Alex Hopmann’s Blog

As I look forward to some downtime for the next few weeks I asked
Tim if he had any advice
since he took a few months off in between Microsoft and Pure. His advice
was pretty good although I have a feeling I’m going to have a hard time
following it. He suggested not planning anything- take a few weeks where you
just wake up and say to yourself “hmm, maybe I’ll go grab a cup of coffee”.

I unfortunately already have a list of many things to do. There is something like 30
items already on the list. Plus I’m already thinking about how it could be really interesting
to do some consulting for a bit.

Several of the bigger things on my list are getting my office back into shape. I’m probably going
to initially do this the “low budget” way- while I’ve got some cool designs that need some
custom iron-work, initially I’m going to get some cheap shelves from Ikea and go from there.

The second set of things is improvements to this blog- I plan on redoing the styles and graphics
(which were really just a “quick I need something anything in here quick”) and adding some extra
pages for lists of places I want to travel, places to eat, etc.

]]>

For the last two months at work I’ve been writing a ton of code investigating (and building) out some potential new
directions. I suppose having not done this for a few years I was a bit concerned that my coding skills were rusty. They
were, but I’m happy to say that it comes back to me pretty quickly and even diving in to a bunch of new technologies
like PHP had a pretty quick learning curve.

Im still a big fan of the Network Magic product and
all the folks at Pure but I’ve decided to move on.
When I went from Microsoft to Pure I didnt take any time off and this time Im going to
give myself a few weeks to recharge, organize the mess (otherwise known as my office) at
home and start working on some new ideas. I’m even hoping to do some major upgrades to this
site as a way to experiment with some of those ideas, so stay tuned and shoot me email with
any comments.

I also just realized that I did something really rude in my last post-
I mentioned Aaron but I
didnt link to his blog. So
I’ve fixed it in this post and
edited the previous one to fix my oversight.

]]>

I think I saw this earlier this morning but it didn’t really sink in
until Aaron stopped by and mentioned it.
Today Ray Ozzie posted
about the “live clipboard” concept, otherwise known as the clipboard for the web.

Wow. Now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, this is probably a really big deal. And I love how in
this transcript of Ray’s talk (over on O’Reilly)
Ray is quoted as saying that perfect success is people thinking that this isn’t really a big deal, that it is just
a simple scalable paradigm. HTTP started out that way- just GET, HEAD and POST.
Xmlhttp started out the same way, just a simple little control with like 6 methods and
three of them were pretty much the same.

Looking forward to the cool things that I can do with this…

]]>

Rich’s post about spring skiing
reminds me that its soon time. I love spring skiing- its not at all the same thing as good winter skiing
but if you have a good snowpack there is nothing better than swishing down the mushy hill in 60-70 degree
(ok, I’ll take 50s too) weather with a light jacket on and few crowds. I think it was my first winter in
Seattle where Crystal was even open a couple of days in June. A couple of years before that Tahoe got
so much snow that I was up at Kirkwood the last day of the season and it was the last week of June (I think-
I can’t promise that my memory is actually holding up here).

So far this ski year got off to a good start and I’ve already got about 10 days in (probably double what I’ve
done for the past few years). But we didn’t get out at all in February because of some trips we planned and Kat’s
studying for her exam. We ARE planning on hitting the slopes right after her exam (two weeks!) and I’m hoping to
catch some great days in April (at least for the part of April when I’m not in Spain). So while its not one of those
super-epic years, we should be pretty good this spring as long as some of the areas are willing to stay open.

Also- A quick cartoon from the Aero News Network that just possibly
might explain what I experienced at American Airlines. I certainly feel like I experienced “a poop vortex”…

]]>