It took me a month but I finally got a few snapshots from my trip to London online. Here’s one that I had a little fun with in Lightroom and really liked how it turned out:

Work continues crazy-busy with no light on the horizon. I’m not at SxSWi (again) and feel a bit bummed about that. I did get down to 360|Flex for a day and a half and that was fun. I will be going home for Passover though.

Still dual-wielding the phones — I can’t break free of my dependence on a real keyboard for email. Other than that, though, the Nexus is really nice & I’ve been adding apps to it like a fiend.

I’ve been pondering a blog post taking a longer look at location-based web services to update the one I did on Google Latitude last year, especially since in the ensuing months I’ve started using Forusquare. The bottom line is I am still deeply ambivalent about them. Perhaps there’s not much more to be said on the subject than that.

Seen tonight on Facebook.

A good reminder that no matter how rough you think you have it, someone else generally has it much worse.

As the sun sets on this last day of 2009, I thought I’d take a few minutes to put up an “end of year” post. There’s a lot of “End of Decade” stuff out there on the blogs this week, but for me, it’s hard to think of 1999 / 2000 as 10 years ago. The cataclysm of 9/11 and the yawning gap of the “nuclear winter” of 2002-2004 makes the time before that seem like another age, almost something that happened to another person.

When I think of pivotal moments in the last 10 years, the first one that comes to mind is the one that set in motion much of what came afterwards. And it happened here:

In the spring of 2004, I sat on a bench looking up at the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome and decided that I was not going to accept what had happened to my life — which at the time involved living in a crappy (yet cheap) apartment in a remote corner of SF, working a low-wage survival job with no heath insurance. It sucked. It was what I needed to do to keep a roof over my head during the bad times, but it was not going to define the rest of my life.

Sitting in a masterpiece of Roman architecture, I decided I would go back to school for the MBA I should have gotten much sooner and get my career back on track. And despite having no money and a less-than-stellar math GMAT score, I did. And then while in grad school, I decided I wanted to work for a big brand — I was tired of working for companies that nobody had ever heard of before. And despite a gaping hole in my work history, I did.

Looking back now, I don’t know if it was pure luck, or hard work, or just persistence that got me through. It seems like a small miracle, especially considering much of that happened during two recessions. Probably a little of all. But however it happened, here I am.

A lot has changed over these past 10 years; mostly for the better but not all. Some family members have passed on. Some friends have moved onto diverging paths and grown distant. More pounds and grey hairs. But on balance, despite the really bad years in the middle, this decade ends with pretty much everything in my life, finally, heading in what feels like the right direction.

2010 should be quite a year. At work, I’m looking at some new challenges that will force me to get out of my comfort zone, learn, and hopefully grow. That was a theme for 2008 as well (although I didn’t know exactly how much so when last New Year rolled around, I never expected to get promoted so soon for one thing). Outside of work, I have much less free time than I used to but I hope to keep working on my photography. Who knows, it might actually get decent one of these days.

So as 2010 dawns, that’s where things are for me. I know 2009 has been a crappy year for a lot of people so my main wish is that we all have a better 2010.

I didn’t go to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade every year when I lived in NYC — it’s pretty cold to be outside in November in NYC, so unless we had friends holding a viewing party I often skipped it. Still, it was always fun to wander by the balloons being inflated the night before.

The first year I was in California I was so homesick that the parade on TV made me cry. Not anymore though. These days, I still love to see NYC on TV, but I find the parade overproduced, overcommercial, and annoying. It’s more of a 3-hour commercial for NBC than a celebration of Thanksgiving or even of Macy’s. (The Rockettes are still fun to watch though).

Parade aside, this is going to be a great Thanksgiving. The family is gathering at my cousin’s and I’ll be headed over there a little later. I have a lot to be thankful for this year and it should be a great day.

I hope you’re having a good one too!

It’s been quite a week. Adobe did a layoff and restructuring this week, which was about as stressful, sad, and disruptive as these events always are. The one bright spot of the week was how supportive and sympathetic the community was. It made a hard week that much easier.

Less than a week ago I got to play host for an extremely successful CFDevCamp. It feels like a lot longer ago than that.

Here’s hoping next week will be better.

10 years ago this week, two people with one-way tickets loaded two cats and 6 suitcases onto a Tower Air flight bound for San Francisco and set forth into a new chapter of our lives.

The cats (and the airline) have all passed into oblivion now but we’re still here in the Bay Area.

I still have trouble envisioning spending the rest of my life here. i still call myself a New Yorker, and reflexively refer to NY as “home”. On the other hand, there’s no better place than the Bay Area if you want a career in technology. We have jobs we love at great companies and no plans to go elsewhere. And after 10 years in California it’s hard to pass yourself off as being here just temporarily.

Still… it doesn’t sit easily. If I could have a teleporting door in my closet so that I could live in NYC and work in San Francisco, that would be the best of both worlds. In the meantime, I’ll just go on keeping a foot on both coasts.

So this morning, up pops in my feed reader a blog post by my friend Jason about a Halloween Bar-B-Q Bar Mitzvah.

OK, nice post about the food at a recent Bar Mitzvah he went to and how much more fun it was than the standard Bar Mitzvah (the menu is definitely much more interesting than the standard Bar Mitzvah!). The brain-twisting part (for me) was that I also knew the mother of the kid involved; Laura and I went to high school together and we recently reconnected on Facebook. She’s been posting updates about the party planning for weeks. I knew that she and Jason knew each other (they’re both NJ-based foodies with an IBM connection) but it didn’t occur to me that he was actually going to the party.

Most of the people who actually read this blog will probably just shrug and say, so what? For the segment of people that have adopted social media tools and integrated them into their lives, this kind of public intersection is pretty much a non-story. Having spent my last weekend back home in NY and talking to a lot of people who are not part of the adoption curve, though, I’m reminded that there are plenty of folks for whom blogging a kid’s Bar Mitzvah or finding intersections between different worlds via Facebook is completely alien territory.

The tidal wave that is Adobe MAX has come and gone for 2009 and I’m back home recovering.

I have attended a lot of industry conferences over the years and even helped organize a few. To me, what separates the good from the bad conferences is not the facilities, the speakers, or even the wifi availability, it’s the people. Obviously MAX is about an intense amount of information transfer — with hundreds of hours of sessions, keynotes, BOFs and unconferences — but it’s also about building connections within the Adobe community. The advent of MAX Online means that if all you want is information, you can get that without having to leave your home. The true value of attending MAX is everything else that is layered around those sessions.

Although I’m biased, I think the fact that one of the first things you saw when coming onto the show floor at MAX was a very large and comfortably furnished community lounge speaks volumes about the importance of building connections at MAX. And that lounge was never empty, not even early in the morning. Any time you came by, there were community members and Adobe staff filling the chairs and gathered around the tables; talking, working, Twittering, demo-ing, and much more.

A lot of other people have written extensively about the news Adobe released at MAX this year, so I’m not going to talk about that here. And if I tried to list all the people or all the cool stuff I saw this year at MAX I would fail miserably. Instead, I am going to call out two things that were particularly meaningful to me.

First, there’s this:

Community at MAX Keynote

(Photo Copyright © 2009 by Kendall Whitehouse, used with permission)

I knew going in what the theme of the Day 2 keynote was, of course, but had no clue at all that the keynote would open with a display of Adobe User Group logos from around the world onscreen, so when I saw the screen it was a big warm fuzzy moment. The Adobe User Groups work very hard to build community in their local communities and it was great to see them included onstage. Many of those user group managers were not able to be present at MAX due to the cost of travel, but as one manager put it “At least my logo could be there!”.

And next there’s this:

It’s been a very long time since I first sat down with a copy of ColdFusion and tried to figure out how to connect a database to a web page, and CF has had a special place in my heart ever since. That the CF team included me in the launch gift for CF9 means a lot to me. Thanks guys!

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll just wrap it up by saying that MAX rocked, and if you;re on the fence about going next time, just go. It’s worth it.

People who know me in real life know that as Jewish observance goes I am on the low end of the spectrum, but I do take Yom Kippur seriously. I believe we reap what we sow in life, and thus this is the time of year to stop and consider what it is that you’re putting out.

There are three aspects to teshuvah, as I see it:

1) Asking forgiveness from Adonai
2) Asking forgiveness from other people
3) Forgiving yourself

I struggle a lot with number three.

For those who observe, I wish you an easy fast, and may we all be sealed for a blessing this coming year.

Our cat Tommy expresses his regret that Summer will be ending soon by claiming my flip-flops as his own.

On the bright side, it’s Rosh Hashanah this weekend! A happy and sweet New Year to all.

Eight years later.

What I wrote on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 is the best I have to say about that terrible day.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

Lately in American political discourse, there’s been an increasing tendency to use the word “Socialist” as a bogey-man threat around policies people don’t like, or even as a slur against people.

This rampant fear-mongering would be bad enough, but using the word “Socialist” as if it were the worst thing you could ever call a person makes me even more annoyed.

My late grandfather, Harold Luxemburg, was a Socialist. In fact, one of the earliest mentions of his name in the New York Times was June 2, 1934, when he and some of his fellow Socialists got arrested for forming a picket line in front of a Brooklyn bakery they were trying to unionize.

Scary stuff, right? Um, no.

Grandpa worked all his life for the rights of people who didn’t have many. He could have had an easier time of it had he chosen some less contentious profession, but instead he saw poverty and discrimination and unfairness all around him and decided to do something about it. He worked to improve the lives of milkmen and restaurant workers and janitors, and he always rooted for the underdog.

In his private life he was a kind, intelligent, and caring man with a strong work ethic who valued education and cultural literacy extremely highly, and loved spending time with his family. And sadly, he left us in 1990. To this day I miss him and am proud of him.

So to the Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh loving troglodytes who think that “Socialist” and “Socialism” are a slur and gleefully hurl those words around as if they actually had the power to hurt (if any of you should happen to find your way to this little corner of the Internet) — with all due respect I say, you don’t have a clue. My grandfather the Socialist was a better man than any of you.