Rhonda Bracey: At Random

After doing some laundry, I left Monterey around 10am, stopping in Gilroy to change some of the underwear I bought a few days ago (I got the wrong model!). Then it was back on Highway 101 to Mountain View where I had a lovely lunch with Shelley, one of the Lone Writers group.

Travelling through Silicon Valley is such a thrill for a geek… The 101 goes right past these buildings: Intel, Sun, Yahoo, McAfee, WebEx, and more. Just think, back in 1995 when I drove that route often in a two week period, virtually none of those companies existed, or existed in the same way they do now.

I left Mountain View just on 2pm and was in the hotel in San Francisco just after 3pm. Finally, I have wireless broadband!! So I can catch up on blog posts, upload photos etc. Though I think I’ll be doing most of that tomorrow morning, as I’m waiting for my friend Char (from Boston) to return to the hotel room, then we’ll be out of here to go the the monthly dinner meeting of the Berkeley Chapter of STC.

(Anyone notice a theme with many of the blog post titles for this trip, yet???)

Update: Char and I just returned from the Berkeley Chapter meeting where we both met some lovely people. The dinner was good (home-cooked Thai green chicken curry), and the panel of speakers was good too. A nice feature was for each person to introduce themselves to the group prior to the main part of the meeting starting. That gave me a good sense of who did what, and where. The main meeting was a panel who focused on questions about what they looked for when hiring tech writers. While Linda U kept the panel on topic, some of the discussion roamed into related areas such as outsourcing, contractors, and the like. There were some good questions from the audience, and some interesting comments from the range of panelists. Two of the panelists worked for very large corporations in the Bay Area (Oracle and IBM), while the other two worked for (or had recently worked for) smaller organisations. However, in all cases, they each managed a team of at least five technical writers and associated professionals.