And Georgia it is...
Everything went pretty quickly the last couple of weeks:
About, two weeks ago, I was contacted by a company (let's call it company B) in the Atlanta area to whom I had sent my resume earlier in May. We organized a phone interview the week before memorial day. It went fine :-)
Very luckilly, I had planned vacation in the Atlanta area for an extended memorial day week-end weeks before company B contacted me and I already had a plane ticket to Atlanta. I immediately thought, that's a good sign. Do you believe in signs? I am actually starting to... The week before I sent them my resume, I stopped at a redlight while driving and the car in front of me had Georgia plates (with the Peach). I remembered it because that is not current at all, Georgia plates in California. It was actually the first one I saw since I live here. Troubling isn't it?
Even better, last week-end as I was driving to the grocery store (the Stater Bros on Iowa Avenue in Riverside, CA to be precise), they were doing road construction and the regular road to get there was closed. I more or less followed the detour signs, left, right, left, etc.. starting to be a little lost until I make a right and realize I am on "Atlanta Avenue". Wouaw, I did not know there were an Atlanta Avenue in Riverside before. OK, I stop because I am sure you are completly freaking out right now (please stop the Twilight zone music in the background), but I guarantee you I am not making that up! Or maybe I never noticed Atlanta Avenue before cos Georgia was not on my mind at this time :-). Or more possibly, it could just be a bug in the matrix!
Anyways, I proposed them (company B) to stop by for an interview on thursday 27th. They accepted and it went well too :-)
Finally, yesterday, they gave me a very good offer that I happily accepted :-)))))!!!

Company B is truely great, very interesting work, a great working environment. In the Atlanta office, it is a small team of only engineers, about 10 people. The company is overall about 150 people. The work is also going to be more in touch with current technologies, a lot of object programming (C++), a lot of multithreading, and I am even going to do some IPv6 work. I was starting to be a little concerned to do so much traditional programming in C and sometimes I felt I am in the same situation as a Cobol or Fortran programmer 15 years ago. In this industry, everything moves so fast, you have to be constently careful not to get yourself distanced... IMO, if you don't have object programming experience nowadays, you are going to be in trouble within 5 years or it is going to be much more difficult to find a job if you want to move on.
The company is small but profitable and it seems very well managed. The people I met there were very nice and laid-back. You can tell right away that this is a company that treats well its employees. For instance, in this company you have 4 weeks vacation the first year of employment, 5 weeks a year from the second to the fifth year of employment and 6 weeks after that! Do you know anyone in this country that has 6 weeks vacation a year (except George W. Bush of course) ;-) ? Pretty unusual.
Actually, I found people in this area (Roswell, Georgia, about 20 miles north of Downtown Atlanta, in the heart of high-tech area of Atlanta) in general a lot more friendly and more relaxed than in Southern California.
It is true it is very nice. I used to love living in Maryland (Montgomery county) before I went to southern California and I found in Roswell everything I liked about Maryland, the green, friendly people, the green, sometimes the feeling you live in a forest, the green, this almost "country side" feeling you can get at some places even though you are 30 minutes from downtown Washington DC and still have all the convenience of a major city, and also did I mention it is very green? Well, Roswell is like that, only better, greener, much more affordable (you can get a pretty decent house in the 200K-250K range there), and I would also guess that winter does not suck as much as in Maryland which is 600 miles up north ;-)

I really was tired of living in the trashy hellhole that Riverside, California is. After 18 months living there I came to this conclusion: living in the desert is not nice. Duh?
And I never really connected with people there, mostly a mix of:

• southern California trailer trash kind
• superficial, turn the head on the side when crossing someone that does not look like a hollywood star or that is not rich enough (or even both)
• stressed people commuting everyday to LA on those rotten freeways (1 hour 15 minutes one way, god bless them)
• Junkies
• tramps
• etc...

Where are the normal people there?

So needless to say, I did not hesitate for long before accepting the offer. I will not miss my current company either for sure (let's call it company A). I must find the motivation to hold till the end of next week! Well I will miss my work buddies B.... and J...., but that is pretty much it!
Now I can say that going there was the biggest mistake I made in my whole life. At least I learned to make the difference between a good company and a bad one, a good manager and a bad one, etc... Sometimes, you see what you have only when you lose it!
The problem with people my age (28), is that we started in the golden age of the industry and thought that all the crazy stuff that was happening at this time was normal... I started in the beginning of 2000 at Ericsson in Maryland, when everything was great. All the high-tech companies were just throwing away loads of money to their employees, desperatly trying to keep them on board, doing anything and what not to make them happy: company week-end gateways fully paid by the company for its employees and their family, flexible work hours "come to work at noon if it pleases you", some companies even allowing their employees to bring their dog at work (this is still the case for google btw), etc...
When things progressively started to suck, of course there were a big setback, project cancelation, layoffs and other cost cutting measures implemented very fast, not to mention the big confusion (almost panic) in the highest level of the management at Ericsson in Stockohlm about what exactly do to survive. All that made me (and many others too) very unhappy. But what I learned the hard way, and I actually realized it only three months after I joined company A, is that it could be even worse! I don't regret to have left Ericsson though, I was not too interested anymore in the work there and I may have been laid off anyways, but I really regret to have ever joined company A and I could not be happier to leave it. To be fair, I have to admit that I added a few good stuffs to my skillset in company A but it was everything but fun.

I have not felt more confident about my future and more relaxed for a long time. Now I just have to find an apartment and a mover. Stay tuned.