2002

The apartment had a miniature fire place that was probably just for decoration. I chopped up the Christmas tree and burned it there.

One day, she put some kind of leash on the cat took it for a walk.

I believe after we had reconnected after a bad fight, Susan had another abortion in 2002.

I really liked my manager Scott at U.S. Bank, but after about a year, management shifted the Interwoven project under someone else, I think named John. He and I didn't see things the same way and I ended up taking a contract with Sogeti, speficially a contract through Siemens at Intel, I think making $98K/year. For whatever reason, Intel paid me something for three months to learn C# while porting what seemed like hundreds of thousands of lines of very redundant (copied and pasted) Perl to that language. Having experienced the challenges of early Java, I really liked C# from the very beginning, and I wasn't even too unhappy with XML at first.

When the Intel contract ended, I got another contract with shipping logistics company CNF. This was another C# project, so I was able to apply much of what I had learned at Intel. To be honest, I probably even modified some code libraries that I had developed for Intel.

I remember hearing that the managers at CNF argued about who would get window offices, so the company boarded up all the Windows. Corporations can be relatively inhuman.

Susan and I moved into Portland, which was closer to both Intel and CNF. I could walk to work, and there were a few coffee shops along the way, and a few breweries on the way back. Unfortunately, this contract only lasted a few months. I worked with a guy named Rob that would turn up later in my career.

//TODO: California weed card

By this time, Susan was working for tarot.com. Intewoven work for me in Portland seemed to dry up. From December of 2002 to July of 2003, I worked a contract in Iowa for Pioneer Hi-Bred where I basically ported the .NET code that I had written to Java. Somehow, I was able to get Susan onto that project as an XSL expert, even though she didn't have any experience with XSL. I think I might have even gotten a signing bonus for getting her the position.

We rented an apartment in Johnston, but we were rarely there except on work nights. We generally flew either back to Portland or to some other place each weekend. There were a couple of Indian guys on the project - Abas and Anul - and they went to the Florida Keys with us once. On the way back, the only place we could find to eat was a Wendy's, and I got really sick from that. Abas was an expert on Epicentric, and the other guy knew something about Interwoven.

There was another Indian guy named Shay on the project, who had previously worked for Interwoven. He seemed to always be full of shit, never adding any real value. The project lead was a white guy who also didn't seem to add much value, but knew something about being political with the organization. The company was implementing an Internet. The consultancy that had contracted with me brought in another guy, I think named Anthony, who was supposed to be an expert on search. He didn't seem to understand the nSitecore grew relatively quickly and did really well. Over the years, I had lots of interesting experiences there, including attending parties at Kronborg Castle (known from Shakespeare's Hamlet) and at the top of one of the towers of Tower Bridge in London. I had to give presentations to large groups occasionally, and the first one went really well, but I think they eventually realized that I was not very good at public speaking and I didn't have to do that for more than a few years. Actually, I think it was my presentation to the Most Valuable Professionals group (something like Sitecore insiders) about the SPEAK UI technology that Sitecore had developed but which I really didn't like. That entire presentation had an Star Wars theme with quotes like Darth Vader saying omminously, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed". eed to implement any information architecture, so he and I really didn't get along.

All of these people had to be flown in and housed weekly, which felt like a lot of money to spend on consulting for such a project. The company didn't seem to have much technical capacity, and its people were all old. I remember they referred to IIS (Internet Information Server, a web server that comes with Windows) as ISS (the Internatlal Space Station) and it wasn't a joke. Our entire team was relegated to a room that felt like a hallway, which was at least a floor away from the company's IT team. This is not an efficient structure for teams that should be working together, and I derogatoraly referred to that room as the batcave.

There was actually a decent Indian restaurant not too far from the customer, but Abas's wife also cooked for everyone sometimes. Once we went out to TGI Friday's or Chilis or something. Abas was absolutely disgusted when his ribs arrived and he realized that they were pork. I hadn't known that he was muslim. I respect when people keep their religios beliefs to themselves, but in looking back, I wonder if that was partially a response to the events of September 11, 2001, which were relatively recent at the time.

An older cigarette-smoking woman named Barb was company's project manager, but she didn't really manage anything. There was no way they could have completed this project without the consultants, and I doubt it went to production after I left. I got a hug from Barb on my way out.

Susan, who had wanted to live in San Diego, was not very happy living in Portland. I took a job at Network Associates (later acquired by McAffee Security) in Silicon Valley and we rented a house in San Jose. I really don't like living in Silicon Valley, but I was trying to compromise her happiness with mine. This was one of my worst jobs ever. I liked the guys I worked with, but I felt like management really lowballed me on the offer, especially as I had to be available to work with American, European, and Asian teams, which basically means all time zones.

I quit after about two months and took a job at John Deere in Moline, Illinois. I don't know why, but I've always liked that particular brand, and I was happy proud to work there. Maybe it was good to get away from Susan every week; our relationship might have failed much faster if we had spent more time together then.

At Deere, I basically ported the .NET libraries I had written to object-oriented Perl, which (along with some feature implementation) took about nine months (Perl really does suck for anything more than a few lines of code, and object orientation doesn't really help with that at all).

After Deere, I worked for an advertising agency named Organic in San Francisco. Most days, I took the Caltrain from San Jose into the city. Even for the bay area, this is a relatively long commute. It was possible to read or even use a computer sometimes, and riding the train was pleasant. Plus, I didn't really have any reaason to be home in San Jose.

At Organic, I worked on an Interwoven project for Symantec, which was actually a competitor to Network Associates. Probably like many people, I feel like I pioneered an architeceture called Ajax, which is about using JavaScript in the client to retireve XML from the server. By this time, Interwoven TeamSite Templating had a JavaScript library that I used to with Ajax to add significant capabilities to the data entry forms. It's disturbing to think how much I have been paid to write code that should never have reached production, and if it ever did, must have been thrown away shortly afterwards.

I think the office moved from something that felt like a warehouse on Bryant Street to the highrise at 555 Market. Either way, I felt pretty good about myself working in San Francisco, even though to get there I had to walk past a street full of homeless people living in their cars that would piss and shit on the street.

There were a lot of cool people at Organic. I specifically remember one Asian girl that always smelled really good when she walked by my desk. One day I asked her what perfume she wore. Luckily, I don't think she took this as an advance, but she was pleased to tell me. I think it was called Happy, and I think I wanted Susan to wear it, but I don't think that ever worked out. Susan did once have a perfume called Forget Me Not that she and I both liked. I think it was a limitted edition that we picked up in Europe that eventually ran out.

Another girl was Aimee. She was kindof big, with noticibly big breasts, and was always happy. She had a boyfriend that had a BMW M3 of a later model than mine. I remember seeing her on instang message once. She had entered characters in a sequence that looked like breasts and typed "take two of these and call me in the morning", which I though was both smart and funny. I could tell that we could have been more than friends. Some time later, we met up, I think in Palo alto, and it seems like we almost kissed.

2004 - Now Susan Wants to Buy a House?

From the time that we met, I had told Susan that I didn't want to live in America. Canada seemed like a good option, but I wanted to do charity work for disadvantaged girls in Asia, which Susan knew very well. We had even discussed adopting Chinese girls from about age three, as neither of us wanted to be responsible for babies.

In 2004, Susan decided that she wanted to buy a house.

To be honest, we should not have been able to get a loan, since I did not have a stable employment history and Susan didn't earn much. But, the housing financial crisis of 2008 was approaching, and one outfit offered us a $700,000 loan that we could apparently use with no down payment. I can never understand finance and didn't realize that this indicated a bubble, nor how variable interest rates would end up screwing borrowers.

I asked Susan not to look at condos and not to look in places like Castro Valley, so she looked at condos and in places like Castro Valley. She ended up selecting a unit on the 10th floor at Gateview Condomimums, which was a huge ugly facility near Albany Hill, accross the bay from San Francisco. The price was high, but we could afford it, and I didn't think we could afford much else.

The place had a great view, from the Bay Bridge all the way past the golden gate. Some sunsets were amazing, especially during fire season. At night, the lights from San Quentin Prison were extremely bright.

At the same time, there were many drawbacks, such as high and rising property taxes and HOA (Homeowners Association) fees. At the time, I thought her reason had to do with resale property value, but Susan had picked Albany partially due to the quality of its publc school, which require high property taxes. In reality, she was probably planning to have children all along, whether I realized it or not. Getting from my parking space to the condo required going through two elevators that were slow, unreliable, and overcrowded.

Between living in San Jose and Albany, we rented a house in Emmeryville, which is close enough to Oakland that it has a lot of black community. Both of our commutes from Emmeryville and Albany were terrible - Susan to San Jose and me to Palo Alto.

I was working on a project for Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, which wanted to replace their Interwoven implentation with a more modern CMS. While I was working there, a system administrator with whom I had worked at Network Associates invited me to get a gmail address, which I did. At this time, google was still relatively young and gmail was invite-only.

At this point, I had worked directly for companies that purchased enterprise software, and for consultancies that implemented software for such companies (including partners of the company selling the software), but I had never worked for a software company.

SHC had no objection to .NET, so I specifically looked for options that used that technology, which is when I first came accross Sitecore. At this time, Sitecore was a small Danish company that had had some success in Scandinavia but was just starting to explore the US market. I emailed the company and said I wasn't interested in "glossies" but was interested in evaluating the product. This is when I met Bjarne, who (along with Eric) was one of the partners founding Sitecore USA. Eric's son Michael was the CEO of Sitecore, and his other son Mads was working to get Sitecore USA started. Bjarne and Eric had alredy achieved significant career success.

Somehow I ended up in a Sitecore training class in the bay area led by Lars, who was one of the founders of Sitecore in Copenhagen. Probably because they assumed it was more approachable or possibly even more relevent at the time, training focussed on XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language), which is a declarative language for transforming XML, which was one view into the Sitecore information architeture and data.

Somehow I got some exposure to the search engine Autonomy while at SHC. I highly recommended Sitecore to SHC, but Perot Systems had come in on a services contract that I heard was worth about $170,000,000, and of course they were going to use Perot software.

I had already told Bjarne that I wanted to work with Sitecore regardless of whether I could get SHC to buy it. I met them at Mads' house in San Rafael, because they didn't even have an office yet. I remember I was wearing really casual clothes, like cargo pants and a T-shirt, which probably didn't impress the Danes much. I can't remember exactly when they offered me a job, but I took the training again in Copenhagen with Stephen (who worked for a Sitecore partner, and who would also come up later in my career) and again with Lars, this time in Texas.

Susan didn't want me to join Sitecore. She knew that I was making good money with Interwoven and that starting my own company was a huge financial risk.

The client in Texas was FMC (I think originally Food Machinery Company, but somehow split off into an undersea drilling equipment manufacturer). I remember the manager (name slips my mind) was in the class and suggested something, to which Lars responded very directly "That would be stupid," which isn't generally something a US vendor says to a management suggestion during a sales process. FMC had a contractor named Andy that first invited us to see prostitutes (Lars, Andy, and I were all married) and when we decliend that, to go to strip clubs (which we both declined). I was learning more about different industries and how business works in different locations. I think Lars might be th eonly one of us that's still married.

Sitecore turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, and really changed my life, even more than Xilinx had. At the time, I had just purchased a condo in Albany, California. Bjarne first offered me something like $36,000 annually and 5% of the US company, which I accepted. When they realized my financial position, Sitecore raised the offer to $60K, which still would have been pretty challenging for me.

Those options vested after a year during which I worked prety hard, travelling the country to do sales presentaitons and teach classes. My title was Chief Technology Officer, but that's nothing like the role that I performed, especially as I didn't own any portion of the Danish company that made the software (Sitecore USA was just a distributor). I didn't really understand what I was getting into by basically volunteering for a startup, which can be a significant grind. I tried to quit after my first year and they offerred me another 5% if I stayed on for another two years. I ended up staying about twelve years total.

After three years, I mDeereoved to the documentation team. The entire time I had been working with Interwoven, I had been active on its Developer Network Forums, and I actually received a trophy from them for my contributions there. I was even more active on the Sitecore forums, and I also started bloDeeregging and eventually posting on twitter and LinkedIn. I feel like I became somewhat famous and was valued and well-respected in the Sitecore developer community.

2005

In 2005, Susan and I went to Washington, D.C. to see my cousin Chico and his wife amd attended protests over the re-election of George W. Bush (the son of George H. W. Bush, who had been president previously).

Likely resulting at least in part from the web professional certificate that I had helped her to achieve while we were in San Diego and the job that I had helped her get at Pioneer in Iowa, though partially also resulting from her work at tarot.com and whatever she had done in San Jose, Susan somehow managed to land a job doing some kind of web tasks for Kaiser Permanente, a huge health insurance and healthcare provider on the West coast. I think her starting salary was $50,000 yearly, but Kaiser has incredible benefits.

One reason that we had picked the condo was supposedly because it was within walking distance from a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. It was actually a nice walk through some trees and past the Peet's coffee shop where we generally went every day. Unfortunately, Susan always wanted me to drive her, and I often had to wait in the BART parking lot for long periods of time to collect her, partly because has always been so terrible at communicating and really doesn't have much concern for other people and their time. This is a particular pet peeve of mine - I don't like waiting for people and I certainly don't want them waiting for me. Her laziness and self-interest in this area added significant conflict in our relationship.

Most of the units at Gateview did not have laundry machines. Our unit had a portable washing machine. To use it, you pulled it out from under the counter and connected a hose to the faucent of the kitchen sink.

It's probably worth mentioning here that I was never allowed to be involved with laundry operations. From my experience with several women, there really does seem to be some kind of innate or learned female, Chinese, or Asian instinct around doing laundry.

One night, I was awoken by a pounding on the door. I stepped off the bed and found the carpet soaked. The condo security guard at the door indicated that the neighbor one or two floors below us had reported flooding in their apartment.

Susan had left the laundry machine connected to the sink with the water running. The connection had failed somehow, flooding our apartmend and the one below it, with some water reaching the unit below that.

We hired experts to deal with the drying. I don't remember if they ripped out the carpet first, to help the concrete below it dry. They brought big fans. I don't remember using insurance or paying anything for any units downstairs from us, but there were some certainly some costs

I think because we were so cheap, we lived with the barren concrete floors for quite some time, which was pretty unpleasant. At some point we had Greeny, a friend of my friend Brooke, install something like hardwood flooring in the living room, but I think we only replaced the carpet when we started working on selling the place, which was several years later.

Susan stopped using the portable laundry machine, which meant that she had to use the building's laundry facility downstairs. This was obviously a huge hassle, which she would constantly compound by forgetting her keys to the unit, requiring me to come to the door for her. I put her keys on a lanyard and hung that on the doornob to help her remember them.

//TODO: scooter - 1997? Brooke living with us, got him his job

I had reconnected with Scooter to get weed. I had also lent Scooter money for a big weed deal. Scooter came to the condo once. Of course, Susan didn't like him. I think Scooter and I went shopping for Hot Wheels together or something because he didn't have a car at the time. Scooter somehow made money selling Hot Wheels. He was also really into old VW bugs and buses.

Susan really didn't like it that I smoked weed. I sometimes smoked weed at my desk near the big windows in the living room. Sometimes I smoked weed in the bathroom.

One day, probably stoned, I took a nap in the bedroom with the door shut. Susan woke me up by slamming repeatedly slamming something heavy on the bedroom door, very hard. She had forgotten her keys again while doing laundry, and when she knocked, I had not come to the door. She had had to go to security and get them to let her in, so she was very angry at me.

I was honestly somewhat traumatized by this incident. I hadn't done anything wrong, and it seemed clear that she could get physically abusive over something relatively minor that wasn't even my fault. She said that she had been concerned that I was dead, but that doesn't make any sense, because if that were the case, she should have called 911 rather than slamming on the door.

2008 - Now Susan Wants Kids?

When we met, Susan and I agreed that we would not have children, and had immediately had an abortion. In fact, I believe we later had another abortion. I should have seen her desire to buy a house as evidence of her original deception about our future plans, or at least as nesting behavior.

I think it was in 2008 that Susan informed me that she wanted to have children. Maybe she had always been dishonest with me about wanting children, or maybe it was just standard female chemistry. Our marriage had always been a terrible mistake, and I think part of her reason was that she thought that a child might hold it together.

Some time after we moved into the condo, possibly around the time that she started arguing that we should have children, Susan and I agreed that in the case of divorce, she would not take any money from me, including income, inheritance, and anything that the Sitecore equity turned out to be worth. I should have gotten all of this in writing.

Susan knew very well that I would never want children. Not only that, but I especially wouldn't want to raise them in the condo, which we could barely afford.

I saw three options:

• We have children, in which case I am unhappy.
• We don't have children, in which case Susan is unhappy and makes me unhappy.
• Divorce, in which case were might both be unhappy.

By the time I realized that I would have been much happier if we had divorced then, we had already gone with the first option.

We got pregnant in 2008, but Susan had to have a DNC (Dilation and Curettage, like an abortion) because it turned out to be molar. On the afternoon of the surgery, I wanted to celebrate and asked Susan if I could take her out to dinner. Her reaction told me that she wasn't as happy as I was.

We had scheduled a trip to Peru around this time. The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train from near our condo towards SFO (San Francisco Airport) stopped for long enough in Oakland that I got worried and suggested that we get out and take a taxi. Always trying to save every penny, Susan decided that we would stay on the train.

When we were less than a mile from the airport, the train just stopped on an elevated section of the tracks, with no explanation. When we finally arrived at the airport, we had missed the check-in cutoff by a few minutes, and hence our flight and hence any subsequent flights. We had an entire itinerary booked in Peru.

Luckily, this was one of the few times that we had purchased travel insurance. We got the doctor to write a note that said that Susan had had a DNC. We used that as an exuse for not making the trip and got most of the costs back from the insurance company.

Maybe around this time, the dimanod disappeared from Susan's wedding ring. It wasn't a very expensive ring - I'm no fan of ornate jewelry or wasting money on things that aren't precios because they really aren't rare or valuable. At some point while we were talking about something, I noticed the diamond glinting in what I called the stating area, which was between the bedroom and the living room, and gave it back to her.

Orchex,N/A,,,Dec 2024, Conscia.ai,Principal Solution Architect,,,Jan 2024,May 2024 Konabos,Senior Customer Advocate,,,Jul 2022,Mar 2024 Perfection.DEV,Consulting Product Architect,,,Aug 2022,Nov 2023 Contentstack,Consultant,,,Feb 2020,Jun 2022 Brainjocks,Consultant,,,Sep 2019,Feb 2020 POSSIBLE,Senior Vice President for Experience Platforms,,,Apr 2016,Aug 2019 Sitecore,Chief Architect,,,Jul 2015,Feb 2016 Organic,Content Management Consultant,,,Feb 2004,Jun 2004 "Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc.",Content Management Solutions Architect,,,Dec 2002,Jul 2003

second grade - star wars and missing family after Christmas