personal

Apparently I was too busy to even mark the passing of my own birthday.

Monday was the big-two-seven for me. My god I’m getting old…

Photo from luvtequila2005’s CC-licensed photostream

After 2 years, 7 months, and 7 days at Amazon.com, I’ve decided to make a major career change.

May 16th was my last day at Amazon. After about a week of a half of vacation I’m starting all over today at blist.com, a small, early-stage startup in Pioneer Square, Seattle. My tentative job title is “Technical Project Manager”, but my actual work will encompass so much more. I’m looking forward to working with such a young, ambitious company and getting the chance to leverage my skills and experience in ways that will hopefully help make them very successful.

In my tenure at Amazon, I had the opportunity to work with so many awesome people that I can’t count how many people I need to thank. I still love Amazon and all it’s hard working employees, but this opportunity at blist was too good to pass up. They’re small, scrappy, and have a grand vision of the future, probably much like Amazon did when it was starting out. It’s a big jump, but it should be a great ride, and I look forward to being able to accomplish some great things.

Photo borrowed from TheMahers Seattle Lunch2.0 photoset on flickr

Just about anybody who spends any time on the web has to admit that there are way too many social networking sites. You’ve got Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn, and just about a million others.

Although I’ve had accounts on a good number of them, I just can’t keep them properly updated and maintained anymore. Thus, I’ve decided to start “pruning my network,” so to speak. As such, I’ve cancelled my accounts on Orkut and Friendster. I haven’t even touched my Orkut account in about 2 years, except to occasionally accept friend requests from the hordes of (often quite attractive) Brazillian women who seem to try and befriend everyone on Orkut. And I hadn’t logged into Friendster for so long that I couldn’t remember my password. I also plan on canceling my Myspace account soon, but I’d like to notify a few friends on there before I suddenly disappear.

From now on, I plan on maintaining a much smaller collection of social sites:

• Flickr for my photo collections
• Facebook for general friend-networking
• LinkedIn for career networking
• Twitter for random comments

If you want to network with me, you’re best to find me on one of those four in the future.

Update: I’ve notified those people in my MySpace that weren’t already on Facebook and I’ve canceled my account.

For some reason I thought I’d share a few pictures I posted to Flickr of my new apartment.

I’ve spent the last couple months accumulating new furniture and I’m pretty happy with the results. The crown jewel was a great brown leather couch I picked up on Craigslist last weekend that really pulls the whole thing together. And I got a great deal on it.

You can view the rest of the photos in one of my Flickr photosets.

Pretty pimp, eh?

I’ve just returned from my first Washington surfing adventure and, despite its best efforts, the ocean didn’t manage to kill me. But I think I’ve caught the bug. Any sport in which beer drinking and campfire making is so integral is a winner in my book.

Update: I’ve also uploaded my first YouTube video… a short clip of the break from this morning.