Milestones…
August is a month of personal, family, and business milestones for me. Indulge me while I enumerate them. *I think that it is important to recognize anniversaries and milestones, so here goes, in descending order by age:</p>
- 25 Years of Marriage – I met my [Carmen](OK. Hold on tight. Think of this as a horrible legal version of “Does it Blend?”.), wife-to-be in 1979 while we were both students at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. We were married in August of 1982 and will celebrate our 25th anniversary late this month as part of our annual trek to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico! It is hard to believe that a quarter of a century has passed so quickly and that we still have such a good time with each other and with our family. Most everyone told us that we were way too young to get married to to start a family. They were wrong.
- 10 Years in Sammamish – We relocated from Potomac, Maryland to Sammamish, Washington at the end of the summer of 1997, planning to stay here for 5 years or so. Things didn’t quite work out that way and we are still here.
- 6 Years of Syndic8 – In August of 2001 I decided to create Syndic8 to allow other people to help me expand on and nurture my collection of RSS feeds, then 1000-strong. Now, 6 years later, the site is putt-putting along with over 500,000 feeds. I need to figure out where it should go and perhaps even find a new owner for it, but that’s another story.
- 5 Years at Amazon – In early 2002 I was self-employed, working with some venture capitalists to evaluate and spin up companies in the XML and web services space. One fateful day that Spring I logged in to my Amazon Associates account and saw a little box which said “Amazon Now Has XML.” A few months later I was a senior developer on that team, and not long after that I was the first-ever Web Services Evangelist.
- 3 Years on the Blog – Prior to 2004 I had been running a pair of blogs on the now-defunct editthispage.com, but they were lost in a server meltdown. I started this blog in 2004 and have been keeping it up through thick and thin.
</em>