epc

The Night Hawks (Taken with Instagram at DUMBO, Brooklyn)

Daily East River Dogs (Taken with Instagram at East River Ferry Terminal Brooklyn Bridge Park/Dumbo).

Grr. Wish I could catch when the iPhone autocorrects “dogs” to “digs” (or WHY it does that).

Dozing dogs

Daily Deli Dogs 30 December 2011

Daily Deli Dogs 29 December 2011

Daily Driving Dogs, Jacksonville Edition

Frisket & Sailor Take South Beach (Take Ⅱ)

. @frisketofmainst asks “Are we there yet?”

The Ron Jon surf shop signs are the Wall Drug signs of I95, moreso than the South of the Border signs.

Daily Deli Dogs 14 December 2011

Daily Deli Dogs 13 December 2011

Daily Deli Dogs 11 December 2011

Daily Deli Dogs 11 December 2011

Daily Brooklyn Bridge Dogs 8 December 2011

Daily Deli Dogs 3 December 2011

And all I wrote was this whiny blog post.

In theory I was going to serve in some sort of executive role at a local startup, in practice that only lasted for six months. I’d write more about that experience, but can’t, even ten years later.    

I have many minor regrets, but not many major ones.

My head was quite messed up that fall of 2001.  9/11 being only one of many little chessmen playing around in my head.  Honestly, I think that the implosion of what I thought was a career at IBM did more to mess up my head.  

I hadn’t really thought much of it recently until jwz’s piece “Watch a VC use my name to sell a con.”  hit the wires.  I think much of my resistance to traditional VC funded startup mythology comes from having had a similar experience at IBM, though with only a small pot of fuck–you money at the end.  

I know, I know, IBM?  But seriously, the small group we had running ibm.com (under 25 people for most of the 1994-1999 period) was severely underfunded and understaffed for what we were allegedly supposed to do (run www.ibm.com and a myriad of other IBM corporate sites, while also directing in some sort of vague cross-matrixy way all of IBM’s web sites, 1000+ of them, worldwide).  We slept under the desks in our office in Armonk, until we got kicked out in December 1996, then we slept on/under desks at offices at 55 Broad Street in Lower Manhattan.

We were chronically short on hardware.  I regularly erased the logs for www.ibm.com for the first couple of years because I simply had no place to store them and couldn’t get funding for a 1Gb (!) drive to archive them to.  Don’t even ask about tape backup.

IBM’s foray into Chess web sites was mostly a disaster, partly due to my own mistakes (hey, did you know that even with reverse resolution turned off a certain 1997 era web server would still try to do reverse lookups, and hang horribly on a multiprocessor RS/6000 system? Yeah, neither did I), but also due to funding (the first Chess site was hosted on a shared server at some poor ISP in Boston because …well, it wasn’t a priority. Until it crashed and rearranged priorities).

Ahem…anyway, ibm.com was a great, small, team at the epicenter of a truly revolutionary era in technology and within IBM.  I miss that team.  When I tried to return to IBM in the Fall of 2001 (after a ~8 month post Sydney Olympic Games sabbatical) I couldn’t find any organization that came even close to that sense of camaraderie, collaboration and innovation.  I’m sure they existed, they probably still exist within IBM, but I couldn’t find one, and ended up leaving on a really sour note.

I honestly thought that having served as Corporate Webmaster (I know, what the hell is that? Think CTO. Sort of.) for IBM would have been an entree into multiple opportunities.  If anything it’s been a millstone (NOT albatross, read up on your Coleridge).  Larger companies viewed it as a non–executive HTML jockey role, smaller companies viewed it as too much experience.  Non–profits viewed it as a guarantee that I’d walk out on them the minute I got an offer from Corporate America™.

Still, I think leaving was the right thing to do, perhaps for the wrong reasons at the time.

I think that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re constantly sacrificing your personal life and health for some mythical payoff in the end, you need to get out.  The payoff, if it ever comes, never approximates the personal cost, never pays it back.

As for me, I sort of view the past decade as having been on the extended DL.  

I don’t have a grand plan for 2012 or the following decade, let’s see what happens.

Special Edition Nightly Traffic Cop Dogs

Daily Deli Dogs 24 November 2011 #HappyThanksGiving Edition