I haven’t really been posting much lately because a lot has been on my mind and my plate, and I couldn’t really post it all up for the world to see. Now it’s finally final, and I can: I’m moving to California to work in Sunnyvale for a very large Internet company as a senior system administrator. I’m going to design and develop tools for managing gazillions of Internet servers effectively and efficiently. It’s pretty much the job I was grooming for before the Great Internet Bubble Pop of 2001.
It’s about the closest thing I have to a dream job, unless you count that sysadmin position at that antarctic research station. I’m terribly excited about it. It’s a big move, halfway across the country to a place I know just about well enough to get around. It’s in Sunnyvale, in Silicon Valley, where I commuted to week in week out for a year or so back in the day. It’s a beautiful place, right next to the Santa Cruz mountains and the Santa Cruz beaches, just south of San Francisco and a little north of Monterey. It’s three hours from Yosemite and about four from Lake Tahoe.
On top of that it’s definitely the capital of the tech world, and going to work there is like going to The Game. It’s a challenging place with a bunch of hard-charging, bright, ambitious people, and I look forward to being part of that.
At the same time, Austin is my Home, my capital-H Home. The only place I’ve ever really belonged. It’s where I met most of my friends, where I first fell in love, where I learned what life was all about. It’s where I learned to lay back at the Greenbelt and chill, to swim at Barton Springs, to get crazy at Eeyore’s Birthday, to get blazed at Marley Fest. It’s where I met the craziest Bohemians ever at SXSW, where I sat at Auditorium shores watching the lights of the skyline dance in Town Lake. It’s where I played a drunken game of flag football at 1 AM on Thanksgiving in Zilker park. It’s where I saw ten thousand kites fill the sky, and a million bats fly off into the dusk. It’s where I watched flocks of birds swoop in graceful arcs between the behemoth skyscrapers I stood astride. It’s where I explored every room of the Capitol and fed the squirrels on campus. This place is the sum and total of damn near everything that’s been good in my life. It is, in all likelihood, where I met you. And meeting you has been a seminal experience in my life. I have learned from you. I will miss you.
I will come back to Austin, some day. It is my home. Until then, and I don’t know when it will be, come visit me. Come visit me for a weekend or a week and hell, stay if you want. Until then I will miss you if you don’t. Until then I say goodbye.
Keep Austin weird; I’ll see what I can do about south bay.
PS–Yes, there will be a party, and it will be a party to remember, and if you remember our parties you know what I mean.* Details to follow; suffice it to say that we may not be the only people leaving this blessed burg, and nobody that’s leaving is known for going out with anything less than a bang.
*–Also, you were obviously doing it wrong, ‘cuz I don’t. I hear some great stories, though.
