What I will do is just simply inform those that have some how ended up on this URL what I have been up to.

First of all, my 2nd to last post was about my dad. He is doing very well. In fact his experience has woken him up and he is actually talking about the R word, aka retirement. He is in good health right now, probably better than he has been in the last 10 years. So things are looking up for him. He is planning to retire with my Mom to Aruba.

I still work for the same software company, Likewise Software. Great company to work for, great people to be with and I can’t see myself anywhere else in the near future. Which is a considerably change from the past considering that I have worked for digital.forest, McGraw-Hill and Classmates.com in the last 5 years. All were great jobs and I wouldn’t be where I am today without any of the experience I acquired at the previous positions.

While I am still single, I have lost approximately 30-40 lbs since my last post. I continue to lose weight and find new ways of keeping the weight off. For example I am participating in the 2010 Rock ‘n Roll Marathon. I love to run and I really enjoy doing it in my new surroundings.

Yes, new surroundings. I didn’t move to NYC as my last post may have hinted. Instead I did something different. I found out, after all my traveling that I have done the last 18 months, that I truly love Seattle. So instead of turning my back on something I love, I have embraced it. I am now a resident of Ballard. NYC is still a fantastic city and it is a great place to go to, but I was going for the wrong reasons. Right now every single time I approach Seattle, whether is a south to north landing (over Tacoma) or north to south landing (over Seattle), I get the warm and fuzzies. This is a feeling I can’t simply abandon. It is a feeling I need to respect. So I am staying here for the long haul (well at least another 12 months).

On to the next change. I got rid of my Scion tC. It was a wonderful car. Never had any problems what so ever. However I wanted something… faster. After some shopping around, reading reviews, renting an Infiniti G37 for a weekend and completing testing drives of an Audi S5… I landed on a BMW 335i. My brother, Tjakko, and I went shopping and I remember test driving a 650i and enjoy it but when I test drove a 335i… well it was love at first sight. It has everything I need and more. Thankfully it hasn’t gotten me in trouble… yet… with the law.

So in summary what is different about me between 03/30/2009 and 03/30/2010.
- I lost 30-40 lbs
- I moved to Ballard (20 mile move from previous location).
- I bought a new car

Not too radical and I truly enjoy the changes.

Whenever I have a customer or even prospect to visit in NYC I literally jump at the chance. Hell I’ll even arm wrestle people over it. When I’m at JFK needing to go back home I actually don’t look forward to going back home, but rather want to stay. That feeling to me indicates it is time for a change.

So… in hopefully September 2009 I will be moving from Renton, WA to one of the fiv boroughs (focusing on Brooklyn right now) and I wont be the only one that is going. My brother (who is finally graduating college in T-1 month) will be joining me on our new quest.

What does it mean for work? Nothing from what I can tell. The cool part of my job is that I travel and the funny thing is that living in NYC means I am 3 hours ahead of office plus with a 109 million people a year traveling through one of the three airports (EWR, LGA and JFK) in the NYC area, flights literally go almost everywhere in the US or around the world. As a matter of fact, the other day it was cheaper to fly from JFK to LAX then it was from SEA to LAX.

It’s a change but it is a change I really look forward to. With the speed I update this blog, it could possibly mean that the next time I’m posting from somewhere in NYC.

Flight DL162 diverted to Great Falls, MT.

What came next were hours of getting the entire family out to Great Falls. After dropping everything at work I used my iPhone to find out he was in Great Falls, then did a Google search to look up hospitals in that area. In my favor, they only had one major hospital, which I called right when I got out of the car. By 3pm (plane landed in GTF at 2:02pm PST) I knew where he was and that they were taking care of him.

Made all the phone calls / flight arrangements while getting updates from the hospital which wasn’t forecasting a good recovery. By 6pm I had my brother driving from Pullman, WA in a rental (his car wouldn’t make it) from Hertz and 3 plane tickets ordered from Alaska Airlines with two hotel rooms at a local Marriott hotel.

By 11pm Mountain time (10pm Pacific) we were in Montana next to my Dad’s bed seeing him in probably the worst state I had ever seen.

Thankfully over the next few days he got better (faster then the hospital predicted) and we were once again reminded how lucky he was that he was at hospital (Benefis Healthcare) that is able to perform primary angioplasty.

On Thursday the media in Montana got wind of what was going on in their state and my dad was over the news. We also got to meet the entire staff that saved him.

The staff at Benefis.

By Friday he was allowed to go home and we took a Friday afternoon flight back to Seattle from Helena, MT.

I’m incredibly thankful for all the things that went right. Right flight crew, right doctor on board and an incredibly good hospital (all in the middle of Montana).

This experience also taught me how precious family is and that the time on this earth can be cut off at any moment but I’m glad to still have my Dad for what I hope is a lot more years.

A prime example is a new airline that launched towards the end of 2007 called Virgin America. Not only are their prices competitive ($61 one way to SF for MacWorld next week and you arrive at the International Terminal as opposed to one of SFO’s “older” terminals), but their customer service both at the airport and over the phone have been rock solid. If my job takes me to SFO or LAX, I fly with Virgin America. It is the same reason why I will do anything to avoid American Airlines. I fly AA from SEA to JFK a few months ago and the flight attendant spilled a drink all over my lap. Thankfully I was in a window seat and the flight was long to where my pants were damp / dry by the time I got off the plane. However the flight attendant didn’t even apologize. She didn’t say sorry or offer anything (not that I was expecting much) other then an angry look that I made her job more difficult.

Lets not forget post sales support either. Companies like Costco and Nordstrom have great post sales support. Have a rip in your pants, bring it back to Nordstrom. The vacuum cleaner hose has a rip in it the size of a small orange 18 months after you bought it at Costco, bring it back to Costco. These are companies that are still doing very well through this economic downturn. You’d think that Nordstrom would be losing business as if it were todays rage but they aren’t.

So that’s my New Year’s wish, I hope that 2009 will mark the return of good customer support/service into the world of buying consumer goods.

Imagine the following situation:
- Gigantic crowd, closed subway station at 47-50th because of the chaos at Rockefeller center and streets closed off
- Hotel is 9 street blocks north of you with your luggage (gigantic suitcase)
- The plane at JFK will leave with or without you.

That is the situation I found myself in yesterday. I literally had to push my way through a crowd of thousands of people to get to the hotel to pickup my crud. Finally got there at 5:25. Rushed upstairs got my stuff and thought about options on how to get to JFK.

* Taxi cab – $45, takes about 80 minutes.
* Subway Line A to Howard Beach station – $2 + $5 for Airtrain, takes about 70 minutes
* Subway Line E to Jamaica Station – $2 + $5 for Airtrain, takes about 60 minutes + time to get to Line E
* LIRR to Jamaic Station – ~$8 + $5 for Airtrain, takes about 35 minutes + time to get to Penn Station

Cab was out of the question. Battle came down to Line A (since it was right next to the hotel) or a trek to Penn Station. With the fact that having a giant suitcase on a subway at rush hour is *no* fun at all, I decided on the railroad. Made it to Penn Station at 5:40pm, train left at 5:45pm and I was pulling into Jamaica station at 6:15pm.

I thought to myself the entire way that I can’t even make it in 35 minutes by car or any form of public transportation to Seatac when stuck in Bellevue at 5pm… whereas in a city just barely under 10 million people and about the same distance to the airport I have options and the ability to do exactly that.

Soon, very soon, options wil become available in Seattle….

After my relationship ended in May I thought to myself “If a company offered me a job to travel 50% or more of my time, I’ll take.”. It would be the only reason I’d leave Classmates. Such an event happened in August. An usability study in June turned into a job offer by August after various delays on my side. So this Monday I start. First I need to get acclimated with the product (which is called Likewise) and hopefully I’ll be soon traveling all over. This is a big change career wise for me. Going from system administration to deploying software is a pretty big change but it’s a huge challenge for me. My fear is that I’ll get rusty when it comes to system administration but I’m going to do my best to keep my “A” game.

One thing I hate from all of this is way my resume is starting to look. Sure my last two gigs were over a year but not anywhere near 2 years and that makes me fairly unhappy with myself. That will be my next thing to improve…..

Some of the things that have changed, in no specific order:
- In May, after almost 4 years, Cam and I broke up. While she may have written extensively about this in her blog, I feel that there is nothing left to say on it. She cheated on me and that is just simply a deal breaker. Attempts to justify this is simply wrong as there is no excuse for that type of behavior.
- The colors of my condo have finally changed. The living and dining room was this nasty mustardy dark dark yellow, bordering light brown, now its bright yellow with a tint of orange. The bedroom went from a dark brown (with green) to a ice blue. Yum. Pics will be made soon.
- As of today a new couch. This thing kicks ass; fantastic to lay on.

My focus at work has also changed. Previously I was doing just system administration stuff but over the course of the last few months I’ve taken on more responsibility in the area of storage. So now I work with HDS, Netapp and a few Sun X4500s. Each have their own specific uses and it truly is exciting stuff, especially since who used to administer it left room for some major improvements to be made.

I have realized that I’d like to travel more. I am definitely not looking for a new job as I’m actually having a good time at Classmates with the one exception that if a job landed on my doorstep that would require me to travel a good amount (like 50%+) then I’d go for it.

Welp thats all for now.

I can’t talk about it specifically because I can’t talk about it so it. However so far so good but it definitely is *beta* software. Some quirks like it wiping out your existing contacts when you enable the exchange calendar and contact sync (the calendar sync works great… the contact sync it self not so much). However the ability to get your email and acknowledge pages without opening up your laptop is fantastic. Once I disabled contact sync and forced sync my contacts back over I was good to go.

Haven’t tried the Cisco VPN yet, have to find my profile file to load that one.

All we need now is landscape SMS and MMS support .

PS. In my 3 years of being a digg member this is the first time a submission of mine made the front page.

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