Monthly Archives: February 2015

The TL;DR of the last five years

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I recently joined VMware and a lot of folks I knew from years ago are there wondering how I’ve been.

How do you capture the last five years? And so here’s a short version:

The TL;DR for folks who lost touch in 2009

(1) Went to Zynga
(2) Had a kid, little boy Nicholas and spent 5 years living that wonder
(3) Dog Died
(4) Got a new dog
(5) Did a Marathon
(6) Lost 40 pounds
(7) Did another marathon , an olympic triathlon
(8) Was involved with Cityville
(9) Did a half-ironman
(10) Did lots of really cool and amazing stuff at Zynga including building the last soup-to-nuts hyper scale infrastructure
(11) Watched a lot of hockey at the Shark Tank, no Pavillion no SAP Center although after the loss to LA last year is starting to feel more like the The sap Center
(12) Became Chief Engineer of Zynga
(13) Somehow stayed married to the most amazing and forgiving and beautiful woman on the planet
(14) Moved to Juniper for a year
(16) Now at VMware doing stuff i love to do.
(17) Read some good books.
(18) Went to Hawaii and Greece a lot
(19) Met a lot of great new friends.
(20) Learned how to be a lot less angry, more humble and patient.

You’re only paranoid if they aren’t spying on you

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While I was in Colorado, I couldn’t help but take pictures of me next to marijuana stores:

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I don’t smoke. Never have. Never really had an interest to. And so the fact that I am having pictures taken of me next to pot is amusing to me. It’s a little bit of naughtiness for a guy that tries to be straight and narrow.

And I am happy that we are legalizing pot, because I do think it’s mostly harmless.

As we were leaving Colorado, I posted on this blog  a picture of the special dumpster for pot. The dumpster had a special sign reminding folks that whereas pot is legal in Colorado, other states are significantly less enlightened.

This was all part of the funny theme that I don’t do pot and pretending I do pot.

And that’s when things got weird. 1 hour after I take my picture, as I am going through security, I get flagged for special attention. Then my boots get flagged. Then I am getting a pat down from a dude that is exploring parts of me that I don’t want ugly dudes exploring. I mean if you are going to get a pat down, it should be an attractive dude doing the pat-down, right?

My current favorite TV show is Person of Interest. Person of Interest is about an AI that sees everything, makes inferences and makes decisions to protect us … And this whole sequence may have been a coincidence or not. Maybe my first blog post signals the Machine that I need to monitored, and then my second pushes the Machine to tell Homeland Security to really pat me down because I went from a possible to probable bad guy.

I’m not paranoid, really. Except this was too freaky.