I’m still at Adobe, and still focusing on community, but that’s about all that’s the same.

I’ve moved to a different part of the company and have a new focus. Instead of working with just one segment of the many communities at Adobe — the fantastic designers and developers who belong to the Adobe Community Professionals and the Adobe User Groups — I’ll be working to create a “Community Center of Excellence” for all of Adobe’s various community programs. Essentially, I’ll be applying Jeremiah Owyang’s “hub and spoke” model for social media in corporations to community.

It’s a big challenge and an exciting one. There’s just one small drawback – having to step away from the community I’ve spent almost 4 years supporting. Being able to work with such a supportive, energetic, and engaged group of people has been both a privilege and a pleasure, one that I will miss very much.

Luckily, I won’t be going too far. And I also get the pleasure of getting to learn about a range of communities I haven’t had much interaction with so far – like the vibrant Web Analytics community that has grown up around Adobe SiteCatalyst over in the Digital Marketing side of the house.

On my one-year anniversary at Adobe, I wrote this:

What a ride it’s been.

I can’t find the scene on YouTube & don’t have time to rip it from my DVD, but there’s a snippet from early in Season One of “The West Wing” where new White House employee Charlie Young is watching his first Presidential TV taping from the back of the Oval Office:

Charlie: I’ve never felt like this before.
Josh: It doesn’t go away.

I know the feeling.

A lot has changed since then, but I still know that feeling. And as long as I do, I’ll continue to think I’ve got the best job in the world.

So here’s to a new chapter!

This time last year:

• Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and Kim Jong Il were all still alive. Also Steve Jobs.
• Hosni Mubarak was still President of Egypt
• The ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy movement hadn’t started
• the 8-year US war in Iraq was still ongoing
• Google+ hadn’t launched

Scott and I rang in 2011 in the company of a few close friends. Sadly one of them is no longer with us.

And on a much less important scale (except to me) – this time last year I was 20 pounds heavier.

2011 was also my most-travelled year ever. I flew more than 65,000 miles and visited 7 different countries (8 if you count airport connections). I don’t think I’ll be on the road quite as much in 2012, but you never know….

As for 2012 – I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. Most of them are ignored by the end of January anyway. Changes, especially the big kind, don’t fit into neat and easy packages. It’s what you do on any given Tuesday that matters more than what you decide on some arbitrary starting point. So I won’t be making any this year.

What I do want for myself in 2012 is to stay open to the new. It’s so easy to get locked into what’s safe and comfortable, but if you do that too much, you find that the most dangerous choice of all is to play it safe. I don’t think I’ll start jumping out of airplanes or be moving to Katmandu but it’s a big world out there and there is still so much I haven’t seen, done, or learned.

So thanks 2011, and here’s to a great 2012!

Scott, you are my best friend, my love, and my strength. You believe in me more than I do myself. I love you and I am so happy to share my life with you.

The last 15 years have been a hell of a ride. Here’s to the next 15 (and 30, and more…)

I’m spending the week in Connecticut. There was a heavy rain a few nights ago that flooded a few of the marshy areas near the house.

I like the interplay of the water, the leaves, and the reflected trees.

So as much as I love portability, I’m also seriously thinking about buying a nice big monitor and spending more time at my long-neglected home office desk instead of computing on the couch. I’m even considering buying a small desktop computer to go with it. With so many cloud sharing services these days, synching files across devices isn’t the pain it used to be.

The main thing that’s holding me back is what going back to a desktop might do to my back. I screwed my back up badly before I got the laptop by not paying enough attention to my chair and desk quality, and I don’t want to make the same mistake twice. On the other hand, I don’t really want to spend a bunch of time trolling Craigslist for used Aeron chairs.

It might be a fun Xmas Shutdown project though… Hmmm…

To go big (screen) or not? What do you think?

Fast forward a few years, and every morning as I left my post-college Soho apartment, I would look to the left and see the World Trade Center rising over 6th Avenue as I headed for the Spring Street subway station. I’d periodically meet friends at Windows for drinks, to celebrate special events. I even considered having my wedding reception there. I’d walk through the Concourse daily, on my way to work at two different jobs. And I still have clothing that I bought in the shops there.

The World Trade Center was an integral part of my life, and of my New York.

Until the day it wasn’t.

Photo by Andrea Booher/ FEMA Photo News

Ten years now. It seems a bit unreal that it has been so long, when I can still close my eyes and go back into the utter horror and chaos and fear that was 9/11/01. I try not to, though. Even ten years later, the memories are too vivid and painful to spend much time revisiting them.

I’m not going to write about that day. I could call up the memories, put them down here, but my story is a simple one, shared by thousands of others, both too commonplace and too painful to retell. Some year, perhaps, I’ll write it all down, but not this year.

This tenth anniversary finds me outside the USA, and I have very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I feel like I should be at home, honoring the day in some solemn and proper way. I’m reasonably confident there will be nothing untoward today, but there’s that nagging “what if” that makes me think not being home is a bad idea. On the other hand, I have a job to do and places to be.

And then, there’s Kath. I’m in the country of her birth today.

For the first year or so after 9/11, not a day went by that I didn’t think of Kath. 10 years later, I don’t. But even so, in a way, I feel that I’m living for both of us. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that I feel a responsibility to use this time that I have, which she did not get, in a way that honors her.

If there’s any lesson to be drawn from 9/11, it is that you can never give in to those who want to bring horror and sorrow and pain into the hearts of others. You must life your life to the fullest rather than embrace fear.

I try to remember that. For Kath, and for the 343, and for all the others whose lives ended so terribly and so suddenly, ten years ago today.

That’s how it started.

For a very long time, I never gave much thought to managing my weight. Bit by bit over the years there was more of me, but I gained weight so gradually, and I carried it well enough, that it rarely bothered me how the pounds were adding up (although I didn’t like that my older clothes stopped fitting after a while). This spring though, I stopped liking what I saw in the mirror. I din’t like it one bit, in fact.

So right after I got back from visiting NY for Passover in April, I decided it was finally time to make some changes.

I don’t want to call it a diet. I’m skeptical of the entire concept, frankly. Especially the big branded ones. Too many of them seem designed to part the dieter with their cash (books, special food, memberships, supplements, and more) than with their extra weight. There’s too much junk science and too many claims I find hard to believe. And too many dieters seem to gain all the weight back once they end the diet. I wanted to do something a little more sustainable.

Instead, I based my plan on two guiding principles:

1) Don’t make sacrifices that you can’t live with over the long haul.
Example: I refuse to give up putting sugar in my coffee. I hate the taste of all the sugar substitutes, and I don’t see the point of putting a bunch of chemicals into your body that trick you into thinking you just ate something sweet. Might as well just make room for the calories and have the real thing.

2) Simple is always better.
I found a great Android app that made tracking my food intake and exercise simple: Noom. What I most like about it is that it tracks your intake in a way that works both at home and while eating out, and doesn’t take a lot of time. For example, if I have a salad for lunch, Noom doesn’t ask me to enter each type of vegetable separately or figure out how many ounces of chicken I put on top. I’d record it as “heaping handful of vegetables, half a handful of chicken, tablespoon of salad dressing”. Done. Yes, it’s not pinpoint accurate, but it’s close enough. And it worked.

So how did I lose the weight? I tracked everything I ate and kept to the daily calorie allocation Noom assigned me.

How? I dropped a lot of the carbs from my diet (although not all) and became much more aware of portion sizes. I ate a lot more beans and salad, and cut down the snacks and sweets. And on the days when I said “the hell with it” and ate steak frites for lunch because I couldn’t bear to eat another salad, I didn’t beat myself up or feel like a failure. I just started again the next day back on the plan.

And it worked. Four months later, I am 16 pounds lighter. That’s roughly a pound a week lost, and I did it during a time period when I took 2 vacations (including a cruise with a LOT of good food and wine). My BMI is nicely in the normal range for my height now, and I’ve lost a full dress size. I was afraid losing weight was going to be a titanic struggle, but aside from the occasional pasta craving, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. And once the scale started showing real results, sticking with the plan got even easier, because I knew it was working.

Oh yeah and that report about women needing to work out at least an hour a day to avoid gaining weight? It’s crap, at least for me. I exercised three times a week in May and June, but I’ve slacked off the exercise more recently (ok, I admit it, I haven’t worked out since mid-July). And I still lost weight in that time.

Maybe I got lucky? I don’t know. I do know lots of people struggle greatly with their weight and that my experience isn’t universal. Still, what I did worked for me, and that’s what matters.

To sum it all up: I lost a bunch of weight. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. And now I need to buy some pants that fit.

It would be easy to blame “social media,” or Google+, or simply having too much stuff to do. That would be the easy way out. The simple truth is, I think about blogging a lot; I just don’t actually open up a screen and do it. Part of the problem is that I mostly think about blogging while in the car, and then when I get to wherever I am going, I promptly neglect to actually blog about whatever I’ve been thinking about.

And there’s a lot that’s gone on in the past few months. I’ve taken two great personal trips, lost 10 pounds, and (most recently) attended another fantastic Community Leadership Summit. Plus the usual raft of stuff at work. I’ve been meaning to blog about most of those things and I hope to do so in the upcoming weeks. Let’s see if I actually do.

I haven’t anything resembling a green thumb. Luckily, the roses on our patio seem to thrive on neglect and are blooming despite my inattention.

On a related note, I’m thinking about getting a monitor or possibly also a Mac Mini for photo editing at home. I love my laptop but a 13″ screen doesn’t do Lightroom justice.

New York Times, May 2, 2011

I have deep, mixed emotions tonight. The torah tells us that we should not rejoice at the death of our enemies, but I cannot help being happy that this man who brought death and misery to so many, is finally dead.

It won’t bring back Kath or any of the others that Al Qaeda has killed over the years. It won’t bring the World Trade Center back. And it won’t stop terrorism.

But still, I wish so badly that I were in NYC tonight so that I could celebrate.