Bubbleicious

If a new tech bubble isn’t forming, you wouldn’t know it from my schedule. Or the traffic on the freeway every morning — it takes me longer to get to Mountain View now than it did in 2000 when I started at Epinions. Or the number of jobs and deals floating around out there. Someone definitely turned on the money faucet somewhere.

New year

I can’t remember the last time I was so happy to see a year end. I appreciate that everyone needs rebuilding periods — without the forest fire, new sequoias could not grow and all that jazz — but 2003 still sucked. There was a lot of loss for me, and a distressing proportion of it was permanent. So even if it’s superstitious and silly of me, I was way eager to press the reset button on 2003.

I’m not a fan of New Year’s Eve festivities — too many drunk people on the streets — so we usually just kick back with a bottle of champagne (Perrier Jouet this year, it seemed appropriately tentative) and chew over the past year. We also exchange modest gifts on the holiday itself: Tim gave me
the most fabo book and I gave him a huge box of replacement CD jewelcases.

This year I’m outsourcing the resolutions, by trying to do things with people I care about. Yes, I am actually listening to suggestions and doing things for others! (I can just hear my mother’s voice in my head right now saying, “FI-nally” in her adorably snide way.) So far, I’ve got this list:

• Buy a house
• Eat extra-carefully and exercise extra-hard for six weeks
• Attend the Stitches West knitting show
• Promptly attend to my parents’ requests

I also very recently switched jobs. I don’t want to say much about it, and the episode does not exactly cover me in glory anyway, but I should note that everyone at my old job treated me with unusual kindness and professionalism. My new gig is Java — ironic, because about a year ago I gave up on Java after concluding that my competitive advantage is more with C/C++ people because of Open Source.

So after a year of struggle, everything is in place for a year of potential fun. Here’s to the wheel turning again!

New blog

So instead of holding up the whole train until I move 4 years’ worth of old blog posts over to this schema, I’m just going to declare victory and start a new blog. It’s probably a good idea for other reasons anyway.

This blogware is Serendipity, by the way. Featureful, PHP-based, BSD-licensed, and I am on the dev team.