What I Have Been Up To

It has been a while since I have been able to post so I thought a brief update was in order.

Life

California here we come! That's right. I have moved to the San Francisco bay area with my family. This was primarily to be closer to my work at Oracle, but I am also a lot closer to the action when it comes to Open Source, Maker Communities and IT in general. We are all having a lot of fun exploring a new area of the country, and the weather out here is a great bonus as well. Unfortunately, we are still not in a house yet and so most of my podcasting equipment is still packed away. But in the next few months we should be all settled and podcasts should start appearing again on there usual "better late than never" schedule.

Work

In case you missed it, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems back in February and they threw me in as part of the deal. Work has been very busy since day one at Oracle where I am a Principal Product Director for our line of Storage Products. However, the move to CA has cut down on some of my travel which is nice.

Podcasting

Since I can't really put out very many of my own episodes until we can unpack, I have been helping my friend Randal Schwartz by occasionally co-hosting Floss Weekly on the TWiT network. It certainly is nice to be able to concentrate on the various guests and Open Source topics and leave the production part to the great engineers that Leo has hired over at the cottage.

Making

It goes without saying that the community of makers in the SF bay area is quite a bit larger than in Cincinnati. I have already attended a meetup with a bunch of great people that meet monthly to talk about projects and whatever it is they happen to be working on. In fact, at the last meeting I went to we made our own TV B-Gone devices from kits that you can buy from the Maker Shed. You can always find something going on in SF if you do a little digging, and I will be attending the East Bay Mini Maker Faire that is happening on Oct 24. I can't wait to see what local makers are cooking up in there garages. I plan to incorporate more and more maker projects into the podcast to go along with my traditional Open Source content. I have lots of great ideas, but if you live in the bay area and have a project that you think would be good to have on the show please let me know. Here is my short list of what to build next:

Treadmill Desk (to reduce my waistline)

Wind Turbine (to reduce my power bill)

Arcade Cabinet V2 (to reduce my free time)

That's about it. Just a quick note to let you all know that I am still here and planning more great content to come soon.