Last Thursday Slide took the whole company (or those that were interested) on a day of skiing goodness at Northstar resort in North Lake Tahoe. The morning started at 4AM with a pint of good Jamaican rum, a flask halfway filled with top notch mescal and all my gear loaded in the back of the Golf. I arrived at work with a co-worker to see the crew of zombies wandering around the office who decided that it was a better idea to stay up all night, instead of go home and get half a nights sleep. Usually I would be one of these people -- but I guess I have fallen to the curse of moderately good sense.

Feeling well rested, I cruised by all the refrigerators in the office filling my pockets with various treats as I knew at some point in this 5 hour bus ride I would become excruciatingly hungry but I still wasn't hungry for anything at that point. At roughly 4:10AM, all 50 barely conscious people loaded the bus with staggering energy that faded to a silent slumber after about 30 minutes on the dark bus. I plugged into my phone to listen to Joe Satriani and try to catch some Z's. Two pulls of mezcal and some mellow electric guitar knocked me out cold. I awoke to the begging of a Warren Miller hi-lights real to get everyone pumped up for the day. The resident hostess was passing out various beverages and snacks for breakfast (why did I bring all this extra food, I thought).

As we cruised up the snow surrounded highway people started to get excited for the day. Upon exiting the bus we were told that anything left on the bus would be locked away until 3:30 in the afternoon, which made me start sorting through a day of skiing in my head to figure out what was absolutely necessary to bring with me.

I changed quickly behind a van and threw all my extras back under the bus. One step in my ski preperation routine is to put my iphone in a ziplock freezer bag as I know I will fall on it, and also the moisture in my jacked always somehow finds a way to wreck the screen.

Off to the powder! I have this really brief almost day dreamy memory of seeing something fall between my legs out of my jacket, but looking around I spotted nothing, however after a few really amazing runs we inevitably lost one of our crew. Sitting on the lift I went to find my phone to give them a call and see where they were, and I realized OH NO! My snow white iphone in it's zip lock was gone, the pocket was unzipped and the headphones were still there. You can imagine the sinking feeling of knowing that your 600 dollar phone jam packed with all the details about your life is now at the mercy of randomness.

My first thought was, "I should have protected my phone with a code, forcing someone to format it to get to my data". However, this turns out to have been a saving grace. Somehow I didn't let the lost phone ruin my day by convincing myself that I somehow left it in my jeans that are in my bag under the bus. Oddly enough, calling the phone went straight to voicemail meaning that it either somewhere that has no service or has been turned off. I still have no idea which of those was the case.

Towards the end of the day I headed to lost and found to no available, and then back to the bus to tap the keg and forget about my terrible mis fortune. Leaving the mountain I felt as if I was leaving a soldier behind, and that I was missing a major part of my body.

As we neared Vallejo Jacob ran up to the front of the bus where I was sitting saying that Megan needed to talk to me urgently. Apparently "Some Kid" found my phone but she was concerned that I had a concussion. Not having any idea where this concept of a concussion came from I quickly called my sister Diana to make sure there was no family catastrophe, then Jeff Olds who Megan mentioned had received this persons contact information. Upon calling this foreign number I was informed that a work acquaintance had received a pretty gnarly concussion and was in the hospital. I then received the story of how my phone was found by a 14yr old boy skipping school to go skiing but in order to appease karma they decided to make sure it got back to me.

At this point I am excruciatingly sore from hard powder snowboarding, then sitting in the same position for 5+ hours and want nothing more than to get off the bus and go home for some major sleep. The next morning I went back and forth with fedex and my good Samaritans in Tahoe City to ensure the return of my phone. I set them up with some meals out to thank them for their rare honesty.

I have to be totally honest, it was kind of nice to not receive a phone call for 2.5 days. It was actually pretty peaceful not feeling the need to compulsively check email.. but I did seriously miss the Google Maps feature. I have no idea where anything is without that sucker!

Monday morning I woke up to find the fedex arrival containing my phone that still had 60% battery and many, many missed calls. I feel extremely fortunate, and certainly have my faith in human nature restored. The minute I knew the phone was gone I instantly jumped to the assumption that some dishonest soul had adopted it and that I would never see it again.

It's always nice to get a little positive reinforcement from the powers that be, reminding me that sometimes people just do the right thing.

This week, off to SXSW -- hopefully I fill my boots with some more t0asted content.

At the moment, I am sitting in the lobby of the Westin Hotel & Spa in Whistler BC. I first must preface this entry by saying that I have had an amazing week, and a great time here. I thank Mozilla for putting on a really cool experience, and I do not regret coming up here one bit. Also in between each of the following paragraphs I was attending some really cool sessions, eating great food and hot tubbing.

Monday we took a flight from Seattle to Vancouver, minus the screaming kids it was relatively painless flight. Meg was planning to meet me up here, and crash in my room... somehow she left SF that morning and still beat me here. I have no idea how that happened. Anyways she was here waiting when I arrived, and I quickly had to check in and get to dinner. Huge buffet with all kinds of delish foods, a pretty impressive spread with a solid bar.

Tuesday was a good day.

Wednesday morning I wake up and turn on the news and find out that the only reasonable road between Vancouver and Whistler (highway 99) has been closed due to a rock slide. Not only was it a rock slide, IT WAS A FREAKING HUGE ROCK SLIDE: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/s ... VNewsAt11. Apparently it wrecked the entire road, and the train tracks and to remove it they will have to BLAST the van size boulders with dynamite. I didn't panic until they told us that it would take a bare minimum of 5 days to start getting the road back open. As you can imagine, poor Mozilla crew organizing all this must be pretty stressed. Two funny things happened as a result of this incident, during the "Travel Update", Mike Schroepfer yell out "Have we determined if Microsoft is responsible for the rock slide?" which under the circumstances broke the intensity in the air. The second was that a bug was logged in the Mozilla Bugzilla which marked the messed up road with severity:blocker, and that we may want to look into convincing Google to "Come pick us up".

Thursday, we woke up to silence, no lights, TV's, dead laptops and the quick realization that the power was out for the whole hotel. As you can imagine, this is a slight problem for a "Tech Conference". I actually slept in a bit later in the nice quiet darkness and caught up in probably a month of lost sleep. In the lobby they had posted that the hotel transformer had been "hit by a laundry truck"... UHM, are you kidding me? The giant green metal box sitting in the woods next to the hotel was "hit by a laundry truck". This HAS to be Micorosoft's doing, I can't image any other way something insane like this could possibly happen. We got to spend half the day without computers or A/V doing presentations off of notepads and then discussing in the dark. This did make for an interesting dynamic, and in a lot of ways was still pretty productive albeit very strange. Fortunately right before our 5:45 presentation of GristMill, our firefox automation framework "Talk" the power came back on so that I could give my sweet demo. I really like doing talks at conferences because people immediately have ideas, and uses for whatever it is you are doing. It's very gratifying to know that people are going to go home and start playing with your stuff.

Thursday night dinner we jumped on the gondola and headed up to the top of the mountain for a pretty rockin shin dig. A beattles/elton john/other cover band was playing, it was snowing outside, and they put on a huge spread. John Lilly talked, Mitchell Baker talked and after many toasts and rounds of applause Shrep went up and clearly fighting his emotions, thanked everyone for the last few years.

A wise sage told me, that when you go to a conference/event it's always a good idea to make a list of the people you want to worm your way into a conversation with. So this time around, I made my list. During the day people have been crazy running around all over, but last night people were a bit more relaxed and in a social mood so I had the chance to introduce myself to some folks and have a couple conversations I had been waiting to have all week.

Today is friday, its 11:58 AM, my float plane was supposed to take off at 11:45 AM... clearly this is a problem. The word I was given was that the planes couldn't fly because of the high tide and that the planes weren't able to land safely at the moment. Well, the way I feel about this is that we basically have tides mapped out like clock work... someone booked a flight to leave at a time when they would be landing during an unsafe high tide? I don't think so. There is a massive cloud cover, but mostly I think it just makes sense that the trend of insanity would continue.

I am feeling a little bit burned out, pretty tired, sick of eating, drinking, and talking frankly. Please someone send your private jet and get me the hell out of this beautiful, tree covered resort town before I do something insane like deciding to go backcountry snowboarding on the glacier in the middle of the summer!

Please leave your base.

Last week may have been the first week that I went to an office for work all five days since I graduated in May 2006. Fortunately my fears of a five day commute and survival in an office turned out not to be much of problem for me. Just like any other person driving a car between 8am and 12 noon in the bay area, there is traffic and that is a bit annoying -- but compared to a place like Seattle I think I am coming out on top here. I averaged out the time it took me to get to Foster City and it came out at 36 minutes. A high of 47 mins and a low of 24 mins.

The ride home isn't really as much of a big deal to me, Rearden has a pretty decent dinner brought in and starting around 5:30 I start keeping an eye on my return route via Google Maps with traffic turned on. As soon as all those red lines turn to yellow and green things seem to be pretty reasonable.

In terms of the actual work day, I didn't get much 'work' done.. but I do really like my team, my manager, and feel that the tasks I will be working on are pretty interesting. Why didn't I get any work done? It's quite a list, but anyone that has started a new job in the tech industry knows that getting anything done the first at least one, sometimes two weeks is nearly impossible. Week one is usually called, 'setup your environment' week. Week two is usually called 'get familiar with the code base' week. And week three is usually called 'I think I've got things down, oh **** can someone revert the code repo?'.

Monday started with an orientation of sorts, getting familiar with my new Macbook Pro, after getting acquainted with the office, first introductions with my team, and my first round with IT, I was pointed at a wiki page on how to setup the environment and build the Java app. There are about 40 steps to this process, and I think I got stuck somewhere in the first three. It turns out that I am the only member of my team using a Mac, and one of less than five at the whole company. Building the app does not work natively on MacOSX. This jumped me right into the world of VMWare Fusions, which I must admit has made some immense and impressive progress since I last tried it.

It took me the whole week, but I think I have finally come up with the best environment for me to work on the application natively on MacOSX, interact with Perforce natively on MacOSX but build the app on Linux and run the app on linux.

I will be using the visual perforce client on MacOSX (P4V) to pull down the code repo to a folder that is shared using VMWare sharing. The folder is given my users privileges in fstab so that linux doesn't give me permissions errors when building. In my home directory I have a sym link to the folder shared via /mnt/hgfs so that the path including the release directory name etc is assembled correctly when my .bashrc sets up my environment variables. The build happens on linux, then scripts are run to turn the project into a usable Eclipse workspace. However when these scripts are run they leave read only permissions on the Eclipse project files which error out when you try to import the project. After a chmod 755 on the whole directory, I can go back to MacOSX, open Eclipse and import the workspace.. importing the projects into an existing workspace doesn't work. With the server running on the Linux VM, I can access the app in my mac browser of choice, or from my Windows VM for IE testing..

I haven't actually written any code yet, but I was able to navigate around and find code that I wanted to work on using the impressively fast Search functionality in Eclipse.

I look forward to next week, so that I can put a dent in my already growing bug list. I also looked over a portion of the code base I will be working on, as I barely have a clue about the Java pieces I do have a list of JavaScript pieces where I think I can contribute so I am really looking forward to hitting full stride.

So far, thumbs up, I think/hope the uncomfortable 'new clueless guy' phase is over.

After a month of intense phone conversations, flights to the bay area and deep thought I have finally accepted an offer. On February 25th I will be starting at Rearden Commerce in Foster City CA as a Software Engineer in Web Development. More specifically I will be joining the team building universal UI widgets for the Rearden Personal Assistant. At this point I don't know exactly what my tasks will look like but I have a pretty good idea and am excited about the new opportunity.

I wanted to thank all of the people I talked to for their time and efforts. The whole experience was pretty tiring and constant information overload. I look forward getting back into a routine where my brain is solving interesting development problems instead of building spread sheets to compare the pros and cons of possible job offers.

The job at Rearden quickly moved to the top of my list due to the fact that it moves me out of the QA ranks. I learned an enormous amount and had a fantastic experience in the QA role I had at OSAF, and I firmly believe that everything I learned there will be very useful in all of my future positions. However, after spending two years automating testing and finding ways to break other peoples code I am exited to move into a position where I will be the guy writing the code to be broken. I am still committed to Windmill (http://windmill.osafoundation.org) and will be using it for testing all my personal projects and have had some interest from Rearden in introducing it to their QA team to test the web app. The move from QA Developer to Software Engineer I see certainly as a promotion as I will get to be building functionality that customers will be using and I find that really exciting.

Rearden was originally called Gazoo, was then named Talaris and wound up being named Rearden Commerce. I am not exactly sure what the deal was with the name swapping, but I do understand that as they have become more successful in the Enterprise/Business space a name like Gazoo might make potential customers a little nervous. On the web site (http://www.reardencommerce.com) you can see a list of their current customers which includes a large deal with American Express. The site also has a pretty well done video explaining the product, but the summary is that it takes all of the products you use to plan a business trip and put them all in the same place. Over time the product keeps track of things like points/miles etc and learns what you want/like to make your life easier in the future. I believe in the premise of the product, see the size of the potential market out there and expect interesting engineering work to be involved. They currently aren't supporting Safari, and as more and more of the market gets shaved off by Apple that will need to happen. After my experience at OSAF I think I see a niche for myself in solving cross browser JavaScript issues etc.

So far the interactions with the people over at Rearden have been really solid and I have to say while I'm at it that during the interview process Rearden was the most responsive, accommodating and enthusiastic to get me on board and I hold all of that in high regard.

I am thus closing the OSAF chapter of my life, but have and will keep in touch with the great people I met there. Don't be fooled, as it is true that I am moving to a company looking to make money -- I still hold Open Source to be extremely important in my daily computing and will be learning the YUI JavaScript toolkit. Assuming Yahoo doesn't get bought by Microsoft this should keep me expanding my Open Source JavaScript development at work, and who knows where that will lead at home.

Monday I headed to the bay area to meet up with a couple companies about this whole 'find a new job' situation I'm currently dealing with. The experience was rather intense not fully because of the grill sessions you are privy to as a developer, but because flying anywhere when it's -35 degrees outside is a bit of a challenge.

At 5:00 AM I woke up, showered, somehow got over my delirium and headed out to the car to start the de-thawing process. After sitting in the car scratching ice off the inside with my fingernails and a spoon I was finally ready to roll off down the snowy road through the canyon and down to bozeman to jump on my plane. I arrived nice and early as any frequent flyer should and cleared security pretty quickly. I then sat in my chair until 8:00 AM when I was supposed to be departing when I was told that after trying to de-ice the plane for multiple hours in Butte, we would have to wait until the temperature warmed up enough for them to de-ice and fly down to get us. I believe that the plane finally took off around 10:30, another partially satisfying nap, some crackers and a glass of tomato juice.



When I finally got some lunch and got to my gate in Seattle I was informed that the conditions at SFO weren't good and that we would be waiting an extra two hours to take off. Finally I arrive at SFO at 4:00 PM, get a car, drive south down the Peninsula to have my first set of interviews.



The next day I continued the interviewing, handled a couple things I had on my list while I was in the bay area and then headed back. The first flight went off without a hitch, but if course at 8:00 at night in Salt Lake the crew was supposed to be flying in from Houston and was two hours late. On my drive back from Bozeman to Big Sky I looked down to see if I had bars on my phone and looking up saw a herd of elk standing in the highway -- you don't see that every day.

Anyways I made it home, had some really cool conversations with some really bright people and look forward to my results. It can be difficult to read how people are interpreting your personality, skills and ability to be a good addition to the company. All you can do is your best, and then let life take it from there but I am pretty comfortable with my area of expertise so I have high hopes!

As this process is pretty involved there are emails whizzing around like crazy, I will keep you updated on any interesting happenings.