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So, for anybody who doesn’t know by now, I do want to mention that my time with Cisco is coming to a close. Our team got cut a month ago as part of a restructure. We thought that, being a relatively new team with a product that we thought was strategically important to our business unit, we would make through any cuts the company might make in the near term. Sadly, we were proven completely wrong. We were actually among the first to go. The product, however, will live on in some form and taken on by our team in Bangalore. They have a considerable challenge on their hands, especially since there are currently no plans to add staffing to that team. I hope nothing but the best for them. Needless to say, I’m sorely disappointed with the way it all ended. The timing was terrible, and I feel the company is handling the transition of the product poorly.

The team was a truly special team. We never lost our start-up spirit even after we were acquired and grew in size. We did things very differently from the rest of Cisco, which drew both good and bad attention to us. We had some ridiculously creative and intelligent people on the team. We were a team of about 25 people doing the work of about 35. Managers were also developers. Developers were also customer support. Customer support was also IT. We worked on a platform-independent process messaging system and then we open-sourced it, which was unheard of in Cisco. We proved we could do things with our platform with one guy in a couple weeks what took other teams in the company months to just plan. We were mavericks and trailblazers, and we had fun while doing things our way. On top of all of that, we were close like friends, and not just coworkers. The sudden dissolution of the group was even harder to take because of that.

Between my time with the startup and Cisco, I had put in nearly five years into the team. The things I have learned in those five years as both an engineer and as a person have been innumerable. I’ll continue to have many fond memories of those times in spite of the way it all ended.

I had an extended employment with Cisco for a month (which ended earlier this week) to help with the transition. I’m currently in a period of a couple months where my primary goal is to find another job, although Cisco will keep me on the payroll. This is all part of a rather generous severance package, which is easily the one thing in this whole ordeal they are handling well. In all honesty, though, Cisco was one of the best companies of its ilk to work for, and it seems that it also one of the best companies from which to get laid off. Unfortunately, it still could not escape the typical trappings and politics of a being a large technology company and stuff like this still happens.

I also have a fair amount of free time on my hands now…which, granted, already seems to be taken up by other things. However, I do plan to take some time very soon to get around Texas to spend time with the usual suspects and some people I haven’t really made time to see. Aside from the larger cities, I’ll probably try to hit up some other places I normally don’t stop in like Ft. Worth and College Station. Some e-mails will be sent out soon.

One of the things that surprised me when I was at SxSW Interactive last year was how all these people, who’s generally personally and professionally invested in “new media,” practically lived and breathe Twitter. While most of my friends, generally considered to be normal everyday people, never heard of it (at the time, it seems yet even more ubiquitous now). I can kind of understand why. A regular person probably looks at something like Twitter and says, “What’s the point?” It’s true that it doesn’t seem like much at first, but it was like my first experience with MySpace when it just got off the ground. I signed up, but I knew no one on it at that time, and thought “What’s the point?” Once you get a small network of friends on it, it’s appeal becomes much more apparent.

ANYWAYS, I said all that to say this: here is a neat little video explaining Twitter in Plain English. I think it’s part of a series of videos that explain web phenomenons to regular people (which, clearly us internet people are NOT).

Tags: twitter

The changing of the Presidents can be jarring, especially after you’ve had the same one for two terms. It’s a bit like what happens immediately after the New Year when you keep writing “2008″ on your checks on accident for a while even though it’s 2009, except like ten times worst. You have to remind yourself to follow the word President with “Obama” instead of “Bush”. Also, you have to remember that the phrase “The President” refers to that young Democrat that everyone seems to like, as opposed to that neoconservative Texan that everyone seems to…not.

That is my thought on the changes we face as a nation as of January 20, 2008.

Tags: politics

Someone who flies more often than me (which is probably everybody) please explain this to me.

If I fly from Austin to X with a nearly three hour layover in Dallas, it could cost me $y. However, if I want to simply drive to Dallas and take the plane from there to X, they want to charge me $y + 100. How does that make any business sense for them to charge me more for using their service less?

Also, if I take the flight with the one stop, is there something against the rules about just going to Dallas and boarding the second flight without taking the first one?

Tags: planes

This is huge news.

Apple will soon allow record companies more flexible pricing of songs on their iTunes music store. Songs may be priced at 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. In exchange for that, however, iTunes will make every available song completely DRM-free.

This essentially heralds the death of digital music purchases with DRM. While no doubt Amazon has been a big player in that (and in turn, they have received a lot of my business), this definitively puts the nail in the coffin. Since iTunes is the leader in digital music sales, all other stores will have no choice but to follow suit to remain even remotely competitive. This is great news for music lovers/tech geeks everywhere.

There are other possible ramifications for this move. I imagine more music players will start supporting AAC files, the format that iTunes uses, now that the songs will no longer require specially configured players (iPods) to play them. Also, with DRM gone, Apple has almost no good reason to keep their firmware locked down like they have with the past couple generations of iPods, so maybe future models will be more RockBox-friendly.

Tags: digitalmusic, itunes