Eight years and one week ago, when I was 26, the first entry in this journal was made. The original purpose of what was then titled “Blowin’ in the Wind” was to chronicle an adventure to Alaska that began after I left the job that I’d held since graduating from college. That job at Anderson Consulting started in September 1998, just at the tail end of the Asian Financial Crisis. As a result of the slowdown in business overseas the San Francisco office was filled with new hires sitting around waiting for work and trying to figure out how to start their lives in the Bay Area. Since there weren’t any projects to go out on I decided to spend those days teaching myself the new “Java” programming language; little did I know this would be something I was reasonably good at, and one dotcom bubble later I had been involved with creating companies, working overseas, and designing systems for some of the world’s most recognizable corporations. However, after four years and too many 100+ hour weeks burnout made change inevitable, and I set out in the Subaru for Alaska with no real idea of what the future held.
When the journal started, and still to this day, the idea of putting these updates online seemed a bit presumptuous – why should anyone care about day-to-day details of what I’m up to? – but in retrospect it’s nice to have a personal chronicle that records the path that I’ve followed, and it’s also kind of cathartic to sit down and go through the exercise of putting together entries whose goals are to give a status of where things stand and how they got there. Eight years ago I wouldn’t have guessed that this journal would last as long as it has, but today I’m glad it did and hope it’s still going strong for many years to come.
