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I’m driving up to New York on Saturday, and barring any hairpin turns of fortune, I’ll be able to file my final divorce papers at the courthouse on Monday. Other than the fact that it could have been finished much sooner, I think it’s ending in the best possible way. My ex and I are still on friendly terms, and I don’t think either of us has any hard feelings.

I’ll get to see some of my old work friends, too, over the weekend. I miss those guys. When I was working with them, I felt a real sense of belonging and cooperation; we really believed in the product and the company, and each other. Plus I miss the Half-Life fragfests. :)

I also plan to visit Ground Zero this trip. I haven’t been since September 7, 2001, when I grabbed a slice of pizza on Liberty Place before spending my last weekend as a quasi- New Yorker. I don’t quite know why I want to see it; normally you revisit a place and it reminds you of the past, but the absence of World Trade can’t bolster my memory, they’re in conflict. Maybe there’s still some small part of me that doesn’t really believe it’s gone. Maybe on some level I think it’ll provide some answer or explanation, just because there don’t seem to be any anywhere else. Maybe I’m just curious. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia digging its heels against the push of time.

Ahem.

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So here I am. Historically, I’ve been pathetic at maintaining journals of any kind. A handful scattered and unrelated entries, separated by months or years, is the best I’ve been able to manage. I’m counting on the public nature of this one to motivate me to actually use it frequently.

Of course, that’ll also make it harder to be completely candid. But then, this isn’t therapy. All I really want from it is something to look back on and remember, or perhaps more precisely, learn again. What is it about text that’s so easy to forget? When I read things I wrote in college, I don’t recognize them at all. I enjoy reading it and feeling a sense of otherness about it. It’s a different kind of feeling than looking at old photos. Those truly remind me of things; reading old text is more like meeting myself anew.

I tend to edit myself a lot, which has also been an obstacle in previous journal-keeping efforts. I’m hoping to curb this tendency here. Wish me luck.

Retropost: Visual Networks “Come Together in Cancun”

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Early in 2000, Visual Networks bought the startup I was working for at the time, Avesta Technologies. Not long afterwards, they announced that the entire merged company would be going to Cancun for a week in May. It struck me as an insane waste of money. We stayed all-inclusive at a big resort hotel, with Visual picking up the tab, including airfare. Looking back seven years later, it seems impossible that we ever actually got to do this. Here are some of the things I remember about the trip.

I roomed with Uday Menon, though I didn’t actually see much of him there. He was a Smalltalker, our resident Trinity Model guru. Great guy.

I missed the mostly-developers pirate cruise ship and rode with mostly sales and marketing folks. They were nice enough, but I couldn’t help feeling I had missed out.

I walked on the white sand beach in moonlight bright enough to read by. It was so beautiful. One such walk was with Casey Comeau, who’s an amazing person, and a very good listener. I’m not sure what it is, but I always felt like I’d known her a lot longer than I really had, and I could trust her very easily. But even so, I didn’t really go into the problems with Michelle, which were on my mind and bumming me out. I can’t remember precisely what we did talk about.

HR divided everyone (yes, everyone) into karaoke teams for a singing competition. My team also included our CEO. We were assigned the Shania Twain song “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” Basically it was a setup for the big boss to make a clown of himself, to the amusement of everyone. I didn’t know the song at all, none of us seemed to. They wouldn’t even let us try to learn the song in advance. But then somebody arrived and said she knew the song, and would sing it while we all just did backup swaying and stuff. She did a pretty good job, and we guys were in drag so everybody got to chuckle at the CEO. But it turned out that our savior wasn’t on our assigned team, so we were disqualified in shame (or whatever — I can’t say I was emotionally invested in the outcome). I thought she had just arrived late.

I sat in a hot tub in the wee hours with about twenty other people. We all belted out the theme from “New York, New York” at the top of our lungs. I did my best vocal imitation of Sinatra. Very out of character for me, at least in public, but I felt pretty camouflaged in the crowd. It felt kinda liberating.

I got a bit sunburned — and also a bit hung over — and opted out of the “day trips” that were available to us on our last day. I floated in the shade instead.

In between all this I also attended some large meetings on our product lines and corporate philosophy and direction, and also some small meetings with the doc team. Michael and I were on a crusade to get everybody using Frame+SGML. I cemented my place as the technical one on the doc team, the goto guy for all things related to help and HTML in particular (and for Trinity to a lesser extent), even among programmers. I loved that.