After eight and a half years and 192,000 miles-yes, that’s over 20K miles a year-I’d started looking about for a new car to replace my Acura RSX. As much as I liked it (and the engine still seemed to be in pretty good shape), it needed work: squeaky brakes were a must-fix and tires were due to be replaced within the year, and it had annoying and ( Read more... )

…but not as brief as a tweet.

Work has been busy the last few weeks, culminating in really busy this last week. Today was a coworker’s last day and he was trying to do a knowledge dump while we’re trying to roll out the code that he’d been working on and merge in various fixes that were being stashed away rather than checked into the source code ( Read more... )

Time for another update, and also time for my quasi-regular reminder that if you’re interested in more minutae from me, follow my Twitter feed; my journaling is as light as it is in part because I just throw the little things I’m doing up on Twitter rather than collect them and write about them here. One may argue that Twitter can’t adequately ( Read more... )

I opened my last entry, back on June 17, with “it’s been almost a month since I’ve updated my LiveJournal.” Well, now it’s been, uh, more than a month.

I went to tugrik’s big shop shindig (to borrow jakebe’s word) on Saturday and had a great time. I’ve driven all over hell the last couple of days, so it seems, between here in Foster City, jadedfox’s place in Alameda ( Read more... )

Specifically, to steal from Seth Godin, in an entry he titled “Who you are and what you do”:

The neat thing about the online world is that you are judged almost entirely by your actions.

If you do generous things, people think you are a generous person. If you bully people, people assume you are a bully. If you ask dumb questions, people ( Read more... )

I’ve never been inclined to greet the new year with resolutions. I often greet it with reflections, but I reflect constantly-likely too much.

I realized that in my too-constant reflection, I can’t recall anyone ever saying they hope the next year will be even better than the great one they just had. Everyone hopes the next year will be better, but ( Read more... )

I’ve applied at a few positions so far, haven’t heard back from any of them. For now, I’m trying to be selective in where I shove the ol’ résumé out to again, like I was during my layoff period in 2006. I am of course mindful that the job I ended up with for two years was one that contacted me, not the reverse; that’s often been the case in jobs I’ ( Read more... )

As I’ve written before, it’s a busy time at work. I feel sheepish complaining, given how many friends I have who’ve had much tougher periods at their tech jobs. But my crunch time has been just enough to keep me off-balance. As inadvertent demonstration, I started writing this on Thursday at lunch and didn’t get back to it until Sunday afternoon. ( Read more... )

I spent a chunk of the day over at tugrik’s, doing 4th of July BBQ things and re-meeting a bunch of folks I see too sporadically-Frang, smackjackal, tilton, higginsdragon, Baron, smudge_dragon and more. A good thing, overall. I may have a few conversations to follow up on specifically, even-but what I’d mostly like to do is just keep in actual (gasp) face-to-face contact more than I have been in ( Read more... )

The last few weeks I’ve been reminded that yes, I am working for a Silicon Valley startup. We’ll just say things have been busy, and on weekends I’m usually inclined to be doing something that either doesn’t involve being in front of the computer or at least requires no thought. (Standard plug: one can follow me on Twitter or FriendFeed as “ ( Read more... )