My first day at Grant Street Group was a nice mix of gentle easing me into the water and tossing me into the deep end.

I got the expected set of papers to fill out as a new contractor and a guided tour around the office to be introduced to everyone who works there (the ratio of onsite to remote employees is swinging, but there are still a majority of onsite workers.)

I also got my new MacBook Pro and had some time to play with it, learn some ropes.

I watched most of a training video (had trouble playing it on my Mac because it was in some obscure WMV format, but finally got it to play in my Windows XP VMWare guest), got a username and password set up on most all of the systems I'll be working with, and met (virtually) with my team leader on working with the codebase.

Before day one was over, I had a handful of issues assigned to me to address.

At lunchtime the manager over all development and another telecommuter that was in town took me to Mexico City for dinner. I was excited to have some mexican food as it is one of my favorite food genres. I was a little unsure of what to expect because my experience eating mexican in New York City a few years ago was so bad ("I ordered an enchilada." "That is your enchilada right there." "No, this is a quesadilla!")

Mexico City wasn't bad, but it definitely represents a far-from-the-border interpretation.

After work, I grabbed some dinner at Subway and took a cab to Millvale, a few miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh for the Porcupine Tree concert I had a ticket to. More on that in another posting.