My co-worker Chris and I just finished our 3-country press and analyst tour. We were in Hong Kong for 5 days, Tokyo for 2 and Seoul for 2. It was my first press tour and a good experience. The last day was especially interesting as I went on a customer visit to some Korean scientific agencies and then they took me out for sushi. It was a lot of fun to build a personal relationship with people from a different culture.

There’s no doubt that I feel quite a bit of buyer’s remorse. It goes up and down - on some days I’m flush with pride and confidence in my move to product management and other days I feel foolish, jealous, angry, and very insecure.

In general, I have to admit, I’m feeling insecure about a lot of things. I don’t know if it is a natural biological time (i.e. just turned 30) or if I’ve been socially conditioned to be reflective and introspective - or finally, if there are simply too many unsettled changes going on in my life.

Somehow, I happened on the blog of Michael “Mish” Shedlock - everything must be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but I think a lot of his analysis is spot on. I’ve also started following some articles on http://seekingalpha.com/ as I try to make sense of the current investment climate.

Being in the middle-class, capital preservation is very important in volatile times - otherwise there will be nothing to invest when the market rebounds.

This is for the Hong Kong press and analysts:

Nick Kirsch has over 9 years experience designing and building distributed systems. Nick joined Isilon in 2002 as an engineer and participated in the development of version 1.0 of the Isilon OneFS operating system. Nick spent 2003-2006 designing the infrastructure and building a team dedicated to system configuration and management as a Development Lead and Engineering Manager. In 2007, Nick built a team of 15 engineers focused on Isilon’s SyncIQ disaster recovery product before leading the Software Engineering organization as the Director of Software. In April of 2008, Nick moved to Isilon’s Product Management group to focus on maintaining and extending Isilon’s technology and product lead in clustered storage. Before Isilon, Nick spent 3 years at InsynQ, Inc. as Director of Development. Nick holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Puget Sound and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

My dad complained for years that everything was made in China. Sadly, it is becoming a reality.

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Dear Mr. Kirsch:

Thank you for writing me about the current downturn in the housing market and the federal government’s role in responding. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

As you know, growing losses in subprime mortgage markets have recently had a negative effect on the United States economy. Thousands of people are on the brink of losing their homes to foreclosure, and as a result many financial institutions have been faced with bankruptcy as consumer confidence in mortgage-backed securities has decreased. I share many of your concerns regarding the appropriate manner for Congress and the Administration to respond to this situation.