Author: lux

Happy Thanksgiving!

Little Drummer Boy, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Image by docnad via Flickr

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!

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A Rare Post About the Office

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. 🙂

A Foot On Both Coasts

Tower Air.
Image via Wikipedia

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.

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Colliding Worlds

Facebook friends photo grid
Image by dan taylor via Flickr

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.

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