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I got hit by a car on my way to work on the second day on the job. (Yesterday.) Two cars turning left across me. The first one saw me, and had enough time to turn. The second car didn’t see me, and didn’t have enough time to turn. I was barrelling down the hill from La Isla Tortuga and couldn’t stop.

The only immediate problem was a little road rash on my left shin and a totally unrideable front wheel. The driver stopped, but wasn’t very helpful. It’s a long story. I ended up getting a ride to BART in a police car.

I’m a little more sore in my right hand, arm and neck today. Not sure what the best medicine is. Ibuprofen, probably.

Some of you know that I have finally settled down to a job after precisely 2 years and 1 day of unemployment. Many of you don’t.

I spent seven hours today in Hayward, CA being oriented. Woo. Tomorrow I’ll get to learn what my job is really about. Something about monitoring solar fields. Designing sensor networks and the data pathways used to pull that data out for the analysts to use. Also, it will involve using Windows. But my company (Optisolar) just signed a huge contract with PG&E to build a 550 megawatt field in California. Which is more than an order of magnitude bigger than the largest field currently in the US. Exciting times.

In addition, I learned that the Hayward Fault tends to cause a major earthquake every 140 years or so. It hasn’t caused one in 143 years at the moment. It’s likely to be in the neighborhood of 7.2 - 8. We’re 1.5 miles from the fault.  Exciting times.