Latest stories

“Silly”con Valley Neighborhoods

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More on the saga so far. This week we spent three days crawling around neighborhoods looking for places that fit the criteria: They are livable – as in, we can walk our dogs in the evening without fear for our lives. We can afford it – We do have an upper limit to what is affordable, after all. I don’t have early Facebook equity. The commute doesn’t completely suck –...

Moving Travails

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Moving from Phoenix to San Jose is going to be an eye opener. We currently have almost 2,400 sqft of house, not counting the garage. We will be lucky to have half that here (for 2.5x the price). I am already thinking about what will have to go. A lot of what I have packed in my garage is going to get nuked. It has mostly sat in a box, so I am not going to miss it. My CD’s might get sold...

Notes from House Hunting in San Jose Area

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This week I am in San Jose/South Bay to “preview” prior to deciding to relocate. Since I spent the first 38 years of my life here, I don’t need much pre-viewing, so we are hitting likely locations to live. So far, I have pretty much dismissed the far south bay. Morgan Hill and Gilroy, while they are near and served by Caltrain, are just too damn far. I last lived at the north...

Relocating back to Silicon Valley – The Good

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Hell has frozen over, and it looks like I am going to be relocating back to the Silicon Valley. I left there in 2003 to take a job in Tucson that I liked, and came to enjoy much of what Arizona offers. A couple times I flirted with going back, including a very tempting job offer. As we head out to “preview” the south bay, I would like to take a few minutes to reflect on some of the...

Anniversary of an Ominous Day

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Four years ago today was the classic definition of a “bad day“. I had been at the gym, doing my daily workout, but felt blah and off. I couldn’t get my heart rate above 100 (registered on the elliptical trainer), and I really had to force myself to do the full hour. I was uncomfortable on the drive home, but that wasn’t so unusual after a session at the gym. I stepped into...

Travel Horror Stories

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Product management and product marketing are two fields where you can expect to travel often. Unlike sales, who usually have a territory, we cover the world and are called to travel widely. Every one of these jobs I have been in has advertised 25% of travel. And every one of them has underestimated the percentage of travel required. Pro-tip: If they tell you while interviewing that you will...

Google Authentication Shenanigans

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Is it me, or has google been fucking with their gmail authentication today?
I swear it has kicked me off my webmail 4 or 5 times today. Won’t remember which accounts are logged in.
At one time it got me stuck in an authentication loop. Over and over, prompting for my password.
Grrrrr. This has happened before. Hope this gets fixed soon.

eBook Fun – Fixing fouled up books

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As I have mentioned many times, I have been a long time satisfied user of my reader and ebooks. Certainly better than hauling around a lot of dead trees when I travel. All good. I have been building a collection for more than 5 years now, from a variety of sources, many commercial, but also many of the free sources (Project Gutenberg) as well as some other sources for out of print books that are...

More hand suckage – Cortisone shot

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Ugh. My 6 weeks with a brace on my thumb didn’t help. I guess I am not surprised, at best it was going to help ease the bone on bone rubbing. Today, I went back to the hand specialist. He wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t improving. The degeneration of cartilage is not really reversible. Just controllable. Today I got a cortisone shot. The needle was much smaller than the one when...

My online history

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My blogging/online history I started blogging late, in 2009. I was stuck in a bad job, that had gotten much worse due to some serious political wrangling by the executive suite. At first I just grabbed a wordpress.com site, and made a couple of posts that were really not meant to be read by anybody. Venting about the stupid crap that I saw every day. Very quickly, I wanted more. I had been...

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