everything from consumer electronics devices, to the individual components that make up those gadgets. Here's a visual tour to help explain what I mean:

Computer logic boards and individual computer chips

Awesome remote-control toys

Huge selection of Blu-Ray movies and DVDs

Massive collection of appliances

Some things that don't have an on/off switch...

Huge selection of magazines, including every technical periodical for geeks

One note on that picture of the candy. When you go to "check out" at Fry's, you have to run a gauntlet of "impulse buy" items that usually stretches for at least 100 feet. I'm not joking. You never know when you'll need a bag of Doritos and a Snickers bar when you're assembling a computer. I just found out that they have a Fry's in Austin. YES!!!

At lunch, I decided to drive by two places that I worked at, in the South Bay. Back in the 90's, I worked for Apple Computer. It was an incredible time. I'll have to write a post about the incredible projects I was part of - for now, it's just about the locations. One building is located in Santa Clara. We call it the "Cheese Building":

Not a great picture from my camera phone - but you can tell that the building basically looks like a wedge of cheese...on its side. This is probably the first workplace that my older kids will remember. The building is quite distinctive. You can see that there are terraces along the edge. Those were great places to hang out in the California sunshine.

The next stop was...shall we say....Mecca. World headquarters for Apple Computer:

This is where all the magical elves work, that produce those amazing iMacs, iPhones and iPads that normal people love. I have a special reverence for this part of Cupertino. I stopped by one of the buildings that I spent the most time in, Bandley 4:

This humble building housed the Apple TV studios (more on that in another post), that I worked on. I have some incredibly great memories of Apple and this building. The company was a bit smaller when I worked there, but the dedication to great products was still the same.

I took a few minutes to visit the Company Store, which is a smaller version of the Apple Stores that you've seen at some malls. This is where employees can buy Apple products at a discount. It's where regular customers can find a pretty decent assortment of Apple accessories and software. Good stuff.

Well, that's all the free time I had. Tomorrow, it's back to Boston so I can prepare for my trip to China next week. Never a dull moment!!!!