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...

I've been laid off. This comes at a strange time for me, as I've been toying with either returning to Denver, or trying to get a work permit for the UK and moving there. Right now I'm still too frazzled to draw any sound conclusions.

More detail to follow.

Acting on a suggestion from a friend, I've made a donation for Hurricane Katrina relief by way of AmeriCares. According to him, this organization has a stellar record of getting aid to the places it is needed, has extremely low overhead (meaning a much higher percentage of monies donated go to aid vs. bureaucracy), and a long track record from events such as the tsunami last December and 9/11.

Do whatever you can to help the victims in New Orleans. You don't have to go through AmeriCares, but for the sake of humanity do something.

OSCON 2005, and I'm already through one tutorial. About to grab lunch (after I finish some updates, don't want to turn off the net connection just yet), and go to another tutorial this afternoon. Since the convention proper doesn't start until Wednesday, not a lot of people are around, yet. I've run into a few already, though.

How much of Portland beyond the convention center I get to see, that remains to be seen.

There's a pretty good chance that I'll be taking a contract for some moonlighting work with an entity I'm not at liberty to name at the moment. This will be in addition to my usual day-job.

On top of that, I was picked as an alternate presenter for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention this year, after someone had to drop out. So I'm also working up a paper/presentation that I'd already given up on and stopped researching.

So, with the exception of a small number of regular engagements, I'm probably going to be effectively invisible for at least the next 8 weeks or so. If anyone gets worried, feel free to e-mail me. Odds are about 3-to-1 that I'm online at that very moment...

I've been doing some clean-up on this journal, and one of the things I've done recently is remove the comments from stories. This isn't about hiding myself from the opinions of others, but rather about comment-spam.

The comment system I used is fairly robust, and could prevent some types of comment-spam (comments that are either outright commercial messages, or worse, those that contain malicious JavaScript code). But not all of it, and while I had some useful cron scripts catching most of the rest, it just got to be too much of a hassle.

So, from now on if you want to disagree with me, you'll have to actually e-mail me to do so...

I haven't had a single month fly by so quickly since, well, probably when I was in college and facing down my last set of final exams. I seriously feel like I blinked on the 2nd or so, and now it's the 31st.

I'm back. I've caught up on most e-mail, and select weblog entries. I am very, very tired.

Going off the grid for a few days. I might find some source of internet connectivity while gone, but I haven't on any previous trips. A few days in Aberdeen, Maryland, with some time on Sunday to visit the new National Air and Space Museum extension at Dulles Airport.

Sadly, this is my first journal entry for the month of April. To call my current circumstances hectic would be a fair evaluation.

Waitress Applicants Videotaped Naked

At the interview they were told to change into the uniform of bright orange shorts and a white tank-top bearing the Hooters logo and were surreptitiously videotaped, he said.

This pisses me off, and the guy (if indeed guilty) should be punished as any sex-offender would be. But don't try to convince me that the whole "Hooters" atmosphere doesn't foster this sort of mind-set. Anyone who's seen their ads or bus-side billboards knows better.

LiveJournal has again decided that all the stories in my RSS feed were new and/or updated, and has spammed anyone who has the rjray_rss feed in their friends-list.

I don't know why. I've been too busy to write anything, and the only template change I've made was several days ago (and it would not have affected the checksums of the stories– it was to the <head> section of the page only). I would have thought if that were the cause, it would have appeared before today.

Sorry. Again.

After having endless problems dialing in to my ISP (connection would drop, sometimes after only 30 seconds or so), I've found a place in Boulder where I can get reasonably-priced wireless access. It's part of the Surf and Sip network, in case you want to give them some business on your next travel outing.

Mostly caught up with e-mail, and my LiveJournal friends-list. Crikey, but people write a lot...

I'm not exactly off to a great start for November. Today is the 12th, and this is my first note of the month.

There are a lot of interesting goings-on, but there isn't a lot of free time. I'm hoping to catch up on things, so there should be some new entries (with actual content) fairly soon.

Be warned, though, that I will be making some adjustments to the templates that are used to generate the individual stories. This may or may not cause a large number of entries to re-appear on LiveJournal. So I'm apologizing in advance.

LiveJournal has spewed the last 17 entries from my RSS feed, all in a row, all at about 2:26AM this morning. I have no f'ing clue why this happened. For one thing, the RSS feed itself should only produce 15 entries at a time. Although, checking with some command-line tools just now shows me that it's sending 41. I'll have to look at that separately, but it doesn't explain 17. Secondly, the only time in the past that this has happened was when I made a change to the story templates that actually affected the content of the individual stories (I suspect that the LJ application that fetches RSS feeds tracks things with checksums of some sort, probably MD5). That hasn't happened, either. Not counting this entry right here, the last file modification in my blosxom file tree was about 5 days ago, the follow-up to the "Find the Boeing" story.

Ironically-enough, that followup was to address the fact that LJ seemed to be correctly leaving RSS-fed stories in their chronological order when such a story had an update.

No clue why this happened. Apologies to those who were spammed.