Travel

I have traveled fairly extensively as part of my job at Sony, NEC, and all my previous jobs as well. I believe I spent more than 50% of my first year at NEC out of town, working at customer sites or at trade shows. A large part of my job at NEC was convincing developers to support PowerVR, which I did by in part by taking starving developers out to dinner at some of the best restaurants I could find (a great way to make people welcome you back anytime you want to visit.) As a result, I know some of the best restaurants in all these cities that will allow someone dressed like a typical game developer to eat there. Prior to that I traveled to about half of the Virtual World Entertainment sites to do installation, maintenance or act as technical director during some type of media event. My consulting practice involved a number of trips to various customer locations for on-site work and the job at Digital Interface Systems involved doing design, evaluation, installation and trouble-shooting on-site in factories and steel mills. I'm a fairly experienced traveler and am very good at making efficient and inexpensive travel arrangements. I do enjoy traveling but would prefer not to spend more than half of my time out of town on the average. Below is a list of the cities I am most familiar with and have lived or worked in for two weeks or more. I've been to quite a few other places as well, but haven't stayed long enough to become very familiar with them.

Places I've lived (in reverse order)

San Francisco, CA: Living here since June 1999, very pretty with amazing scenery and a very comfortable climate (at least near the bay)...unfortunately, sky-high state taxes, land prices and rents make it a very expensive and difficult place to live.
Austin, TX: Lived there 2 years, full of tex-mex, bar-b-q and other southern food and a major hub for tech companies. Austin is also famous for it's variety of live music and the great hill-country scenery. It's hot in the summer, but the dryness makes it fairly livable. It doesn't rain often, but when it does it pours like it's been saving up all month. Cheapest major tech hub to live in, no state income tax!
Chicago, IL: Lived here 7 years, probably the best food city in the US, just about every kind of ethnic food imaginable available cheap and in quantity (most restaurants give you so much you won't be able to stand up for about an hour after eating). A terribly convenient city if you live and work downtown, everything is in walking or public transport distance.
West Lafayette, IN: Lived here 4 years while attending Purdue University. Rarely got very far off campus, good pizza and some good greek food (at least when I was there).
South Bend, IN: Born and raised here, it's a fairly large Indiana town. Not terribly dense in any part of the city, has tons of mini-malls and shopping centers.

Other Places Where I've Spent Significant Time or Visited Frequently

Tokyo, Japan: Spent about a week here for Sony (so far), it's an interesting and densely populated city with extremely good public transportation. Thankfully, if you have some clue of where you are going, it's possible to navigate the subways even if you don't speak Japanese. People are generally pretty friendly and willing to try and help, but it's still not for the faint of heart. You get a pretty good idea of what it's like to be illiterate because so many things are in Japanese only. You can get by without a native guide, but odds are if you do you won't get to eat in some of the more interesting places or try the most interesting food.
London, England: Have spent over two months working there during a number of separate trips, London comes very close to Chicago in convenience and food selection. Being in europe, the choices of food tend to be more exotic, not to mention the food being a lot more expensive. The public transport system is amazingly convenient and cheap.
Las Vegas, NV: Site of many of the trade shows I regularly visit and the location of one of Virtual World Entertainment's locations. I kind of like the flash and shows of this city, at least in small doses. And since I rarely gamble, it's safe for me to visit.
Walnut Creek, CA: I helped install one of the first Virtual World Entertainment locations here, during a 103 degree heatwave!
San Jose, CA: The usual location of the Computer Game Developers conference.
Los Angeles, CA: Regular location of many trade shows and the home of quite a few game developers I used to support for NEC.
Salt Lake City, UT: Another location with several game developers I supported for NEC
San Diego, CA: Location of Sony's 989 studios and the Sony labs responsible for cable TV and satellite products (among other things) as well as a place I visited frequently to support NEC game developers and the location of one of the Virtual World Entertainment sites.
Seattle, WA & Redmond, WA: Have spent over a month here working with various Microsoft related things, attending conferences and so on.
Manhattan, NY: Visited here a number of times while consulting for McGraw Hill.
Palm Springs, CA: Location of the twice-a-year Intel Developers Forum which I usually attended (till joining Sony)
Princeton, NJ: Worked with Sarnof Labs on a project for Hasbro to create a VR headmount game system for the home market. The project was way ahead of it's time (1995) and pretty much failed because adequate computer power simply couldn't be provided cheaply enough.