Flutterby™! : Lunch at Pixar

Had lunch over at Pixar's new digs today. Lunch was quite yummy, food service sure has come a long way since Elroy's. It was the first time I've been on that lot since construction was finished. Heard the tales of the cracking floorboards, the brick sent back because it was the wrong color, the $20k throw rugs, the multi-hundreds of dollars a cord wood for the pizza oven, the guy whose job it was to wander around and touch up the faux-weathering on the hand-bolted beams, the new render farm, with the next generation Sun machines that are actually 10% slower than the previous boxes, and two times the racks and several times the power consumption the room was designed for. Names of the tour-guides elided to protect their careers... I enjoyed much of my time at Pixar, but overall I'm glad to have moved on; that the money was spent on making the building a showcase and not on the amenities that could have made working there a much nicer experience speaks of the corporate culture issues that lead to my decisions. Despite the rumours, I do think that a sphinx with the face of Steve Jobs in the fields beside the entrance would be a little over-the-top.