The Great Move West

So The Wife and I leave for Berkeley in ten days. We have a weekend to do some furious packing before we hand our earthly possessions to those paragons of reliability known as The Movers. The chosen movers incidentally built in a lot of padding in their quote, 3,000 pounds worth of padding it seems, hmmmm, and there is some toli to be shared about their approach but I won't tempt fate until we safely receive said possessions on the other side. To paraphrase Dick Cheney, the last throes can be a very "interesting" phase.

All this to say that our time in Cambridge is fast drawing to a close (at least for the next couple of years), and that the Great Move West beckons.

Some would say it's about time, that 15 years living 10 minutes from your freshman dorm (and 11 years living 15 minutes from your office) indicates a certain aversion to change (or lack of imagination depending on your point of view). I've long found my relative stability a source of comfort. In any case, all change now...

I'll continue to work with Lotus/IBM - out of the San Francisco office with occasional forays to the Almaden lab. If you read the tea leaves closely you would have surmised that there was a transition 9 months ago, and that the work front has been more IBM than Lotus ever since. That switch made this westward journey easier and it has been good to be in a group ostensibly focused on web technologies.

I have been agitating for a certain reinvention of Big Blue with mostly middling results but my dark matter has occasionally warped things in the right direction which is pleasing. "This web thing is going to be big. Really!" I resisted the dot com temptation during that bubble, and I've been lucky enough on the whole to work on interesting technology. By and large, we've tended to keep in mind the effects of said technology on those who use it. Thus there is considerable delight in the problems I grapple with, and the solutions found, delight that overshadows the school of hard knocks that life sometimes enrolls you in (or voicemail hell to pick on a small thing).

If time permits, I'll share some assessments of the various tributaries of this chapter: Havard, Cambridge, Boston and the evolution of Lotus into IBM; some amateur anthropology perhaps from my ground level view. I suspect however that I'll be too busy engaging with the new to worry about such navel-gazing. Typically also, such things are better done at a certain remove.

I've been going through a fairly prolific phase of late, but now real life demands a blogging hiatus - at the very least until we settle on the new coast. In the interim I'll point you to a couple of new links intended to ease navigation on the blog: The Book of Toli and The Toli Technology Series. I'm slowly working up to The Pitch and hopefully there'll be good news when it's fully baked.

If you're in Boston you might well catch us at the Bastille Day business where Amadou and Mariam are purportedly performing - funny that one's last act in Boston is to listen to Malian and Senegalese musicians on the anniversary of the French Revolution, let them eat cake and all that) or at The Middle East on July 15th when The Brand New Heavies (!!!) and Van Hunt will do their thing. Some soulful and funky music to round out this chapter.

[Update] After the movers leave, I'll be doing a radio appearance on Radio Open Source on WGBH tonight Wednesday July 12th at 7pm, dispensing some toli on sports as a leading indicator. You can stream it live or listen to the podcast later. A last bostonian hurrah with Christopher Lydon, Chelsea Merz and crew.

Next stop Berkeley.

File under: life, move, change, journey, transition, Cambridge, Boston, Berkeley, California, toli