After weighing some very nice competing offers, I've decided to return to California to take a job with a company in Palo Alto. It means delaying my desire to migrate to London (and I say "delay" in an effort to assure myself that I can try again as some future date), and turning down an opportunity to work on the guts of the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.

But lest you think I'm complaining, what it also means is that I'm going to get to do some very interesting work in high-traffic management of news feeds (as in actual journalistic feeds, not just any yahoo with a blog and an RSS link on the sidebar), with some added potential for research into semantic web issues as they apply to content itself. It also means that I'll be returning to the bay area, where I have a pretty nice circle of friends, all of whom (that I've talked to thus far) are eager to welcome me back. So while London held a certain romantic mystery for me, I'm awfully lucky to be able to go back to a place where I have so many friends and where I know the lay of the land so well.

Exact details of transition, starting-date, etc. have not been worked out (I'm actually in London as I type this). I'm eager to start as soon as I can, but in practical terms that will probably still take a few weeks, as I have to get things together in Denver, establish where I'll be staying until I've banked enough money to get a new place (not looking forward to apartment hunting again), and wrap up some contracting committments that are still outstanding. Plus, this upcoming week is Thanksgiving, and I had planned on visiting family in Mesa, Arizona. So there are several days this week where nothing will really get done, either. Still, I expect to start not later than December 11th, unless the company has paperwork-ish issues that take longer than that to work through.

So if you're in the bay area and have missed me, I shall be back in mere weeks. If you haven't missed me, at least pretend like you did. I'm going to be having enough self-doubt over the decision I made in the initial 2-3 months, until I can get more or less settled, at least let me think you're sympathetic...