Back on the Chain Gang

I had my first post-surgery checkup yesterday, and the doctor said that everything is looking good. I can no longer use “doctor’s orders” as an excuse for not walking the dog or taking out the trash.

I started back at work this past Monday, catching up on a ton of email and getting my final plans in place for February trips to Utah, London, and Vancouver BC.

I was hoping to say that I was back to 100% when I was thinking about writing this post, but the truth is that I feel like I am at 120%. Because I can now breathe properly, I have a lot more energy. I don’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat, and I managed to stay awake through an entire movie this past Saturday. This may sound silly or trivial, but for years I was known as the person who could fall asleep at a movie, meeting, or even a live concert. I am sleeping well which gets me off to a better start for the day, but I am also breathing better during the day, so I don’t get drowsy anymore. My voice sounds a bit different (and hopefully better) too.

I would like to take this time to thank all of my friends and blog readers for the get-well wishes that they have sent me over the last couple of weeks. I really, really appreciate each and every one of the links, emails, and blog comments. Those gestures really made a difference. Thanks, from the very bottom of my heart.

I’d also like to send a special note of thanks to my friends at Bungee Labs. Not only did they send me a copy of John Woods’ cool book about Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, but they also made a nice donation to his Room to Read program in my name. I saw this on my Blackberry while stopped at a traffic light this morning and it brought tears to my eyes. This looks like a very worthwhile program and I was happy to add my own donation as well.

On a somewhat humorous note, the fact that I had some extra time to read blogs and to write comments set of a somewhat improbable chain of events. I was reading Matt Mullenweg’s note that Sun Isn’t Relevant to Startups and left a very short comment. James Governor from Redmonk picked up on it in his post Every Blog a Potential RFP with the very amusing comment “Trigger pulled. Blammo! Establish business relationship and obvious responsiveness.” From there, Isabel Wang kept the RFP 2.0 theme going,and even called on a few other folks to chime in with responses to Matt. From there she completed the circle with an old post by my friend Kevin Burton who had talked about using S3 and EC2 late last year. Of course I had also responded to that one.