So for months I've had a post in my head about what I call 'benign competition', the kind of thing when you work at a company which is in competition with other companies over who can make users lives better faster. It's more sport than cut-throat competition; it's the kind of thing where after the game is done and everyone's taken showers you're cool going out for beers with the other team. As this post has been brewing in my head it's taken on a life of its own, evolving from a set of notes to an outline for what could be, if not a book, at least something far longer than a blog post.

Blogging plays a big part in this. How the troops on opposite sides treat each other tells a lot about how the greater machines think and act. Having worked at both Yahoo and Google, I have a good perspective on this, and I can list dozens of bloggers on both sides that bear witness to the same mentality, Jeremy Zawodny being a great example, especially when talking about the relationship between personal blogging and the 'mother Y'. I'm sure that it's largely because of my optimistic (myopic?) state that this post by Jeffrey McManus caught me pretty off guard. It's always good to remember that just because a guy will get drunk with you after the game doesn't mean he won't clock you across the jaw when the ref isn't looking. Name-calling is bad enough, but the guy's a director. Sheesh.

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Two quick notes:

• I applaud Jeremy and Yahoo! for publicizing Yahoo's Employee Blogging Guidelines.
• InsideGoogle's post claiming leaked information about Google's Employee Blogging Guidelines is completely untrue.

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Updated on 3/31/05 at 11:20pm)

Today's Guardian features a story by Ben Hammersley about Yahoo being the new Google. To 'prove' his point he pulls out a data point here and a data point there and says 'voila! Q.E.D.' The trouble is that his datapoints are pretty selective, and in some cases are flat-out incorrect.

Ben chooses one moment in time where he perceives Yahoo to have barely edged ahead and calls the game over ('three-nil'). Even if I agreed with his analysis, in the words of Yogi Berra "We didn't lose, the game just ended too early."

Ben says "Google's [search] API was a thing of beauty when it launched [three years ago]" but has been overtaken by Yahoo's [search] API, which was launched last month. Even if you ignore Google's five other APIs, it's disingenuous to fire the final buzzer just because the other guys scored a three-pointer.

For five years Yahoo made relatively minor changes to their maps service, and last month Google came out with an entirely new offering. A little later Yahoo adds traffic data to their maps and yes, it's a useful feature. Ben is quick to note how Yahoo is a 'leader' because they just launched their labs competitor, research.yahoo.com, yet he completely ignores the fact that Google Maps itself is a labs offering. Is it fair to compare a six year old product with a one month old labs release and declare a winner?

Closer to my own heart though, Ben says, "Google's webmail product, Gmail, caused a fuss by offering accounts capable of storing a gigabyte of mail, four times that of Yahoo Mail. No problem, said Yahoo last week, Yahoo mail users can have a gigabyte too." Whatnow? When Gmail launched (a year ago tomorrow) Yahoo mail gave users four megabytes and Gmail represented a 250x increase, not the other way around. I'm proud that Gmail caused the other guys to raise their falsely-limited storage sizes but c'mon. Yahoo announced that they'll finally match the competition's storage offering, a year after the competition's launch, and Ben scores this as a 'Yahoo win'? Have you used Gmail, Ben? Is storage size the differentiator?

Next on the block is Blogger vs Yahoo 360: "Google's purchase of Blogger gave them a place at the blogger's table, but it has done little with it. Yahoo's blogging tool, Yahoo 360, launches this month, allegedly fully integrated with the rest of the content they produce." Ben, Yahoo bought Geocities for 3.6 billion dollars six years ago, and you fault Blogger for not advancing? Also, I have to ask if Ben's used Yahoo 360. Not to degrade the product, I have friends who worked very hard on it and I think they made something cool and pretty. But its a social networking service. Go ahead and compare it to Orkut and I'll happily listen, but a Blogger replacement it is not.

I accept the point about Flickr though. I think Picasa is slick as all hell, but I've never seen someone get communities as right as Flickr has. I wish those guys were sitting down my hall.

The game is a long one, my friends. In the end of course the users win either way. Like two farmhands vying for the love of a girl, no matter which one emerges victorious the lady's got a lot of flowers. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to tend my greenhouse.

Update: Yahoo! Mail quotas won't be upped to a gigabyte for another 4-6 weeks. How big will Gmail be by then?

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After rumors, cagey refutations, and more rumors of acquisition countered by rumors of next-round VC funding, Ludicorp (creators of Flickr) today announced that they have indeed concluded an acquisition deal with Yahoo.

Personally, I (almost) couldn't be happier with the news. Unlike a lot of acquisitions happening in this space by leading internet companies, Flickr wasn't a technological or 'quick-fix' acquisition. They've really hit the spot on how photo sharing on the net can be scalable, community oriented, and centered around the photographers, and not a proscribed business model.

Unlike so many sites based on premises like 'we can make money by getting people to print their photos through us' or 'we can make money by using other people's content to build the walls of our garden a little bit higher,' Flickr instead is a mirror of the web, where photos are atomic pieces of content, like web pages. The ability to create linkages between photos based on common theme, author, reader favorites, or collaborative groups, means that the Flickr site is a fertile bed, full of nutrients giving rise to communities formed through usage, instead of (well, in addition to) explicit friendship circles.

Flickr didn't start out as what it is today. Stewart and Caterina started Flickr small, with a group of users who were highly focused on both photography and online community, and they paid close attention to what worked about the site and what didn't, and they changed it again and again. There are so many features of Flickr that don't bear enumerating because they don't read well as an itemized feature list, but when you're actually reading or publishing through the site, you're constantly surprised by how well thought out it is, and how you can do nearly anything you want.

One of my favorites is the concept of monthly storage allowance. 500 megs of photo space sounds generous when you've only uploaded four pictures, but when you're at 450 megs, it seems a lot smaller. Opting instead to let people upload a fixed amount of data per month, Flickr allows users to throttle themselves if they're adding too much too fast, instead of forcing them to hit a functional brick wall when their quota approaches at highway speeds.

I was also encouraged to read that Flickr isn't seen by Yahoo as a Photos substitute. They each have their own user base, with their own wants and needs, and merging the two would only end up with muzak (and picking one over the other would result in pebcak, as one set of users' application knowledge becomes obsolete).

I'm eager to see how this fits into Yahoo 360, and hopefully I don't have more than a week or so to wait, though Flickr integration may take a bit longer, unless the deal's been signed for a while now, and integration is already well underway. Then again, maybe I speak too soon. Flickr already provides RSS and Atom feeds of almost any page you can get to on its site, so much of the groundwork may already be laid down.

Congrats Ludicorp, and congrats Yahoo. Now let's see if we can get Game Neverending back up off the ground!

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I loved working at Yahoo, but I've got to say that Google has the right idea when it comes to caring for the consumer. While Yahoo is spearheading a drive for premium services, Google is all about the people.

Case in point: Blogger Pro features are now free. And what about those folks who already have a paid annual Blogger Pro subscription? They can get a pro-rated refund (even though the user is still getting everything they paid for!) or a Blogger hoodie sweatshirt, their choice, even if the refund would only be a few pennies.

Heck, even Apple isn't that good to their customers.

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March 2003: Google buys Pyra (Blogger)
April 2003: Six Apart (Movable Type) unveils TypePad
August 2003: Yahoo buys Six Apart

Just you wait...

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Ahh, the inside jokes of working at Yahoo...

Before messenger clients go out to the masses in beta testing, we usually run alpha testing in-house. We post it inside the firewall for all the yahoos to download and use (and believe me, the average yahoo types far more words in instant messaging than says out loud on a given day) and see if any problems come up.

One day a server bug struck several dozen people using alpha copies. No matter what they typed into the composition window, all the other person would see is '3'.

Friend: Wanna grab some lunch?
Me: 3
Friend: isnt that a little late?
Me: 3

the problem was fixed by the end of the day, but for months amongst a small group of yahoos, the bug 'lingered on', always at the most opportune moments.

Manager: how're the mocks coming?
Me: 3
Manager: Quit it.
Me: 3

I miss the 'hoo.

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Well, not so dramatic, but I did have the opportunity to give a talk for my fellow HCI and Interaction Design classmates today (thanks for the forum, Micah and Neema!). I think it went pretty well, considering that I'm running on four hours sleep (hate the GOMS.. Really really hate the GOMS. Homeworks that can be described on half a page that take 12 hours and 38 pages of excel spreadsheets with careful measurements are so not not not fun...).

Anyhow, the talk went well, and I enjoyed sharing. Now I have to work into the wee hours on a project for Interactive Programming, not to mention the sequence models I need to have done in 34 minutes for my lab group meeting.

Ahh well, the forecast is that things should ease up around Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. Also, the nights have been getting downright chilly (around 38 degrees!) and the days are as amazingly bright as they are crisp. My family regularly spends Christmas week in Carmel each year, and this is the kind of weather we usually get, so naturally it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas around here, though probably just to me.

On another note, I see a few people are already using the Fury RSS feed, and one's even complained that I built it, and now haven't even posted in two days! Well at least this post might appease you.

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SFGate ran a nice article this morning on the maturation of Instant Messaging into corporate America. I just wish they'd mentioned Yahoo before the final set of links after the article.

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Hey! If it's between 3 and 3:30pm Eastern time Thursday (noon to 12:30pm PDT), remind me to execute my Yahoo stock options! I'm waiting for the last upswing (hope) but if I don't sell them by 4pm they're gone!

Thanks! (Don't get excited, it's like $600.)

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I'm so deadened to online advertising that I'd been reading articles on CNN for almost an hour before I noticed they replaced all their advertising with candles.

On the Yahoo front, they also took off advertising, turned it monochrome, and made a very nice rememberance site.

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So the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows went into public beta today, containing a lot of the work that I did in the months prior to leaving the company.

A lot of things didn't make this version, (which means that 6.0 is going to be really, really cool whenever it gets made) but 5.5 has several nice new features, such as Super Webcam (with a 15 frame-per-second 'Turbo Mode,' advancing the current 0.75fps mode), more (and improved) smileys, and a new IMVironment selector, in addition to smaller enhancements in usability and look and feel.

The faster webcam deal is really pretty cool (if you're on a DSL or faster connection), as it really runs the webcam into a meaningful expressive tool...

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Today is a very strange day. Yesterday was my last day of Spanish class, which, incidentally, fulfilled the final, lingering requirement for my Berkeley bachelors degree in Cognitive Science.

I used to joke that the strange thing about being at Berkeley 10 years after starting was that every year the students got younger. The funny part is that in my final semester at Berkeley, I had a breadth requirement class filled with freshmen and sophomores. Now, for this Spanish class I took at De Anza community college, several of my fellow students were still in high school, seniors and more than a couple juniors. Seems the students actually are getting younger each year.

And so it was with a turning in of a take-home final and a long drive home that I finish a degree that began eleven years ago when I came to Berkeley out of high school. After a full graduation ceremony at the Greek Theatre this time last year, this true finale is a bit of an anticlimax...

On the work-front: Yahoo threw a going-away party for me at work yesterday! I was really touched. So many people were happy for my upcoming adventure, expressing their sadness that I'm going, and I reciprocate every bit. Instant messaging is interesting here: All these people are in my friend list, and will stay there. Considering how most of us communicate in the office via IMs, when I log in from home, school, or wherever, they're all just a click away.

So I have to jam outta here in a few minutes (still at home) to go to my exit interview with the HR folk, then finish up a few loose ends, and pack up my cube. After such a warming sendoff yesterday, and with almost half of my department telecommuting on Fridays, this too is an anticlimax...

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I'm the first person in my group in to work today.

No jury duty this morning, but I have to call in again between 11 and 12 to find out if I need to come in for the 2pm juror call. Of course, the 2pm jurors aren't likely to hear cases today, but they might be assigned to cases starting tomorrow (my 'last day' at Yahoo), so if I *do* get called in, it will be pointless anyhow, since I can't sit on a multi-day jury. Argh.

Anyhow, hellishly busy wrapping things up, and I've pushed my last day from Thursday to Friday because somehow I have to find time to actually pack up my cube. Sorry if posts are a bit sporadic for the next couple days. :-D

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Busy busy busy... I actually got to sleep before midnight for the first time that I can remember, and I was startled that I woke up before my alarm clock went off this morning. That used to happen every day, but not since I started this 4-5 hours of sleep a night regimen.

I may (or may not) have jury duty tomorrow. If you're super-curious, call (510) 268-7626 after 5pm today. My group # is "L-3001".

Because of the aforementioned jury duty, I pushed my last day to Friday instead of Thursday.

Oh yeah, and I have my last two Spanish classes tonight and Thursday. I haven't even touched the textbook, but it'll all be okay...

I've been having a lot of 'Job as Relationship'-driven anxiety the past couple days, but realizing it for what it is has helped a lot.

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The most visited web page on the planet gets a facelift.

Check out the public beta!

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So my last day at Yahoo! is this Thursday, right around the corner. I have so much to do that I'm working today and tonight to wrap up as much as possible.

So I got this jury summons a few weeks ago, for what day? June 12th, Wednesday. My second-to-last day at Yahoo. I meant to postpone it, either until July, when I'd have plenty of time to sit in a box with my peers, or push it off until after August, at which point I'd be a Penn resident, and would therefore not have to serve on the jury anyhow.

I put the envelope and summons in my backpack, taking them to work along with my other outgoing mail, or so I thought. I'd left the summons at home, bringing only the envelope. Anyhow, I've found the summons a few days ago and now I know that it had to have been sent in 14 days before the appearance date.

Oops. Shit.

So now, Tuesday night I have to call in and find out if they need me to come in, because dodging it is punishable by arrest and contempt of court.

The last two times I've been called up on jury duty I didn't even have to come in, so hopefully I won't this time either. If I am, I won't get picked for a multi-day trial, since I already have airline tickets leaving on Monday. Still, taking Wednesday out isn't any fun, as I still have so much to finish, and I haven't even started packing my cube yet...

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So, true to the customs of HR departments all over the world, and as I anticipated, my manager wrote to me on Friday, asking for an official letter of resignation.

After a moment's contemplation and composition, I am at peace with my reply.

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Riding the train. I overslept this morning, for the first time I can remember. Oh, sure, I'm a snooze-slut, resetting the alarm to give myself another 5 to 20 minutes for good behavior, but this morning I turned off the alarm, and closed my eyes for those last five minutes to sweep up my subconscious after the revelries of yesternight's dreams.

But the dreams weren't done with me, and I had two more before I woke up 30 minutes after the train left. Still, if I rushed I could still catch the late train, so rush I did. Even so I missed the train (or I presume that I did) in Jack London Square, instead rushing on to Hayward where I'd have a better shot.

So now I'm on the train, starting over an hour late at what already promised to be a hellishly busy day. Still, I get both of the big plusses of riding the train to work (surprisingly, 'saved time' isn't usually one of them): A little time to write (and I can hear some of you calling out right now, asking why I'm spending that time writing about this morning when I could be writing a dotcom story...), and a 'hard-out' at 5:30.

What else is in the news? Today is my one year anniversary at Yahoo!, three of my closest friends are out of town, Spanish class was cancelled yesterday, I got new contact lenses (I just put them in for the first time, and had to switch because I got left and right messed up), I got a funky new pair of headphones that stick all the way inside the ear canal. They have a dynamic range from 6Hz to 24Khz. That's some pumping bass.

I've got tons on my mind in every direction. I'm going apartment-hunting in Pittsburgh the week after leaving Yahoo!, and going to Brown Island with family the week after that. I've just found out that Richard Powers is teaching a Waltz Week in the last week of July, and I'd love to go, which suddenly means my huge downtime is reduced to just three weeks idle. Time flies, flies away. and now I'm at Santa Clara, and have to pack up my things here too. Bye!

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Okay, now that the announcement has been made, both here and at work, I've got to buckle down and finish a lot of things, starting off with my own job description. It might be a little quiet around here for a day or two, or seeing how often y'all comment, it might not! :-)

Oh yes, and the thing I was referring to in the earlier posts about being nervous and all, was about letting my manager know my plans.

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Well, the press release is posted, and the cat is out of Schrödinger's box.

That's what all the fretting has been about, leaving a job I love in favor of an opportunity I can't refuse.

So excited! Now, must go to work. I'm not gonna be a lame-duck slacker.

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My odd point at work today is when I was discussing an interaction flow with a coworker, and I said to her in all seriousness, "Well, this is how a porn site would do it..."

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I'm happy to announce that Wednesday night witnessed the release of Yahoo! Messenger for OS X! This is the first software release since I started designing for Messenger back in mid-January. This version brings the Mac client closer to the Windows version, with support for typing notification, the extended set of smileys, idle-time notification, and of course, Mac OS X. Yay!

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Another example of sensationalism:

In no fewer than three articles I read about Yahoo today, they had some version of the graph on the right in the article.

That graph shows yahoo stock over the last five years, and is only shown because it looks pretty 'ooh! look at that!'

On the other hand, a graph of the last 12 months tells a different story, of a stock that dropped 50% in value and has fought its way back up.

Now take a look at the graph for the last five days of Yahoo trading. This is the one that fits the story, talking about the earnings release and subsequent dive.

This is a particularly good example of how looking at the same stock at three different levels of granularity gives three completely different stories to support whatever point you'd like to make.

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Yahoo announced their quarterly earnings yesterday afternoon.

In the days leading up, analysts estimated that Yahoo's earnings would exceed their expectations (go figure out the paradoxical logic on that one), and sure enough, they did.

What's more, Yahoo upped its estimate of next quarter's earnings.

So why did a major analyst downgrade the stock this morning, sparking a 15% tumble?

To be more specific, why did they do it this morning? The reasons they gave were truer yesterday than they are today, and making any upgrade or downgrade immediately after an earnings release sets the tone for telling investors what they should think of that release. There goes a hard quarter's work...

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It looks like Yahoo! is taking a page from Steve Jobs's book, promising something that's so big there's never been anything like it on the Internet, or anywhere else. Liftoff is 1 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday which, incidentally, is just after trading closes at NASDAQ.

And no, I actually have no secret info on what it is...

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(i am not a press release... i am not a press release)

Okay, so it may not be as innovative as MapBlast's LineDrive maps, but Yahoo's new mapping software is a big improvement over the MapQuest (*cough*AOL*cough*) system it replaces. For one thing, the maps are antialiased, so they don't look like crap when you print them, and they have street names you can actually read.

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So I have two lists in my pocket. The first is a list of reminders of things I want to blog about. The second is a list of pictures to take from Chatterwaul's Collectivo project, where each participant takes 10 pictures on a theme. This one's theme is 'The Daily Routine' and the individual pictures are things like '1. The first thing you see when you wake up' and '5. Something that requires your daily attention'. I've finished taking most of the pictures, and I'll point to them when they get posted to the site.

Two of the instructed pictures are giving me trouble though: '8. Your most loathsome daily activity' and '9. The thing you look forward to most each day.' I've been thinking about it for three days, and I can't find anything particularly loathsome that happens daily. I mean, how loathsome is taking out contact lenses really? Similarly, I'm having trouble finding the thing I look forward to each day. Again, how much can you look forward to a Chai? And even then, I already took a picture of that ritual for '3. A food or beverage you consume on a daily basis.'

I hadn't realized how low-contrast my life seems to be getting.

I'm living in the middle.

...

In my love life, that thing that keeps happening outside of fury.com's view, there's a coffer full of untold stories and those still unfolding. I'm neither saint nor satyr, looking for love, but unable to give myself up to it. I have the opportunity for love and commitment, or I could be sated with my friendships, but my own feelings, desires, and emotions are constantly conflicted, to my own detriment and sorrow and that of some of those who touch my life.

I'm living in the middle.

...

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my application deadline to Carnegie Mellon's graduate HCI program. Tomorrow, hundreds of eager hopefuls have to have their own applications postmarked. Last March, with a job offer from Yahoo in one hand and an acceptance from CMU in the other, I chose to defer grad school for a year. I told my manager of my intent to get my Masters degree the following year, and he said that after a year at Yahoo, I wouldn't want to leave.

In two months today's applicants get their thin-lipped letters of rejection or grinning packets of admission. I'll be getting a joyous packet, one year deferred, and I'll find myself weighing the same choices, options, and futures, albeit with a year's more perspective. The needle keeps wavering, and right now it's at the balancing point.

On one hand, I love Yahoo. The people there are the most capable I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and I feel that I get to exert my capabilities more and to more meaningful ends than ever before. Even more telling, in my CMU app statement of purpose, I talked about how I want to be able to design interaction models that will be used by millions, eventually being emulated by competitors, and finally being accepted as simply 'the way things work.' I'm incredibly lucky to have that opportunity, designing Yahoo! Messenger, and I'd be a fool to leave it.

On the other hand, CMU's HCII program is the best in the world. Coming from a university of 30,000 people, and a high school of 3,300, going to a graduate program of 40 people, on a campus with one eighth the population of UC Berkeley, I'd love an educational experience that doesn't involve feeling like a number. In short, I feel like I got an invitation to Hogwarts, and the Dursleys are inside a corner of my brain, crying things like "too much money!" "Pittsburgh? For a full year?" and "The perfect job isn't good enough for you?"

If I choose to go, I hope to continue at Yahoo when I finish in 12 months. There will be packing, storage, the sharing of furniture and furnishings with friends ("Will you take my big TV, oh please?"), and the slow but steady purge of unneeded junk, papers, etc. from my life, in preparation for one carful of stuff on a cross-country sojourn to a new, brief, life. If I choose to stay, I've decided that I need to move. (More on that later. I'm writing it on the list of things to blog about now.)

Gah. I just need more information, and I'll make sure I gather it in the next couple months, both about Yahoo and CMU. But for now, and for the next several months --

I'm living in the middle.

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Cake is playing a webcast concert in Yahoo's FinanceVision studios, which are literally two floors directly below my cube here.

As Dinah so eloquently put it, "You've got Cake under your butt!"

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"Think twice before redesigning your website."

I live by this. And not just 'cause I work for the 'hoo.

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Here it is, 11:30, and I've only just realized that I'm the only person in my row of ten that's at work today. I wonder how many on my floor are here? Now I won't feel gulty about taking a long lunch. :-)

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Well, it looks like yahoo has to recall the trillion plus web pages they've delivered in the last five years and two months.

It seems that back in '96, when Yahoo! was granted the registered trademark 'Yahoo!', they updated the home-page graphic to suit, but in so doing, there was a casualty: Timmy, otherwise now known here at Yahoo! as 'Pixel #2899.' I call him Timmy because he went away the same day that the 'TM' was replaced with the 'R'.

So what can be done? Timmy's disappearance has gone unnoticed for five years and has only just been noticed by one of our own visual designers, browsing through the world-wide web archive. Now the hunt is on to find Timmy, and bring him home.

Watch the saga! Reload your Yahoo! home page every day (or hour, minute, whatever) and watch for Timmy's return!

If you happen to find Timmy, be he in your recycle bin, a porn popup, or changed into a transparent gif, let me know! Please put Timmy on your site and post the link in this post's comments! I'll see to it that Timmy is returned to the Yahoo! signboard safe and sound.

And for all the cynics, this isn't some marketing ploy, 5 years in the making. The error was found this morning, and I'm just having fun with it, as we all know I am want to do. :-)

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Got this when trying to send an email to a friend who had AT&T @Home service:

This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

HEIALMBOS.MHRIH

Glad we cleared that one up.

Oh, by the way, I survived layoffs today. Yay! Tears for the 1 in 10 who won't be coming back to Sunnyvale tomorrow though.

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Okay, so in the same vein as the Bathroom Cellphone story, but much more concise, here is today's Yahoo! bathroom episode:

I go to the restroom, take the far, handicapped-sized stall because stall #2 was taken, and this stall (#4) gives the appropriate 'one-stall buffer zone.'

All goes fine, I unlatch the door, go to the sink, and a Yahoo! janitorial guy goes into the stall I just vacated. I thought he was just observing the buffer zone rule too strictly, as he could have used stall #1 or #3, and buffer zone rules don't apply when it means that you'd have to actually wait to use a stall.

Before I'm done washing my hands, he walks back out of the stall, tosses something substantial into the trash, and leaves. I dry off my hands, and before tossing my paper towels in the selfsame trash, I take a peek, and it's the half-used (half unused? Which one would be the optimist in this case?) toilet paper roll from my stall.

Is there something I should know?

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To quote Jerry Yang, "Limbo sucks."

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So as I mentioned yesterday, 75% of the layoffs are coming in Broadcast, international operations, and middle management.

It turns out that my group might not be so immune from the remaining 25%. the worst part is we don't have any answers yet, and we don't know when we'll know.

Like I said, I've never been around during a layoff before, and I'm quickly finding out that I don't really want to be around for one again (duh).

No news is no news, and I'll write more when I learn more.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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So presumably you read about yesterday's bowling trip. Much fun was had by all. While the trip itself was planned several weeks ago, I couldn't help but think that it has a bit of a "St. Crispens' Day Speech" feel to it, you know, 'tonight we party for tomorrow night we may all be dead"?

You see, today was Analyst Day, which is basically the corporate equivalent of parent-teacher conference day, where the executives are the teachers, industry analysts are the parents, and Yahoo! is the student.

During the quarterly report last month, Yahoo! announced that there would be layoffs, and a one-by-one analysis of each of Yahoo!'s 44 properties (mail, messenger, classifieds, geocities, etc.) to determine its future in Yahoo!'s new direction. The details of these assessments and determinations would be announced on Analyst Day, November 15th.

I shouldn't be so melodramatic. The Gooey group (Gooey = GUI = ... Oh yeah, I did that already) is centralized, so even if properties were shut down or folded into other properties, we would (hopefully) remain relatively untouched. Still, any time the family is trimmed, it's hardly a time for mirth.

Thinking about it today, I realized that I've worked for seven computer-related companies, four of which have dot-bombed (BMUG, MacWEEK, Dantz, Casady & Greene, Ikonic, CKS (aka USWeb/CKS, reinvent, marchFIRST), and Eleven), all with massive layoffs before the end, and yet I've never worked anyplace at the time they were laying off people, so this is all new to me. Also interesting is that every public company I've worked for (with the exception of the University of California) has gone under, and every privately-owned company is still around. Interesting.

Anyhow, the stock price has been going up steadily all week, apparently because strategic layoffs of between 5 and 15% of a company's workforce is seen as a healthy thing. I feel bad for feeling good about the stock. So the news was official today: 400 people (13%) will be laid off in the next few weeks, with 75% of the cuts coming from Yahoo! Broadcast, based in Dallas, and International divisions. Also, Yahoo! will be hiring another 100 people in their core growth areas. Presumably these new 100 will have specific skills or geographic locations or flexibility that the departing 400 don't.

So it looks like Gooey is pretty safe, though I can't sat the same for fellow weblogger Jason Silverstein, whose office (the aforementioned Yahoo! Broadcast) is facing workforce cuts of 45%. The worst part is that Broadcast was bought by Yahoo! less than a year ago, and now they're letting half the people go. Ai-yai-yai.

So tomorrow is the all-hands meeting, where senior management talks to all the employees, but I won't be there, as I'm going to Tahoe for a family reunion. I'll be sure to watch the archived webcast when I get back though.

The good news is that it looks like analysts viewed the all-day presentations well, and that Yahoo! does have a good plan for growth over the next four years. If Yahoo were to bomb, I'd lose faith in the net, because we do things right, have good karma (x-10 notwithstanding), and provide core, established services people need and use every day, and we don't charge for all the basic stuff. Call me tunnel-visioned or biased, but I don't think there's anyplace else out there that you can go to for 90% of the things you use the web for, at least I can't think of one.

So that's pretty much it for today. Just a from-the-trenches look at what's going on. The ship sails on, cool things are always on the way, and maybe most of them will still get to see the light of day.

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I am so stoked. Today the Yahoo Gooey group (Gooey = GUI = Graphical User Interface = User Interface = Visual and interaction design + research) went on an offsite, spending three hours bowling in Palo Alto.

For something I only do once a year or two, bowling is something I really like. I used to be on a league (8th grade, I used to ride my skateboard to the bowling alley seven miles away on Saturday mornings. (no, don't be silly. I had a locker for the ball)) but I was never very good. I played for two seasons and, thanks to stellar older teammates (they were 14 and 15 to my 13 years) and a dynamite handicap, we took first place with my 114 season average.

The next season my average was 122, but I got last place, on a team with less experienced (than me, even!) teammates. I still have the trophies at home.

Anyhow, nowadays I'm an inconstant bowler on my annual sojourns. Some days I'll struggle to break 90, others I'll manage 130 or even 135. I played a few months ago and fell right about in the middle of that range.

Today was simply incredible. I can't believe it. I don't understand it. I can't question it, other than to wonder if a lighter ball is what I needed all along. I played four games today. First game I couldn't hit a strike for my life. Every ball hit the pocket, but the center pin would always remain standing in the rubble. I was happy with the 119 I got that game, though it came more from picking up spares than anything else.

The next game, and I'll spare you the play by play version, saw me do something I'd never managed before, a 'turkey,' the technical term for three strikes in a row. Everything was perfect and as soon as the ball left my hand each time, I just knew.

And on the fourth ball I did it again. Four in a row. Wog.

The highest game I'd ever bowled was when I was 14, when I came up with an amazing-to-me 156. I still have the frame-by-frame account of that game kept in my bowling bag. This second game blew it away. 176.

The third game went pretty much like the second, but without a four-fer. Amazingly the game wasn't a fluke because the third game tallied up to 172.

My last game, and what might be my last game for a while, because I don't want to touch a bowling ball after that magic, I started off slow. Going into the fifth frame I had 54 points. Not spectacular, and barely enough to set me up for another 119. Then the mojo kicked in again. Four strikes, a spare, and another closing strike. 201.

Bowling 201 is, to me, like running a mile and looking at your watch and finding out that it took less than five minutes, or filling up your car and finding out that you got 100 miles to the gallon on your last tank. It just doesn't seem possible. It doesn't occur to you. Or at least to me.

Okay, taking the obligatory application of topical insights to the human condition, I'm surprised that I could be surprised; that with all my studying about how things work and self assessment of who I am, that something could jump out like that. I'm still floating from the act.

Of course, for all of you who are thinking "neat" (or "pretty full of himself, isn't he?"), there's one person (okay maybe two) who is probably steaming mad that I took her luck again.

Anyhow, this, as much as anything, is a representation of my day:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Final 8 / 9 - 9 / 7 2 7 / X   X   X   X   7 / X 201 19 28 45 54 74 104 134 161 181 201

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Last Tuesday I was at work and, is bound to happen when you're working in the real world instead of a TV show, I had to use the restroom. If I'd known that going to the bathroom might have placed my life in danger, I'd have held it. I didn't have to go that bad.

No, this isn't going to be one of those stories. As you can see, Yahoo's facilities are quite clean. Nothing to be afraid of.

Or so I thought.

Okay, back to the matter at, er, hand. I walk to the men's restroom, pick a stall (which, like the nature of my business, was Number 2), and I latch the door behind me. Bip-bip! Hmm? What was that? I thought the restroom was empty (not that it matters). Bip-bip! I look over (I haven't sat down yet (TMI?) ) and see a cellphone in a leather case, double-bipping every Bip-bip! 6 seconds or so. It's just sitting there on top of the stainless steel toilet paper dispenser like a child who, when lost at the mall, has the good sense to stay put but lacks the maturity to keep the small plaintive whimpers inside.

I lean over the phone and take a look at the display. It's not ringing but it sounds like it has a really important message, and the sender isn't willing to settle for just a 'once every 5 minutes' beep and tickle. Taking a look at the display, I see it's all in Spanish and, of course, there's no signal in the middle of a stall in the middle of a bathroom in the middle of a building in the middle of the reclaimed South-bay dotcom wetlands.

That's fine. I get to be helpful! I'll take the phone out with me when I'm done and I'll send out an email to the floor and see whose phone it is. But wait. What if they come back while I'm going? The strange taint that adheres to the emergency toilet paper roll, passed under a stall from a savior to a stallgoer in need of saving, could be nothing compared to the cooties that would infect a cellphone passed from an unseen stranger's unknown hands under the stall door to the owner. This is not the kind of dirt the leather case is designed to repel. Worse, unlike a 'holy roll,' the phone would stay with the owner, if anything, holding on all the tighter for its recent traumatic experience. No. Clearly I couldn't leave it in the stall while I went (and not because I felt it would be staring at me, tittering all the while. Like I said, it's not that kind of story. While we're on the subject, why to they call it 'going'? You don't start going until you're already in the restroom, and you certainly don't leave the restroom until after you've gone. Ahh, linguistics. But, as ever, I digress...).

So clearly the thing to do Bip-bip! is put the phone on the counter by the sinks, then go, then take it with me back to my cube when I leave.

Unlatch the door, pick up the phone, put it on the counter, come back, latch, clean the seat with a sheet (YTMI!), and do my business.

Someone walks in. Is it them? No. To the urinal they go. They finish up, Bip-bip! use the sink furthest from the phone and leave, ignoring the phone (which, in retrospect, they probably assumed was mine).

I realize now (I'm referring to the 'now' of me writing this story, as opposed to the more distant 'now' that I'm relating in the story or your own personal 'now' assuming you're still reading this story, bravely trusting that this really isn't a scatological tale (or, alternatively, becoming rapidly frustrated that your own odd fetish isn't being serviced by my tale (OCTMI!) ) ), I say I realize now that the reader might be getting the wrong impression, that I'm one of those people who has to stop what they're doing whenever someone else walks in, as though the sound of bowels being voided in a restroom stall is as shocking or shameful as a muffled orgasm coming from an office stairwell (NTMI). No, I'm not one of those people, though there seem to be a lot of them here at Yahoo! (the 'don't go (void) till they go (leave)' type, as opposed to the sex in stairwells type, which I haven't encountered, though a coworker told me about a pair (I hesitate to presume they were a 'couple') who was(*) dismissed after being caught having sex in a conference room after everyone else had evacuated for a fire drill). It leads me to wonder what, given how often I see (err, sense) these introverted excrementers, happens when, inevitably, two of these people are in the bathroom at the same time? Defecation Detente? Anyhow, now that I've embarrassed myself further by trying to prove that I'm not a freak (and succeeded in demonstrating that I'm very much a freak of a different sort) (Err, meaning the kind that analyzes people in bathrooms too much, not the kind that has sex in stairwells (oh forget it. I'm getting back to the story now.) )

Right. Where was I? Yeah; so number 1 leaves, a few seconds pass, and another guy walks in to the bathroom. He walks straight to the phone on the counter, picks it up, turns to leave, and on his way out, pulls out a walkie-talkie, pushes the button and says,

"I found another one."

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So Handspring's poised to announce the Treo line on Monday. One of the devices has a build-in mini-keyboard to compliment the cellphone and internet capabilities of the device.

The color version won't come out for another couple months or so after the first two, but it just might be enough to convince me to rethink my Palm V, especially if they do go with Cingular in the bay area, so i could just tack it on as another phone on my existing account.

All this, of course, is contingent on my still having a job. (okay, to ease the melodrama, they'll be announcing staffing changes in mid-November, and it probably won't affect me or my group, but still...)

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Today I get to have lunch with a face and a name.

Rather, I get to have two lunches.

For the first, I'm having lunch with George Chen, a name you probably don't recognize, but someone with a face you'll almost certainly recognize from somewhere. George, aka "The Internet Guy," is a web developer who, as it happens, went to a photo shoot some years ago, and ended up as the Internet's stock-photo poster boy. Like Wil Wheaton, it's sometimes hard to remember that there's a real person behind the 5meg TIFF files. And yes, I'll see if I can get a picture with him. Like Ernie says, he's the next Curtis!

Hot on the heels of lunch #1, A co-worker and I are lunching with Matt Haughey to chat about net stuff. If you don't recognize his name, you'll almost certainly recognize his creation. Oooh. Now I just have to finally meet Ev and my homage to-do list will be complete!

Throw into the mix a meeting from 10 to 11 and another from 11 to noon and my day is 2/3rds gone.

Add into the mix my odd commute today. I went to sleep late (that's always a fair guess when you see me post at 1:30 in the morning) (but at least I got to see West Wing, Friends, Will & Grace, and half of Enterprise) so I decided to splurge and try out the new later train leaving at 8:02 from Emeryville. I was a little late, but luckily I knew that the train was later (28 minutes), and to add to that I decided to pick it up in Hayward, to make for a faster trek home tonight. So it turns out I was the only person to get on the train at Hayward, and I walked into an absolutely silent car. Downstairs was empty, and upstairs there was only one fellow traveller. Almost spooky. Fire up the powerbook, iTunes, and the Supreme Beings of Leisure cd I was listening to in the car and it gets downright otherworldly.

Now I'm between Fremont and Santa Clara, it's 9:30, and considering that I'll probably have to catch lightrail from the station, I'll be lucky if I get to work by 10:20.

Double-buh.

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I should be sleeping. This marks my final defeat for the day.

In the wake of a job that gives me precious little time of my own, I set out this morning to see, with everything arranged most favorably, if I could create a work schedule that would still give me some degree of personal time.

Despite all my efforts, I abjectly failed.

Okay, so I thought I would get to work at 7:30 this morning, and to do so (and to visit Em and Kisa) I stayed over at Em's house last night. Further changing my schedule, I took my shower before going to sleep, so I could be up and out and off to work early in the morning.

Morning came: so far so good. Left the house around 6:30, got in to work at about 7:15 (25 mile commute instead of 45). One of the first in the office, I actually got to relax. For the better part of the morning I was working on mocks and debugging my Powermac which inexplicably slows to crawl whenever I launch iTunes (v 1.1, running MacOS 9.1 on a dual 400Mhz G4 box) regardless of whether music is playing, or even if I quit the app. Every time this happens I have to restart, or suffer with a text editing experience much like typing over a 300 baud modem and a tendency to drop characters.

Ever resourceful in finding ways to increase personal time, I also brought laundry to work, to give our new laundry service a try. At $25 a bag it sounds like a good way to free up hours of my own day and a (relatively) reasonable price. The catch is we're supposed to pack laundry in their bags, but the first time you naturally don't have their bags, so you use your own. Mind you, my bag is huge, holding about 40 lbs of laundry.

Nevertheless, I was still set upon leaving at 4 to come home, only I forgot to let my manager know so come 3:15 I get a plateful of work that keeps me in until 6:45. At about 5:00 the laundry guy comes to my cube to pick up my laundry (nifty!) and he shows me what their 'regular bags' looks like. The site says their bags hold about 2-3 loads of laundry, but it looks more like 2-3 sinkfuls to me. The thing would barely hold a couple towels. Anyhow, I sent my bag off with him anyhow, though I really don't know why since I'll probably just get a call tomorrow asking for authorization for $150 to do my laundry (no thankyouverymuch) and I'll get my old dirty laundry back tomorrow or Wednesday and be right where I am now, only feeling like more of a humanitarian for participating in 'take your laundry to work TWICE day.'

Frustrated at that, and at being at work for nearly 12 hours on the day I was trying to prove that I can shape my destiny and make my life tenable, I finally finish up work at about 7:15 and decide, since my day is shot anyhow, to put a positive spin on it by bringing up from my trunk the parts to the POÄNG chair I bought on Friday and assembling it for my cube. I lug the four pieces (chair frame, ottoman frame, and two cushions) from the car to the cube, and take the boxes apart, only to discover that I got the wrong stain for the chair which, while it would look fine in my office, wouldn't match the one I have at home and, more to the point, wouldn't match the matching ottoman (truly a Will & Grace moment, yes).

Argh. Repack the chair, take it back to the trunk, drive home, stopping by IKEA 30 minutes before they close, making it out of there (god only knows why I happened to have the receipt in my wallet. I'm usually really bad about that) about 10 minutes after their 9pm closing.

Driving home I decide for one last stab at satisfaction and dropped by the Starry Plough for Monday Irish dancing and got to dance a four-hand reel for the first time in about 6 months, so that was good.

Parking, I just knew I'd get another ticket for expired registration tabs and, after grabbing a frozen dinner from the market and getting my mail, I notice my DMV registration has finally arrived, so I go back out to my car and put the sticker on, then come up to my apartment, about 28.5 hours after I last left it (or, to be more fair, 16 hours after I left for work).

Don't even get me started about missing Rosh Hashana tomorrow. Maybe it'll be something to atone for during next week's Yom Kippur.

Anyhow, I'm going to try again tomorrow, even if it means I only get five hours sleep tonight. Outta here by 6:00, at work before 7:30, leave work at 3:30 or 4 and get home around 5:30.

Well, at least that's the plan.

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Christ on a pogo stick I'm stressed. In addition to having a 'get home at 8pm, wake up at 5:45am' schedule with the commute, I have two projects given to me today that need to be done by 9 and 11 am respectively... Ack!

I was planning on driving in tomorrow, but now I need to take the train, just so I'll have the hour to work before I get to work.

No, it's not always like this and I probably shouldn't be venting. This is all just a play for sympathy when you'd otherwise be wondering thy I haven't been posting much.

Dotcom Storytime part 3 will probably be written on the train ride home tomorrow, and I promise you'll get a kick out of it.

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Well, not actually weekend, as it's just Friday, but I just wanted to toss out some bulletpoints:

• Stayed working late last night, left at midnight.
• Gonna get a Poang chair for my office. Good for thinking, and napping... Mmm... Napping...
• Comments are fixed. Long story, messy, but suffice to say that UNIX is a magical beast, and not all magical beasts are nice, or fully understandable.
• Comments will be ported to mySQL soon, and will be incorporated into the permalink-version of posts (more like Dave does it.
• I have finalized an order of priorities for projects, as well as a work schedule (well, and 'around-work' schedule) for getting them done during evenings and commutes. The priorities are:
  1. Metacookie
  2. Blogger Purity Survey
  3. Randompixel
  4. Underblog
  5. qwer.org
  6. more...
• Working on my self-evaluation for the annual performance review
• I am sooo telecommuting on Monday. Heck, Yahoo even got an award from the EPA for that stuff.

Okay, lunchtime. Hasta!

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Sometimes I'm really glad to be working where I am:

• Report: Phony 'Grassroots' Campaign Orchestrated by Microsoft
• Report: Consumers Nix Microsoft Passport
• AOL Voted Least Trusted on Net

(and for those who keep hinting that Fury is just a front for Yahoo, consider that maybe I chose to work there because I like the company, and not vice-versa)

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Okay, so I try not to be a little spout of Yahoo! propaganda, but there is one thing worth sharing today:

Yahoo! and American Airlines are having this big one-day sale on tickets within the continental US. No ticket to or from anywhere is more than $314 round-trip if you buy it through the site today, but at the end of the day, the site goes away. Tickets can be purchased for travel between August 22 and December 13.

Just thought it might be useful to ya! Now back to our pimp-free weblogging...

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Someone wrote yesterday, asking me about the official relationship between Fury.com and Yahoo!, now that I'm designing interfaces for them. The simple answer is that Fury and Yahoo! are completely seperate entities. I work for Yahoo! during the day (and whenever else) and I write for my own blog (and associated projects) in my own time.

No doubt I'll put together an OAQ or FUAQ (or, as I've read said: QTAFA) list eventually but suffice it to say that I'm being very careful to keep both my employer and my readers happy.

Seeing Gaiman speak tonight was great. He really knows how to tell a story, as well as write one, and American Gods will now have a new voice attached to it when I get the chance to read it.

The new, and working, poll will be up soon. Meanwhile, I'm puting together one last sitelet before cleaning my web house (aoliza and randompixel) become my priorities again.

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Driving down to and returning from my second interview at Yahoo!, back in February, I was weighing the merits of employment against those of a Masters education, juxtaposed against the realities of working 50 miles from home and studying 3000 miles from home. Lounging most heavy in my mind were the changes that would manifest transitioning from the 9-4 life of a student living 300 yards from campus and that of a full-time designer working 9 hours bracketed by a combined four-hour commutes

Amidst the downsides, I did see one bright spot that I held to: The Parallax View.

Parallax, the difference between two views of the same scene perceived from slightly seperated points in space, is what gives us stereoscopic vision and a perception of depth. Two simultaneous viewpoints give your brain the information it needs to construct a better picture of the world around it. Similarly, living in Berkeley (northeast SF Bay) and working in Sunnyvale (South Bay) gives me a better perspective on the bay area as a whole.

History: Back in 1994, when Karen and I moved out of our El Cerrito apartment, me to regress back into the dorms (Clark Kerr, building 9 single-in-a-suite) and her to a shared apartment deep in silicon Santa Clara to intern at IBM, the 50 miles between Berkeley and Santa Clara seemed like the voids of the Baja peninsula, ill-defined and forboding. It was a big deal to drive down now and then to see my best friend, or to take BART->bus->lightrail->bus for the same journey. In retrospect it's hard (and a bit depressing) to believe we didn't see each other more often, but from a single-point perspective from a small Berkeley dorm room and a car bearing a moniker of 'deathtrap' and a hood secured with a chain and padlock, the South Bay seemed far, far away.

Later, as more of my friends moved to the South Bay, or at least south of Berkeley, that world started to seem a little closer. For the better part of a year Ammy and I would split the distance for dinner meeting at Hobee's in Fremont. Even then, the measure from Berkeley to Fremont seemed only a bit shorter than the full drive to Santa Clara.

After living with Karen I began a long tradition of getting close to the geographically remote: Liz/Fair Oaks/95 miles/79 minutes, Dana/Davis/63 miles/60 minutes, Crystal/Vallejo/24 miles/30 minutes, Emily/Pleasanton/37 miles/32 minutes. Yet even pushing down the interstate asphalt that lay between the point-source of home and the point-destination of a significant other did little to make the Bay Area seem any closer or more accessable. I'm not sure whether that's because visiting a girlfriend is different than going to a party in The City, or because all of the above lived east of me, and thus represented an exodus from, and not an exploration of, the Bay Area.

Zipping back to the now, driving (or taking the train, as I am at this moment) to and from Sunnyvale on a daily basis has done a lot towards bringing a sense of depth and perspective to my own personal Bay Area geography, consequently bringing the more distant reaches closer to home.

With one foot at each pole of the Bay, suddenly diverting to Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Hayward, or Alameda after work isn't nearly the arduous journey that it once was for the Berkeley-laden student.

Of course, all this space comes at the expense of time. As it is when I take the train I leave home at 7 am and get back at around 7:30 pm, so any extra-vehicular activity seriously cuts in to the four personal hours before my own self-mandated bedtime, but as long as I have waystations closer to work where I can bide the night and shortcut the sixthday transit, the Bay has come into my grasp. Like the sojourner gunning down Baja with a second tank of gas in the back to bridge the gap, so I now have both the perspective and the pit-stop to fully explore my decade-home, a palace with too many rooms that I rarely think of and never visit. (Do you get the gist of the post now?)

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What did I do this weekend? Well, last week all Yahoo! got an email that there's a 25% off sale, above and beyond any other sales or markdowns, at Linens 'n' Things for all Yahoo! employees and their guests this weekend only. Friday I got my first Yahoo! paycheck.

You can see where this goes...

Sunday morning Emily, Ali, and I ventured to Pleasanton for a little binge shopping. Like any bachelor, I find that there are certain kinds of things that follow the binge-purge cycle: build up the laundry 'till you're stuck for clothes you'd dare to be seen in, then spend a whole day at the laundramat, washing everything but the clothes you'd never wear, but can't seem to bring to throw or give away, grocery shopping (and all the people reading this who really know me can shut up now. It's a generalization. <grin>), and of course shopping of all other kinds that don't fall under the 'impulse buy' or the banal needs of the id.

Shopping for the bedroom falls squarely in the realm of the bulimic. I don't do it often, but when I do, I revel in it, and I'm glad that I had two friends with me with a better sense of decorating than me. So three hours, 750 dollars, and a couple cartloads of comforter, chenelle, pillows,and varied assortments later we were done.

Ali and Emily each came away with respectable hauls as well. I'm sure Ali already put her ensemble together to greet her husband returning that evening from Los Angeles. Emily's probably putting hers together as I write this, and I'm putting my new bedroom together as soon as I get home and post this.

I have a houseguest coming in tomorrow, and so I have another bed to make up as well as my own, and more dauntingly, a living room that has seen the brunt of my long hours at work and little time to straighten up these past few weeks.

Assembling furniture and cleaning a room is a lot like taking a bath when I was little: you kick and scream against it, but once you're in the thick it's actually pretty great.

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I'm so tired, and more than that, so tired of Netscape on my linux box choking in fear over simple well-formed HTML pages. It just crashed mid-post, so I'm reshaping my thoughts from the powerbook.

I'm now between my third and fourth days at Yahoo!. (note: The '!' is an integral part of Yahoo!'s brand identity, and should always be included as such. Thus, when someone inquires at your inclination to "Yahoo!?" it should be interpreted as a regular question, and not an interrobang (note to the note: an interrobang is actually "?!." (note to the note to the note: The period "." in the preceeding (preceeding) quote was grammatically correct, even there there is no period in an interrobang (n^4: except for the two periods within the ? and "!." (n^5: Argh. Forget it.)).) and so a "!?" would more accurately be termed a "bangogator.").) Did I mention I'm tired?

So, back on track: I only got about 3 hours of sleep Monday night, fretting about the new job starting on Tuesday. Tuesday night I played games at Ammy & Rick's, and didn't get home until around 10:30, got to sleep at midnight, got up at 5:30 (half hour before the alarm, but I was up, so it was no use). Last night I got 7 hours of sleep, but it was really hot and I had bad allergies so I tossed and snuffed all night. This morning it all caught up with me and I could barely stay awake most of the day. At least the meeting I most needed to be awake for was postponed.

Tonight I will sleep. Tonight I will sleep. Tonight I will sleep. Tonight I will sleep.

Work is great. These people really do know their stuff, and I think I'll fit right in. The best part is I haven't figured out yet whether they know just how rare they are. They probably do. Anyhow, it's just like summer camp where everyone's cool and they inspire each other to do great things.

Okay, now about blogging. I'm torn between getting a Blackberry and writing an email-blogging gateway, reactivating service on my Omnisky modem, or holding out for a ricochet modem for my laptop. The idea is that now that most of my non-work computer time will be in-transit (on the days I take Amtrak, anyhow) that I'd like to be able to blog from the train. Even