After almost exactly 10 years touring the West coast (Seattle, LA, San Francisco Bay Area), Anne and I (and Audrey too!) are moving back East, to Boston. It’s something that we’ve wanted to do for a long time, but things have been good at Yahoo, and it didn’t seem like I could leave that.

The good news is that I don’t really have to leave it. I’m going to continue working for Yahoo as an Architect for our Video Platform. I’ll be based in the Cambridge office along with the team from Maven Networks, acquired by Yahoo! in February. Maven’s offices are literally across the street from where I worked at Firefly in 1997-1998. We have many fond memories of our time there.

While I will be leaving Yahoo! News and the engineering team I largely built, I’ll be taking on new and interesting responsibilities. For one, I’ll be helping the Cambridge team integrate with the rest of Yahoo. Hopefully my experience as the acquiree as part of LAUNCH back in 2001 will be helpful there. We also did a lot of audio and video streaming there of course, so that knowledge will also come in handy. I still have nightmares about debugging LAUNCHcast using Flash 4.0 and the RealPlayer Netscape plugin running in Netscape 4.73 on a Mac. Thankfully the technology has come a long way since then.

Over the years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people at Yahoo and how things work, so that should be another skill I can put to use there. I’m sure I’ll be bouncing back and forth to Sunnyvale and Dallas frequently as I work with the various Yahoo offices that comprise our Video team.

Six years is a long time to stay in any job and I’ve learned a hell of a lot. As my team and responsibilities grew bigger, I got further and further away from the technology that brought me into this industry in the first place. While I quelled that with coding projects on the side at work and at home, I’m looking forward to immersing myself in technology problems again as part of my day-to-day job.

The whole opportunity has been in the works for months now and I’m happy to finally share it with everyone. It’s been very difficult to have to hide the most significant thing going on in my life from family, friends and coworkers for many weeks. We didn’t even tell our families until I had accepted the position as to not upset them if it fell through. They’re thrilled to soon be within an hour or two of their granddaughter.

After I talked to many of the Video team members here in Sunnyvale, I made plans to visit the Cambridge office in late April. I left on a Sunday afternoon, spent the day in the office, then took a late flight back on Monday. What I failed to realize was that was also Patriots’ day in Massachusetts which means it was the day of the Boston Marathon. That would have been fine except for my return flight which was full of sweaty, smelly marathon runners including the woman who sat next to me and who ran it finish to start AND back again a few hours before.

We don’t know where we will live yet, but we hope to buy a house somewhere within reasonable commuting distance to Cambridge. We’ll be crashing with family and friends until we find a place. The plan is to leave here around the 7th of June, just 2 1/2 short weeks away.

When Anne and I first moved out to the West coast, we thought we would stay a few years, but never anticipated 10. We even joked that we’d return when the Big Dig was done, which is a nice way of not making any commitment at all. Well the joke’s on us now. The Big Dig actually finished and we’re Boston bound. It will be good to get back to a place where they have actual seasons of the year (even the cold ones) and where the Red Sox play every night on basic cable.

For my friends on the West coast – thanks, but you won’t be able to miss me too much as I’ll be back often. For my friends and family on the East coast, I look forward to seeing you again and more often.

Boy we have a lot of junk to pack up.

The original lolcat:

The new lolinvestor:

Carl Icahn is trying to replace the Yahoo! board.

idea stolen from a valleywag commenter.

I’ve been reading the glowing reviews for OS X’s Time Machine backup system and Apple’s Time Capsule backup drive. Apple seems to have finally made backups simple and automatic. With Time Capsule, they’ve combined it with a fast network router, simplifying things even more.

While I think all this technology is cool, I think it ignores one big problem – it doesn’t safely back up your Mac. True, you can restore your stuff if you accidentally delete a file or your hard drive dies. But it’s not going to help at all if your house burns down. You’ll have a very nice backup that looks like a piece of toast. All your documents, financial records and email will all be gone forever.

What I’ve been doing for a while now is running my own backup scripts, using good ‘ol rsync. Every night I rsync my laptop and Anne’s laptop to our Mac Mini. Later each night, it rsyncs the Mini back a secondary drive in a Mac at my parents’ house, 3000 miles away.

Now what it doesn’t do is any type of versioning. It only ever has the latest backup. If I delete a file and don’t release it until 2 days later, it’s gone. I do use Mozy for a subset of stuff though, so I always have that as a versioned backup.

So what Apple needs to do is offer an offsite mirroring service (perhaps via Amazon S3), so your Time Capsule is not a single point of failure. Do that, charge me a reasonable amount per year for storage (<$100), and I'll happily get rid of Jeff's Homegrown Backup Solution.

While I was busy trying to sleep last night, I starting thinking about all the concerts I went to when I didn’t have a kid and I could go to concerts. It quickly became a very long list, so I thought I’d see if I could list all the artists I’ve seen live. Now many of these were opening acts or featured at multi-act venues and festivals, so I definitely wouldn’t have paid to see many of them.

Here we go, in alphabetical order. I’ve noted the ones I’ve seen mutliple times.

The Badlees
Barenaked Ladies (4)
Ben Folds Five
Big Head Todd and the Monsters
Joe Bonamassa
Marc Cohn
Counting Crows
Crash Test Dummies
Death Cab for Cutie
Daughtry
Dog’s Eye View
Dropline
Bob Dylan
Earth, Wind and Fire
Melissa Etheridge
Foo Fighters
Garbage
Genesis
Getaway People
The Getaway People
Indigo Girls (2)
Jude
Taylor Hicks
Whitney Houston
Huey Lewis and the News
Live
Lisa Loeb
Luscious Jackson
Aimee Mann
Tara Maclean
Dave Matthews Band
Sarah McLachlan (3)
Natalie Merchant
Alanis Morrisette
Jason Mraz
Billie Myers
Sinead O’Connor
Pearl Jam
Trent Reznor
Semisonic
Duncan Sheik
Sixpence None the Richer
Elliot Smith
Soul Coughing
Sugar Ray
Take 5
They Might Be Giants
Bruce Springsteen
James Taylor (2)
U2
Suzanne Vega
The Violent Femmes
The Wallflowers
Gillian Welch
Brian Wilson
Neil Young

Then I got curious who I haven’t seen. The easiest way to see who I like the best is to look the the size of the MP3s I have of each artist. Here’s the top 10:

R.E.M. 445MB
Billy Joel 338MB
Toad the Wet Sprocket 287MB
Pet Shop Boys 227MB
Madonna 276MB
Tom Petty 275MB
Sting 249MB
Radiohead 245MB
Tracy Chapman 241MB
The Beatles 210MB

Clearly I need to find more music from this decade to listen to.

In my first job out of college, I went to work for a startup in Boston, Agents, Inc. They had developed some collaborative filtering technology that they applied to generate pretty darn good movies and music recommendations. I created my user account (‘bowtah’, account number 51066) on ffly.com late 1995.

When I started, they were just finishing up a project with another startup, Yahoo, to provide website recommendations for a new service they were launching, My Yahoo!. It was the first time that Yahoo offered user registration. As part of the arrangement, when you registered on either site, you also got an account on the other. My bowtah account became part of Yahoo.

A year and a half later, Agents (now Firefly) was moving towards selling their software to businesses, rather than building ad-supported consumer sites. They sold off their music site, along with all the user registrations and ratings, to a music startup. The company was acquired by Microsoft in 1998 and I moved to Seattle.

At Microsoft, the Firefly team worked on building Passport, Microsoft’s single identity system. The idea was to allow you to register once, and use that login across any site on the web. Today, OpenID seems to be reviving that idea, albeit with different rules.

In 1999, I became interested in online radio and went to LAUNCH, a music startup in LA, and the same company that bought Firefly’s music site earlier. On LAUNCH.com, I was reunited with my old Firefly login.

Soon after, the dot-com bomb went off and LAUNCH was in trouble. In 2001, LAUNCH was acquired by Yahoo. One of our first projects after the acquisition was to convert LAUNCH to use Yahoo’s login system. As part of that process, you had the option of merging your LAUNCH account with a Yahoo account. Two acquisitions later, my split identities of bowtah were reunited.

Now that a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is on the table, it’s possible that my accounts may be consolidated again. I don’t think Microsoft did anything with the rest of the Firefly accounts, but my Passport account is still there.

I use 1Password religiously to manage the otherwise impossible task of remembering all my website registrations, but clearly the web a better solution for single identities and Microsoft acquiring them all clearly isn’t it. 🙂 Here’s to hoping that Yahoo’s support of OpenID 2.0 will finally make the problem of maintaining lists of usernames and passwords go away.

I decided a few weeks ago that my home page was getting embarrassingly old again. The last redesign was in 2002, so I redesigned it, focusing on making it both a place to see what’s the latest, and find an archive of things past.

At the same time, I used some amazingly cutting edge technologies in 2008 such as CSS and JavaScript. Wow!

It’s interesting to think that none of the services on the top half of the page (WordPress, Flickr, Twitter) existed in 2002. We’ve certainly changed how we communicate and share our lives.