Whew, what a week! Where to begin? So you know that the week started on a sour note. Things looked up considerably after that: stomach settled, fever dissipated. I spent a couple sluggish days in Broomfield, but fortunately my coworker Jeff was coming off of a cold too, so we forgave each others long vacant pauses, and wandering asides. (And still managed to get some work done, too!) A highlight of the stay in Colorado was stealing away for a couple of hours with an old AOL colleague, Dan Pacheco.
Ain't it funny the way the world works? Once upon a time, Dan and I found ourselves on opposite sides of your classic corporate turf-war -- his team were the business owners for products that my team was building. They had the requirements, and we had the constantly-extended 'blockage palm' (internationalization will take a year! no new features until Q4, bl-blah-bee-blah blah!)
Our Product Managers invented an amusing little phrase -- "Danage Control" to describe their (twice and thrice-daily) attempts to accomodate requests, ideas and directives from Dan. He's just a guy with a lot of passion, and a lot of ideas, and I could tell even then that being one or two steps removed from his implementation team was a hard pill for him to swallow.
So Dan and I went to Boulder, had a long sit-down at The Walnut Brewery, laughed about those times, and exchanged notes on how our circumstances have changed. Dan's got a great gig going with an ambitious local paper looking to transform their business (and leveraging Dan's long history in technology and community.)
Most importantly, his passion and drive are now completely unfettered. (If you've never worked for a large organization like AOL, you may not realize just how difficult it is to get any damn thing done.) He's driving the strategy, he's hiring the developers, and he's seeing his master-plan take shape. Good on you, Dan! Keep it up.
Dan failed miserably, however, in his attempt to fulfill my one request while in Boulder: The Mork and Mindy House remains a mystery to me.
After Broomfield, it was on to the Bay Area, my old haunt. I'm staying in Mountain View on this trip (much better than Redwood City, where I stayed last time. This puts me closer to friends.)
So far:
- One delightful dinner with my friend Shannon. We went looking for Ti Couz, but ended up settling for tapas instead.
- Two fantastic breakfasts with Bradley, wherein we got to talk about life, work, loss and everything in between. And he gifted me with a free Flickr Pro account afterward!
- One fierce throwdown with said Braddles, Matt and Rich. Halo 2 thursdays, with new map downloads and my wife playing from home!
- A visit to La Costena for the burrito that haunts my memories.
So that's my week. I'm writing this down for my future benefit, so please forgive the easy, breezy 'Dear Diary' feel of it all.
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