Made two mistakes: 1) left power cable at Google. 2) Left lights on rental car.

The loss of the power cable made every talk a Mission impossible type adventure – certainly helped prevent me from lingering self indulgently on slides (it’d be fun to make this a rule at conferences – take too long, your laptop shuts down automatically).

The dead battery in the rental car at least stopped me from worrying about the power cable.

I had thought I’d get up early Thursday morning, stop by Google and retrieve the cable, but the lack of anything resembling power in the battery of my car made this impossible. Tip: the extra money for hertz is worth it. They had a service person there to give me a jump in about 45 minutes (btw: the Sheraton folks refused to help – “against policy”. To jumpstart a car? They have a policy for that?)

I managed to get to Macromedia, on Townsend st. in San Francisco early – walked around. Odd neighborhood – semi-industrial, but with mostly high end designer furniture and home decoration stores. The one lunch spot I found didn’t open till 11am, so I went for a walk around. The Macromedia building stands out on the street – it’s a beautiful brick building with steel awning over the front stairs.

Inside I used their self-service visitor terminal to create an id, including a photo (taken from said terminal). This was the coolest id creation thingy I’d see on the whole tour. Everyone, except Sun, had systems like this one, but the whole self-photo thing was unique to Macromedia.

I was in a small room near the lobby – but we filled it. About 30 or 35 people, mostly program managers, with some documentation, engineering and design/usability folks. The group was great – lively, asked lots of questions, and made the session more interactive than average. During Q&A. which went for a good 25 minutes, someone asked the perenial PM question “Is your sock drawer organized by color?”, To which, after faking offense at the question, I answered “I don’t have a sock drawer”, and left it at that. How mysterious.

After grabbing a cookie from the pile of foodstuffs for the talk at the back of the room, I thanked Cecilia, my host, for having me, and headed off down to San Jose, for Adobe – my last stop on the tour.

Just for fun, purely for the sake of experiment, I invited everyone I spoke with out to drinks at a nearby pub. Folks I knew were around, Matt, Chad, and some others, I asked personally, but for the rest – I left it to chance. At each gig I’d announce early that anyone interested in the book, in me, or some free beer, should head on down. The big question was who would show? Anyone? I prepared myself for drinking alone (not difficult for most writerly minded individuals). And besides, there was NBA playoffs to watch, and I could always annoy the bartenders by showing them my book every 10 seconds.

About 12 people showed over the course of a few hours. Given I’d never met most of these people before, I was pleased. None of them tried to sell me Amway goods or convince me that the end was near. The conversation and beer was good. I’d definitely do something like this again next time.

I arrived at Yahoo’s building D at 3:30 – right on time for my 4pm talk. Everything inside was wonderfully purple and yellow, including the big oversized comfy recliner in the waiting area. I explored the Yahoo store in the lobby, looking for a pair of purple and yellow boxers, while waiting for my host Bob Baxley, to arrive. I knew Bob from helping with his fine book on web applications, but this is the first time I’d meet him in person.

I spoke in a small room to about 25 or 30 project managers, designers and other folks. Met Chris (?), someone who worked in Microsoft’s Mac group, and knew me from back in the day. Always fun to meet people – never know how you know someone. Always funny to throw names and see which ones jog a memory and which ones get blank stares.

I did the schedules and lies talk, and it went fine. Finished in about an hour with another 30 minutes or so for questions. The rule of thumb: if folks stay for Q&A, you did ok. Well, most of the folks stayed (The offer of free books helps I suppose).

Book tour score: 4 talks down, 2 to go. One box of books left.

Stayed up late tuesday night working on slides for a half day at google . During the baychi talk, believe it or not, I came up with some changes I wanted to make. Didn’t get home from baychi till about 10:20pm, but was in bed before 1am.

Woke up early enough to get some exercise – I can be super cool presenter dude only if I get plenty of exercise. If I don’t exercise, the whole process of being a speaker isn’t as much fun – but If I exercise, I’m a buddhist monk (as in mellow and smiling deeply) through the whole process.

Scheduled to go on at google at 11am – Arrive early. Way early. 10:15am early. Drove around the outside of campus to see what else was in the neighborhood. I thought the campus looked familiar though I’ve never visited google before… then I saw that tall outdoor sculpture of a man – and realized it was the old Sgi campus!

Google campus has the vibe you’d expect – young, smart, and well financed. The architecture is fun. If you believe in the effect environment has on psychology, you’ll love this place. It’s stimulating and open- toys, games, volleyball court – it’s obvious the place is meant to be feel like an adult playground. And inside the buildings is much the same – big spaces, interesting shapes, open workspaces – little of the reptition and monotony found in most office buildings. (At first it reminded me of the blender, a Dr. Seus style incarnation of building A on Microsoft’s redwest campus that was remodeled into a conventional space years ago).

The talk was in a big open room in Building 43 – it felt like being inside a big piece of swiss cheese: the room was nearly triangular, with big holes leading out into other areas. The room has no doors – just two big wide slots for people to enter and leave – I’m pretty sure this was not the room they used to have their top secret uber-private conversations.

Carolyn Yates, my host, was great and showed me around, and got me set up. The tech folks were there and got me set up in 2 minutes. At 11:05, we got started. Had about 100 people there – and more showed up after we started. I remember there being a row of folks standing towards the back.

The talk was a special one – I didn’t do it elsewhere on the tour – it was about stuff I learned while working on web browsers during the first browser war. I talked about managing team size, process and specs not being evil, and the tradeoffs of business, engineering and customers. I think it fit with the issues I guessed Google was dealing with, and the audience responded well. They laughed at jokes, paid attention, and a good crowd stuck around for Q&A. Many of the questions were about Firefox, browser design and strategy, but about half were about project management and development. I should have mentioned that Adam Bosworth, currently a VP at google, was a key player in the early parts of the browser effort – they have a expert on many of these issues in their midsts.

In the afternoon I did a second section with a smaller group of project managers – the safe bet would have been to work from a set presentation, but I went informal – it was only 20 people – and I tried to build up something from questions. I’ve done this dozens of times and its usually more fun for everyone. But this session did not go well – they weren’t happy with it and I wasn’t either. The feedback I got was that more examples from my own experience would have been better – but I was afraid to focus on that as a former Microsoftie speaking on google turf – I thought it’d all be rejected if everything I said came from my war stories. So instead most of the conversation was flat, and never got into good back and forth riffs. ( If you were there, let me know what you thought – I can probably learn something). One question I should have asked, but didn’t, was whether these folks worked together or not – informal/dynamic sessions run much better if it’s an intact team, vs people in the same role in different parts of a organization.

I met several other google folks, and they were all great – asked good questions, were friendly and generous to me – But I didn’t catch nearly enough names, or business cards – a mistake I made many times on this first time solo author tour. If we met and talked, drop me a line.

I left google around 1:30pm – Just enough to time to head back to the hotel for a quick shower and something else to eat, and then off to Yahoo!

Day 1 – Tuesday, May 10th. Started not as expected – tripped getting out of the shower, dodged the toilet, but jammed my toe during the tortured dance that was required to regain my balance. Fortunately I did manage to avoid tripping over my towel and falling flat on the tile floor. Book tours are supposed to end on naked the floor- not start that way.

The non-bathroom/naked part of the day started with a trip to Sun Microsystems – The Newark campus is up north and across the bay, but staying in Sunnyvale it only took 20 minutes to get there. I arrived early and Met Aimee – the host of the series i was speaking at. She was great (though initially, and understandably, tired from lugging the 50lb box of books O’reilly had sent from her car). While waiting for Aimee at the front desk in building 16, the woman at the desk confirmed that i was, in fact, in the quietest lobby she’d ever been in. It was almost relaxing being there (minus the latent fears i had as a former Microsoft employee entering Sun Microsystem turf). I signed the usual visitor/NDA forms, got a badge, and followed Aimee inside.

At the talk we had about 40 people show up, plus another 15 or more on conference call.

Pros: Good, smart crowd. Good questions, and no one fell asleep or threw anything (two hallmarks of decent presentations). They laughed at some of my jokes. Cons: 25 minute struggle with a projector, which included an inquisition about my laptop, ane it’s inability to produce proper video – but I was vindicated, as a replacement projector worked fine. Gave away half the box of books, saving the rest for lecture #2, the biggest (or so I thought) of the tour – baychi, later in the day. One of the good questions I got included a good pointer for a book I should check out about a biography of Cray (the supercomputer dude) and the way he organized teams.