joestump.net

1. I started the year announcing that I’d taken a position at Digg.com as a software developer.
2. In January I found out that my nagging back injury was a herniated disc. I’ll be starting out this year by going under the knife to get it fixed. More on that to come I’m sure.
3. I finished all of my renovations on my condo in Seattle just in time to move down to San Francisco in February to start working at Digg.com.
4. In March Rebecca and I broke up. She’s now living in Antarctica (how crazy is that?!). Around the same time I turned 27.
5. In April I booked a plane ticket bound for Bangkok, Thailand. It would have been my first international trip of my life.
6. I also began a love affair with test driven development in April.
7. In May I attended Google Developer Day 2007 and blogged the whole thing.
8. I launched correlate.us in May.
9. In late June my first major project at Digg, the new comments system, launched to much fanfare. Note the sarcasm in my voice. We’re currently planning on redoing the comment system.
10. On June 18th I flew up to Seattle to help John and Carly celebrate their wedding. Due to Garren and I’s shenanigans from the night before it was a rough day for me, but I made it through and will soon join John and Garren in Vail for some snowboarding.
11. In early July I bet Kevin that I could write an iPhone version of Digg in less than 48 hours. Being the hater he is he said I couldn’t and said he’d buy me an 8GB iPhone if I could. I did. I wrote up a review like everyone else about the single greatest consumer electronics device created in the past decade.
12. Around this time my alma mater fired long time friend and beloved faculty member, Jim Vick, over the cover up of the murder of student Laura Dickinson.
13. In September my long time best friend, Dorkboy, was married in Ann Arbor, MI. I served as the Best Man, a title I still find unfitting. Considering it was me serving the post it should have been World’s Greatest Buddy or simply The Guy Who’ll Probably End Up Drinking Too Much Beer and Slurring His Speech. Much to Dorkboy and Mrs. Dorkboy’s relief I kept things together and delivered the world’s shortest and sweetest best man’s speech.
14. In October Kevin talked me into flying out to London, England for FOWA. I visited many of the normal sites along with a day trip up to Stone Henge.
15. In November I took a two week trip to Thailand. I spent four nights in Bangkok and seven nights in Koh Phangan. I had a great time and can’t recommend visiting that country enough.
16. In late December Garren and I took a trip up to Whistler for some fun in the snow. Whistler didn’t disappoint. I spent the last day in about 1 - 2 feet of powder on Blackcomb’s aptly named 7th Heaven.
17. I rang in New Year’s Eve with friends in Portland.

It’s official. As of today I’m employee #20 at Digg. I sent in my resume in September fully expecting not to hear back, but over the course of the last few months it became apparent I was being considered for a position. I didn’t think much of it after not hearing from them for almost a month, but Brian Link sent me an email around the first of the year which turned out to be an official offer.

For those of you that don’t know, Digg is the 19th most visited site on the internet in the United States. It serves up more traffic than Wal-Mart, the New York Times or Best Buy. So, as you can imagine, I’m pretty excited about this opportunity. I’ll be arriving in San Francisco somewhere towards the beginning of February. If you’re in the area and would like to get pints please let me know.

Taking the job means that I won’t be doing any contract work and my open source projects will most likely sit idle for the time being. If you’re interested in maintaining Framework or any of my PEAR packages please let me know.

1. I started the year by telling everyone that Lauren and I were ending our marriage.
2. I visited Dana down in San Diego, CA. The first of two trips to see my good friend and eat copious amounts of burritos.
3. In February I released Framework and DB_Virtual unto the world. Not much rejoicing ensued, but many people are using the software and apparently quite happy with it.
4. I found out that I have a herniated L5 disc in my back, which has happily escalated into full blown Sciatica.
5. On March 14th Lauren and I were officially divorced. On March 15th I celebrated my 26th birthday.
6. In April I attended MySQL UC and blogged the whole thing.
7. I bought a road bike and started riding a lot.
8. I ran in my very first 5k logging a time of 0:27:29.0.
9. In July I declared Operation Fat Ass a success and started training for my first sprint triathlon.
10. I bought the love of my life.
11. Towards the end of August I ran in another 5k in Lynnwood logging a time of 23:44, which was good enough for 3rd place in my age division (20-29 Males) and 12th out of a field of 77.
12. On September 17th, 2006 I participated in the Kirkland Tri-It Sprint Triathlon. I ended up taking first place out of the beginner’s heat with a time of 1:19:40.
13. I pulled double duty and flew down to San Diego a scant two weeks later to participate in the Jamba Juice Sprint Triathlon. This time I placed 450th out of 1,480 participants with a time of 1:06:30.
14. In late October I flew back to Michigan to attend Eastern Michigan University’s homecoming festivities.
15. In early November my employment at Enotes.com came to a close. I haven’t mentioned this until now, but I’m no longer working for Enotes.com and am currently doing consulting for a number of clients.
16. I spent Christmas and rang in the New Year with Rebecca in Seattle, WA.
17. Towards the end of December my Sciatica found its stride and now keeps me from doing the most minimal of tasks.

I’ve been thinking about the Internet and, especially, craigslist lately. Since moving out to Seattle I’ve relied heavily on both to form new friendships and find new things to do. This is a brief list of how the internet has affected my life recently.

• The whole reason I moved to Seattle was because I met Brad, the proprietor of eNotes.com, LLC found me via an article I wrote.
• My closest friends in Seattle are Garren, John and Andrew were all met in one way or another through craigslist.
• I’ve disc golfed, snowboarded, ran, walked, talked and drank with numerous people I’ve met from craigslist.
• I’ve gone on a few dates from craigslist. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say dating in Seattle sucks.
• I’m going to Sasquatch with a girl who just moved here from Florida and was looking for a ride.

It’s really staggering now that I think about it. There isn’t a single person that I can think of that I interact with daily here in Seattle that I didn’t meet online somehow.

As I pointed out in a previous post, my birthday was on March 15^th. I turned the ripe old age of 26 and had a good time doing so. At any rate, a few days ago I check my mail and find a birthday card which was postmarked from Columbus, OH. All it says is “Happy 26^th! Jason”. I know three Jasons and none of them would be likely to send me a birthday card and I know for a fact that two of them don’t live anywhere near Columbus, OH. The only thing I can think is that someone who visits this site sent it to me.

If that’s the case then please send me an email to so I can thank you for the card.

That’s when it’s all over and Lauren and I will officially be no more in the eyes of the law. It’s at this point I’d like to lament the divorce laws of Washington for making a couple of young kids wait months before finalizing everything. Seriously, it’s just stupid.

The next day, March 15^th, is my birthday. I’ll be turning the ripe old age of 26. 30 is right around the corner. A few days later I’ll be at a local Irish pub enjoying green beer in celebration of the fact that I was not named Patrick as my parents had planned if I had been born on March 17^th.

Other than the upcoming busy week things are going fairly well. I have lots of work sitting in front of me, we move facilities and started upgrading some of our equipment and I’m kicking myself for not hitting 24 inches of fresh powder with Garren at Stephen’s Pass yesterday. Oh well, at least it’s sunny out today.

On Friday I ventured down to Key Arena with Lauren. The deal was that if she couldn’t find someone to go to the game with then we’d go together. As luck would have it my boss was there with a friend as well sitting in the first row with four empty seats next to him. I think everyone knows where this is going. Lauren and I were able to make our down to the first row at center court. In the picture above you’ll see Chauncey Billups and Rasheed Wallace each sitting about 8 feet away from us and the guy in the white shirt is Bill Laimbeer.

Josh, this is the point where you ball up in the fetal position as the only response to your overwhelming sense of jealousy and rage at the fact you weren’t there with me drinking a beer and sitting in the awe that is Hamilton hitting a buzzer beater with 0.2 seconds left on the clock.

A while ago I hurt my back. I was lifting at the gym and felt something go in my back. I went to the chiropractor and got back on my feet, but never getting back to 100%. About a month ago I had an MRI done on my back and found out I have a protrusion, or herniated disc of my very last disc in my back (the one that sits between the last vertebrae and your tail bone), which is one step below a ruptured disc.

So what happens if I rupture it? Well, there are a number of things they can do, which are all bad and all involve surgery on my back. For now the doctor told me to avoid lifting heavy objects and high impact exercise.

In other news, I’m heading to Whistler snowboarding this weekend. Hopefully, I won’t be heading home on a stretcher.

31,803 is the number of emails I recently imported from various old archives the other day. Every single email from October 16^th, 2000 until present day, minus the emails from September of 2003 until November of 2004 that were lost in a hard drive crash.

So why keep around all of my email? Well, it’s like a log of my entire life. Want to know what I was doing on November 14^th, 2001?

1. My friend Walter sent me a picture of a girl flashing the fans at Wrigley Field
2. My friend Dave sent me an email through his newly created nationwide dial-up network
3. My friend Josh scored a 33% on the geek test
4. My friend Jeremy decided to move back from Italy
5. Aaron and I had a debate about the merits of qmail and DJB’s software
6. I fixed a bug in the build form for Care2.com along with working on the spotlight rotator
7. I discovered ORDER BY RAND() in MySQL
8. My server, zebulon, had been up 119 days

See, that’s why I keep my email. Now, what should I do with all of this information? I’ve been pondering about putting it up in blog format one day at a time in a somewhat raw format. I’d change the names, etc., but I think it would be interesting. Thoughts?

When it rains, it pours.

1. Doesn’t look like I’ll be going to Cold Play since the tickets are with a friend who’s no longer talking to me.
2. Roommate troubles.
3. I accidentally spilled an entire drink onto Dana’s laptop rendering it completely broken.
4. My flight back from San Diego was diverted to Portland. At 1AM this morning we departed for Seattle’s airport. I arrived home around 5AM.
5. My phone died the day before I was supposed to leave. The replacement phone arrived today and does not work either (not to mention it’s the wrong color). I bought a complete turd of a phone as a replacement for now, which is killing me.

I’m exhausted and completely drained from the last week or so. Thankfully I have a ton of bathroom work and a small contract job staring me in the face. Not. On the bright side the two California Burritos I brought back from San Diego survived the trip and are currently awaiting me eating them.