donger need food.

Old Friends

Spent the better part of yesterday meeting up with old co-workers. Lunch was at Pasta? (my favorite!) down in Mountain View to meet up with my old boss who rescued me from the eventual demise of Napster (it was fun while it lasted though, still felt kinda cool being there even though it was post-Lars lawsuit crap) and got me the great VMware gig. It was fun reminiscing over old times, seeing how her new Motorola gig is going, talking smack about the usual company politics and bullshit. I wonder if all companies have similar annoying crap with power hungry managers, undisciplined meeting attendees, cursing, yelling, personal attacks, blah blah blah...

[Woo hoo! My new toy just came in! Kinda looks like a cylon toaster. hehehheheh.]

Then dinner was spent at Faultline with my old homeboys from the eTime days. Interesting, the domain name is now registered to some TradeBeam company -- looks like they're doing the same thing though...supply chain management. It was good seeing those punk asses again, rollin' in their Porsche 911 (a beautiful silver 996 model -- and his other ride is a freakin' 400hp+ blown E36 M3) and the other guy with his Subaru STi (the hopped up B13 is still in the garage). Ah, the good old days of yore, with pre-IPO stock options and P/E ratios in the 100s. Reminds me of that Forbes billboard that spent a year or so perched prominently over the 101 by Shoreline, containing a picture of some hip 20 something white girl with a blurb of something to the effect of: 20 million dollar stock option holding college dropout. Yeah, those were some wild times. It was good dinner conversation, with one of 'em still chasing the elusive answer to all the money problems -- his next new venture is a Chessesteak Shop franchise somewhere in east bay. Quite interesting. And he's getting married too. Maybe one day we'll all figure out how to get out of this freakin' rat race and finally stop having to worry about someone moving my cheese. Conversation ranged from cars, to beer, to money, to business, back to cars, then to women, to exercise, and women, and cars, and cars, and then back to cars...but one thing that did stand out was this: what keeps us from taking those risks, being successful, making the plunge and getting rich is we're too educated for our own good. You look around and see those successful entrepreneurs, a lot of their success isn't because of their education or background, it's just that they have nothing to lose; me, I overthink & overprocess every little freakin' thing and can't just simply "let go". Gotta just roll with the punches, stick your neck out there and (I hate to steal a shoe publicity line, but) just do it. If things don't work out, then you move on and find something else. Thinking about all the crap that could go wrong is just a one way ticket to non-starterville.

Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'.

Anyways, it feels so great to be able to purge. Just got done dropping off about 5 years worth of accumulated computer/telephony/networking crap at CRC down at the Marina. It feels great!!! Although I'm worried that I might be putting myself into a potential tax audit situation since the receipt wasn't too specific about the equipment. Also dropped off another similar accumulation of clothes at the Pak & Save location of Goodwill. Driving around the city today forced me to really think about my living situation, and if I really do want to live in the city now. Or do I exhibit some semblence of Emotional Intelligence and suffer something non-ideal but cheap with the end goal of buying a place in a year? The joy of which will let me enjoy those things that I absolutely love in life -- cars, music, photography? Hm. I need to think this one through some more -- a 1 bdrm in Nob Hill/Mission/SOMA/Marina/Lower Haight would be nice, but $1500/mo nice?

Eh. I'll put off a decision for a little while longer. Right now, I gotta break in this bad-boy scanner and see how my slides turn out in digital form.

posted by VirtualErn @ 3:10 PM

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