Holy first day. Seriously... I haven't felt this n00b in a long, long time - I'm both stressed and excited about it.

So first of all, the drive. It's longer, but sooo much better than my last drive. My drive to Pioneer was about half the distance of my new drive - however I did it in exactly the same amount of time - 22 minutes. On my old route, there was no opportunity to pass slow cars due to all the back roads, but now I can weave down i235 just the way an F150 should... or something.

Next comes the Atmosphere. I'm in Valley Junction - a small village with lots of local shops. It's basically a ghost town at 9am, which was unexpected, but I guess it makes sense. I walked up the stairs into my new building at 8:50 to find only 2 girls there. Everyone else showed up around 9... so apparently I don't have to start waking up any earlier... actually, I could sleep in a bit.

Our office is on the 2nd floor of an old building with creeky stairs in the front and wobbly stairs in the back - totally different than Pioneer. The walls have a few rasterbator posters up, giant space invaders wall decals, a Red 5 Pirate flag, a disco ball, etc, etc. I sit in the corner of a big room with 3 other people - a designer, a front-end developer, and another back-end programmer. My "cube" is pretty sweet too.

Another added bonus with my job is that there's a cooler of free pop... but unfortunately it's only coke products - no diet dewski. :-(

As far as being a total n00b. I'm using a lot of technologies that I'm either completely or relatively clueless about. Mac, RoR, and UNIX. Red 5 is basically an all Mac shop, so I was given a G5. It's a nice PC... however I've never been a Mac guy, so it was an interesting day. I knew I was in trouble when I had to ask Todd (the other programmer) how to open my DVD ROM.

Most of the morning I spent setting up my Mac with OSX Leopard and the dev environment that I'll be working with. macports, gems, rails, mongrel, coda, sqlite3, etc. Leopard is pretty neat. I rather like the virtual desktop thing that you get with Spaces.

Lunch... I love my new lunch options. I'm close to the southside, downtown, and West Des Moines. I've got soooo many more places to eat at my leisure. Plus I can actually meet my downtown friends from time to time. Today, we ended up at Star Bar where everyone had a drink or two. Eat that, Pioneer friends! (drinking isn't allowed during lunch at Pioneer)

The rest of the afternoon I spent learning RoR and writing some code - sort of. Stupid rails and their idea of making coding, not coding, heh.

I'm really excited about RoR development. And finally I'm going to be forced into learning UNIX well. I've always halfass learned it for troubleshooting... but now (especially with RoR), I have to sit down and really use it. I love that Mac OSX runs on a unix system. Having terminal and servers all there without really setting anything up is pretty awesome.

T minus 2 months until I become a mac fanboy... dammit.

Some things that I'm excited to not use are Microsoft, Borland, and Sybase products. Weeeeeeee! I'm super stoked to be back into real world web development using different/new technologies in a small, relaxed environment.

Oh - and no dress code.