At this moment, I feel very uncertain about the future of my career. I have visions of where I want it to go, but no definitive plans. Quite honestly, I don’t even know if that vision is what I want or just want I think I want. In the meantime, the clock continues to tick…

In March of this year, I stepped outside of engineering at Isilon. Moving into product management has been a very enlightening and enjoyable experience in general, but its also been very difficult - I’m in completely uncharted waters. As an engineer, I wrote code. As a manager, I made sure others wrote code. Code makes things work. When code doesn’t work, you point at the code. You can point at that code and say, look - I made that happen.

Zack had been prompting me to read this for some time, so I took it with on my trip to Texas last week. It turned out to be very easy and engaging reading and I finished it on the flight down. Reading Wil’s blog entries and then his own commentary on the blogs was interesting. I have found a very similiar duality or “show” which occurs in my own writing.

Less than 3 years ago, I was the proud owner of a fully populated entertainment center/bookshelf. This is not one of those small pieces of furniture, mind you, but at least 10 feet in length and 8 feet tall.

I love information - I'm essentially an information pack rat, although as you'll see, that is changing. I've kept most of my books from college - especially my math and computer science books. I really (read never) have time to read them, but just seeing them on the shelves takes me back to a time where I was younger, smarter, and more in control. =)

nick.org - down!

After almost four years of no unscheduled downtime, nick.org came to a screeching halt Sunday. I noticed an email from my brother, Kevin, indicating that I had farked something up. “That’s weird”, I thought, “it was working fine last night.” I went to the website and found it very unavailable, with nothing but a strange Apache directory listing. I attempted to ssh and found that it was unavailable too. Uh oh. I happened to be talking to my parents via Skype at the time (it was Mother’s day) and juggling Jerry on my knee.