Wednesday, April 3, 2002
I created the presentation materials for the demo of the School of Pharmacy Web site that I shall be doing in 2 weeks. Joel and I had lunch at Nan King Road Bistro. Cindy and I talked about my performance review. I wasn't very happy to hear that she didn't seem to have sent my feedback from our meeting in August 2000 up the chain of people responsible for determining my salary. In August she told me that the University of California sets the same salary ranges statewide for positions, so it fails to take into account the cost of living in each area. Someone in my position in Davis or San Diego would make the same amount of money, but would have a better quality of life because their rents are less expensive. I told her that I'd already started looking for other jobs and that Patrick and I were already researching other cities to which we shall take our talents. I love the things I'm doing at work, but we're tired of having 46% to 77% of our income stolen by San Francisco landlords. The technology boom ended last year, and rents are now dropping (27% reported recently) but they're not dropping fast enough to make it worth our while to stay. Two days ago I found a great document at the Web site of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. The document is called "Technology and Tolerance: The Importance of Diversity to High-Technology Growth." The report by Richard Florida and Gary Gates provides a rather detailed analysis of measures of tolerance, diversity, and high-technology success in 50 metropolitan areas of the United States. We found very interesting data, such as Austin, Texas ranking third (behind San Francisco and Washington, D.C.) in gay population. (Atlanta was fourth, San Diego was fifth.) Austin also ranked #1 in technology growth and #4 in the population with college degrees. We had been considering Charlotte, South Carolina as a city in which we might live, but after seeing its very poor numbers, it got the big X on our list. (All Charlotte's measures were in the 30's or 40's [out of 50] except for technology growth, which was 12.) I installed Office XP tutorials for Joel. I made business cards for Tina. Patrick and I signed up with RentTech. I checked out Craigslist fora (including San Diego and Austin).