Our hero goes to Portland Oregon and doesn’t see any of it

So I was scheduled to go to Portland Oregon (well actually a place called Hillboro which is about 40 minuted outside Portland). For some reason (I suspect convenience) I was tapped to go to Intel and help with certification work we were doing on a  product.

Anyway because of the concert the day before I couldn’t fly out till the day of the first meeting. To get a flight early enough to get there at something even approaching on time I had to get the 6:15 flight from Oakland which is about 40-50 minutes away from where I live. This all equated to me getting up at 3:30  am.

So I got up got washed and dressed then headed off to Oakland arrived there in fairly good time but then had to queue to get my boarding pass. Found after that that I could have gone straight to a machine a few sections over and printed it out with no queue since I had no hold luggage.

Looked at the breakfast on offer, a burgerking offering suspect looking sandwiches made of croissant, so decided to abstrain and just grabbed a soft drink with caffeine in it.

Got a nap on the flight over which was pretty good went from barely keeping my eyes open to reasonably alert by landing. Found Portland airport is quite large.

Sorted out a car, a fairly crappy Chevy Impala, and then drove off to Intel.

The landscape here in Oregon is a bit more green than in California which tends to be a more yellow beige sort of pallet (once you get out of the constantly watered grass areas). As I got closer to Hillsboro the area became all flat mostly farm land and pretty empty. Then there slap bang in what seems like nowhere is  a massive three building intel campus.

I met my collegue Alex and the Intel guy Martin and they took me through. Inside the place was pretty cavernous inside but even given that the people’s cubical were quite a lot smaller than my work uses so they must really want to pack them in.

We spent a while at intel then headed to another outfit SpecWerkZ who despite their skateboarder dude style name do independent certification work. It is run  by a lady called Diane out of a sort of large shed (of the sort you’d expect to find a garage or auto shop in) next to the local airport. One of their guys ran some more tests and made some conjectures that I didn’t really agree with but it’s hard to argue with them since they are the people who get you certified. Their engineer made a couple of fairly basic mistakes but still hard to get them to agree with you.

Anyway all that means more work for the UK guys and hopefully they will be able to sort things overnight.

Alex and I had dinner at the Portland City Grill which is a nice bar/restaurant on the 30th floor of a building in downtown Portland. It offers some fantastic views of the city and a very nice meal and drinks. The drive in to portland showed that Hillsboro was a bit more than empty farmland obviously a lot had grown up around the large intel buildings. Anyway before we could relax we first prepared a status report for the UK with all the details (I say we Alex did that and I proofed it) with that ready we could send it later. We had mojitos and then some beers the name of which I forget as well as some nice clams and Peking duck for starters then I had a rib eye for dinner. We drove back to the hotel to leave things for the next day.

I was pretty worn out so I’ll probably crash soon. I’ll pick up the story tomorrow, I’m here till 8pm so maybe if all goes well I’ll get to see some more of Portland.

Next morning I woke at 7 but for some reason was still dog tired. Found new code from the UK dozed of while uploading it to the test boards. Managed to stay awake so as to make the meeting at Intel (it looks nothing like those tv ads with robots and holograms if anything it’s a little shabby). Once there the security guard gave my colleague a hard time for being a californian, in jest.

The morning meeting went from having to perform a full retest to a more limited test we could get done in the time we had left. We headed over to SpecWerkZ and got the ball rolling. My laptop then died or at least the screen did which meant I couldn’t do much work. Alex had to catch an early flight back so with the testing still running he left the equipment with me and after a nice lunch of Vietnamese noodles he headed to pdx.

I read my nook and waited out the remaining tests. At about 530 they had finished to their satisfaction so I packed things up and headed to pdx.

The hire car I had was a Chevy impala which is some sort of antelope I guess implying grace and speef. This thing has the grace of a brick and accelerates like it’s underwater. It also had terrible brakes all in all not a fun car to drive it made me appreciate just how responsive and powerful my golf is.

If this is an example, American made cars are shit.

Anyway made it to the airport found my flight was delayed till 9. It’s now 851 and apparently the plane is landing now so I’ll believe that when I see it.

Then it’s just a 40 minute drive back to home where I will likely pass out. It’s been an interesting trip didn’t see much of Portland but well there’s always next time.