Personal

I’m going to tell a couple of related stories about a similar topic today, just because they fall together in my mind and I think it’s an interesting contrast. Let’s talk about time off from both a management and a human perspective. (All quotes are paraphrased from memory.) I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have managers who, at the worst, would listen to HR when they were told that they needed to make me use up my accrued vacation time. And I assume they weren’t generally just waiting for HR to nudge them; they genuinely understood that vacation was important and everyone needs time off now and again. Even working in the video game industry, which is legendary for crunch, I only had a really brutal stretch once. Even Chris Chong, my boss at Amazon, was pretty good about nudging me – although not during preparation for peak traffic periods. At Amazon you gotta plan your life a little more carefully than usual. ...

Time for another “how I got hired” story, this time about my entrance into the video game industry. I’ve really enjoyed the time I spent working in games, and Turbine was maybe the best of it. Despite being the only job in my career where I had to support Windows servers. A couple of years before I got to Turbine, I’d started playing their first MMO, Asheron’s Call, fondly known as AC. At the time, particularly if you were an AC player, AC was one of the big three massively multiplayer online RPGs or MMOs. The other two were Ultima Online and EverQuest. They were way bigger than AC, which was a distant third, although big enough to claim that third place status legitimately. Later on, Blizzard would destroy all of us with World of Warcraft (and cause me some difficulties getting datacenter space), but that’s another story. ...

I don’t remember how I wound up at the Internet Archive. Obviously I interviewed and all that but I don’t remember how I found the job or anything. Maybe through someone I met while I was volunteering as a sysadmin at the 24 Hours of Cyberspace event? Regardless, it was my next job after Sun Microsystems, which I left after the JavaStation work I’ve already written about. Fascinating place, no matter how I got there. There’s not going to be any central thread to this post, just a bunch of memories of a cool place to work and a bit of technology nostalgia. ...

My dear wife S. likes to look at me despairingly and ask why I’m the way I am. It’s a fair question. My usual trite response is that my mother raised me that way, at which point she says I should show my mother more respect, and so on. (I love my mother, truly.) While this series is more focused on my career in tech than on my formative years, those formative years do explain a lot, and I like all the stories. This is the story of how the family wound up half-moving from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, plus an explosive revelation. It captures a lot of our family dynamics, and sheds a little light on my tendencies to resist authority. ...

This is a Scott McNealy story. Kids these days may not remember Scott; he was the long-term CEO and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He was legendary for being outspoken, opinionated, and a maverick. He wasn’t a technical guy at heart, leaning way more towards the business side. Nevertheless, he was pretty smart about which way the technical winds were blowing. Sun Microsystems was built on the idea that a computer which wasn’t attached to a network – preferably the Internet – was less useful. I’ll loop back and talk about the first two jobs I had at Sun at some point. Right now, we’re gonna talk about the last job I had at Sun, which was working on the internal Javastation deployment program. Javastations were perhaps the pinnacle of Scott’s network-oriented philosophy, so this was pretty important stuff. ...

My friend Sarah Gould keeps telling me I should write an autobiography because I love telling stories. I cannot deny the premise of the argument, and I know I want to redevelop my writing skills; thus, I’m going to start capturing some of those tales of how I got from there to here. Like all good stories, I’m going to start in the middle. Don’t expect any of this to be linear. ...

I’m sitting on the Coho Ferry on the way to Victoria; I’ve got one last Ingress key drop to make before we leave the area. Admittedly this is also serving the purpose of checking off one more ferry we hadn’t tried in the past. There’s something kind of romantic about driving to a small city on the edge of America to take a small ferry to a city that always feels like a lost outpost of the British Empire. Naming their big luxury hotel the Empress probably has something to do with that feeling. ...

So here we are in sunny Minneapolis/St. Paul. I’m writing up some notes as we go, and will post the whole thing on our return to Seattle. Right now — Wednesday morning — we’re sitting in the Lost Fox coffee shop in Lowertown, St. Paul. This would very likely be our neighborhood coffee shop if we wound up living in St. Paul for the first year. There are power strips at each table and it’s roomy, plus the lattes are good. ...

I won’t bury the lede: I’m retiring! After literally 30+ years working as a system administrator, manager, director, and general thinking-oriented person, I am hanging up my last employee badge and riding off into the sunset. I told my team last week, and May 28th will be my very last day. It’s a big step. Yes, I’m excited. Yes, I’m also nervous. S. and I were the right combination of lucky and talented to be able to retire comfortably at a relatively early age; after a lot of discussions with professionals over the last six months or so we decided it was better to take the leap and maximize our personal time in the decades remaining. Pokémon has been a good place to work, but my anarchistic self has never actually been all that comfortable as a manager despite the fact that I’m very good at it. ...

Way belated, but I wanted to talk a bit about my day trip to Belfast from February, the last time I was in Ireland. It made an impact on me. So some of my work trips to Dublin are two weeks long, which is honestly more time than I like but gives me a good solid chunk of time with my Dublin teams. Also it means I get the weekend to do touristy stuff. I gave some serious consideration to flying to Berlin for the weekend this time until deciding that I wasn’t going to have the energy for a winter Berlin trip. Instead, I spent one day taking a bus tour up to Belfast. ...