I guess I should post something before January is gone!
First, I got Oriana a puppy. He had a cool name at the humane society, Thor, but she changed it to Badger.
This guy also got Mozilla sick, but he’s getting over it now. He’s also very fat, and looks like he’s always sad. He seems like a pretty fun puppy though. Here are a few more photos of the little punk:
Mozillabomb:
In other news, I am taking a six week sabbatical from Bazaarvoice and helping out the crew at Greater Good Labs. It’s bittersweet as the team I’m leaving is super great, but I’m looking forward to helping start something new. Super kudos to BV for giving me the opportunity to take some time away.
It’s been about a month and a week and I’m still sitting at about half a tank of gas. Given this, I think even when I do need to fill up, I’m not going to fill up all the way. Pretty pleased with the Volt so far. I did the calculation and during the winter, it’s probably around 65 cents to charge up all the way. In the summer, it’ll probably be around $1.
With that, I will leave you with this:
BV flew me out to San Fran this past week to spend some time with my BV West brethren. I didn’t do anything too crazy, but there was a mall and lots of food options around where I was (4th, between Mission and Market). Made me realize how much I like big cities and being able to walk/mass-transit my way everywhere. I walked over to the mall across the street and saw Cloud Atlas (not very good), and bought some clothes since I packed particularly light.
I have a special relationship with SF since I was born there and visited so often. I guess having that deeper history makes me wonder what my life would be like had I decided to go to UC Berkeley instead of UT Austin (which was my middle school plan). I can think of a whole crazy butterfly effect on my current life since I likely would have stayed in the bay area after graduation. What company would I have been working at? One of the hot startups of the past decade? Would I be married? Homeless? =p Where would my Austin friends be without me? How has my existence impacted their lives? Imagining an entirely different timeline post-2001 is kind of crazy. Would I be a significantly different person?
I have the itch to leave Austin sometimes, and though avoiding poop on the street on my daily commute is a mighty tempting proposition, I’ve yet to make the leap of taking off to one of the big cities I find attractive (SF/NYC). I suppose I still have too much in Austin to keep me around and vacationing suffices for now… 
Ultimately, I’m blessed with the life I have and certainly don’t regret going to UT, but it’s fun to think of alternate realities sometimes, eh?
Sometimes, I really enjoy watching really terrible movies. It’s even better if I can sucker friends to join me. I guess I’m kind of a masochistic troll like that. =p Last week, I saw both Red Dawn and Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. I went to see the first one, with Sam and he got the choice between the two, so he picked Red Dawn. It was pretty terrible.
Viraj, got left with the remaining option and we saw that this past weekend. We were the only pair of guys in the theater, which was quite hilarious. The fact that my suffering through the movie included Viraj suffering through the movie made it all awesome.
Here is Viraj with his shame:
At the office, somehow I got added to the BV West office’s mailing list and I found out they were doing holiday decorations. That inspired my team (“code named” Firebird) to do our own in our little area. Here’s that:
I made the firebird-hand-turkey.
I hit my “unofficial” six year anniversary at Bazaarvoice near the end of last month (I was a contractor for the first two months). It’s certainly been a great experience for me as I’ve played multiple roles throughout the years. I’ve had the opportunity to grow immensely both technically and non-technically and have gained a lot of confidence in my own abilities.
Today (well, technically yesterday) I have the privilege of being the official team lead for one of the highest concentrations of talent and passion I’ve ever worked with. That’s saying a lot because many of my past teammates have been no slouches! I feel honored with the designation and look forward to continuing to push the envelope of what the team can accomplish. I’m super thankful to everyone who had a part in getting me here and on this team.
In other news, December brings a large mix of emotions to me. I have a hard time identifying my feelings often times, so this feels a bit like rapid spontaneous mood swings. I generally find myself listening to terrible music, then forcing Mozilla to cuddle. Seems to work well enough.
Ok, as promised, here are some of those puppy pics:
Also, these earrings that I ordered a while ago came in:
They’re NOT for me, but they were too awesome for me not to get. I’m guessing they’ll go to some lucky nerd girl at some point, haha.
This past week, I gave a demo to the entire company, which is quite a lot of people now. It thankfully went well, which was awesome because the demo crashed and burned at the dry-run we had, but I guess that’s why you have dry-runs. =) I’m generally not nervous when presenting on topics I’m knowledgeable about, but now that we’re a couple hundred people and presentations like this are more of a production, I was really feeling the pressure. Like I said, it went well though, so I’ve got nothing to complain about. =)
Rapid fire news!
- I ordered a new MacBook Pro (retina, of course).
- Sam decided to introduce me to new people.
- Mozilla’s been farting a lot today. Think I’m going to switch to another brand of food.
- Viraj ditched us this weekend for his cousins, who I guess he’s contracted Sam’s issue because according to Andrew, he’s really flirty with them. =)
- BV All-Hands and TXJS
Oh, and I guess I’ll steal this from Oriana:
Okay, I finally went through a few photos. Here’re some of Mozilla from the new food trailer park where the Buffet Palace burned down:
Here’s the Mother’s Day gift I made my mom:
BV treated me to a fancy dinner, so I took Oriana to Uchi this past weekend. Here are some of my favorite dishes:
Here’s Oriana:
Tata!
A few months ago, I moved to a new team at work. I have no idea if I’m violating any insider trading rules by talking about it in detail, so I won’t. =) That said, I’m having a lot of fun on it now and I’m writing a whole heck of a lot of JavaScript which I’ve grown fond of. JS used to have kind of a “kiddie” language stigma to it back in the day, but I’ve learned it’s actually quite powerful and works pretty well for a lot of asynchronous tasks (which, in the world of the web, happen all the time). I’m itching to get some more open source projects (small ones, even) on my github account. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to soon.
I’ve got a few photos stuck in the camera that I haven’t processed yet from these past few weekends. I’ll get to them eventually.
Tomorrow night, Chad, Sam, Beika and I are going to see BATTLESHIP at midnight because it’s AWESOME. Honestly, I’m pretty sure it’s quite terrible, but I’m hoping in an awesome way. If someone yells “YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP!” I’ll call the whole adventure a success. I’ll give you all an update on how this goes. Stay tuned.
Gid showed us this video at Vox:
Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.
It was pretty moving as I think we can all connect with the pain of loss. Sometimes it’s good to cry, ya know?
The Bazaarvoice crew lost one of our young implementation engineers this weekend to a stupid hit and run. If you have any information, please contact APD. I didn’t know him very well, but from the small bit of time I worked with him, I know the loss of Andrew Runciman will be felt at BV, so I can only imagine the loss felt by his friends and family. Prayers to you all.
In a week or so I will be transitioning to a new position at Bazaarvoice – Labs Engineer. I’m really excited to face a new set of challenges/problems and am comfortable that there are more than capable engineers in Technical Services to fill in for me. I have no doubt that the team that has been built there will continue to push the boundaries on delivering our products and I hope to be able to help from the other side of the building. =)
I took the job switch as an opportunity to update my LinkedIn with a slightly better job history at Bazaarvoice, lest I forget what I did… haha. I also updated my Twitter avatar and I think I need to make a new custom background, but I haven’t decided on what to do yet…
November is the first month of our new quarter, so BV flew in our international team for our All-Hands. Because they were here, we also had an early holiday party at the Austin Music Hall. I don’t have pics of the latter event, but Anne-Marie was there in photographer capacity so I’m sure she’ll post awesome photos shortly. =) Here are some of my shots from our All-Hands featuring new BV band, FEEDBACK:
Also, congrats to the culture award winners, especially the TS folk!
On Saturday, we played an early game of ultimate so that Simon could join us. We ended up playing for around four hours because the weather was so awesome and Jonney brought us Krispy Kreme donuts to fuel us through the game. It was pretty awesome, but now I’m sore. Luckily, my shins aren’t too bad this week so I guess they’re getting stronger. =p
Sunday was not all that eventful except I met up with the Tings and co for brunch at Tacodeli to see Alex again before he goes back to California. After that, went around eating/snacking with peeps then throwing frisbees around. I think my throwing technique could still use some work…
