Instead of the long contemplative post on how this move is the next logical step in a career of working in Identity Management, I’ll keep it short. I start work next Monday, February 1st, and I’m a bit pre-occupied this week with getting moved from Portland, Oregon down to Half Moon Bay, California.

I expect great things from our team in 2010, and so should you.

My wife and I just moved to Portland a week or so ago and, though we really don’t like Comcast for television, their prices for high speed internet simply can’t be beat. We scheduled for them to come out the day after we moved in, and everything was setup without a hitch. There were a couple of times last week that our connection got a little flakey, but nothing too major.

Some time over this past weekend however, our connection dropped and refused to reconnect. I did all the normal troubleshooting stuff — power cycle the modem and the wireless router, switch out the coax cable, etc. Nothing worked. I figured maybe someone’s fireworks damaged the line, so I called 1-800-COMCAST. After running some tests, the technician suggested that it was likely a bad modem, and recommended that I go to the nearest service center and have them swap it out for a new modem.

I got the new modem around mid-morning, plugged it in, and absolutely nothing happened. Well, the “internet” light on the modem just blinked continually. Power cycle, switch out the coax cable, and still nothing. Another call to 1-800-COMCAST. After being incorrectly routed to a call center in California (where we previously had service), I spoke with someone that handled the Portland area, and he scheduled for a technician to come out. The way this works is that some kind of API call is made from the central call center to the local Comcast office with a request for a service appointment, and the local office replies with the next available time. If that time is okay, it’s booked for the customer. If it’s not okay, I guess another request is made… I’m not sure because we didn’t get that far. The next available time, according to this semi-automated system was 10am the next morning. Great, so now I had no internet connection for the rest of the day, and we were no closer to figuring out what is wrong.

Around 1pm, I tweeted about how flakey our Comcast internet connection was being. Now to be honest, I did do this with @comcastcares in the back of my mind. I had pretty low expectations that anything more could be done aside from sending out a technician the following day, but I figured I had nothing to lose. I got a couple of quick replies from friends recommending alternate internet providers, or places to get free wifi until my service was reconnected. But within a few minutes, I also got reply from @ComcastOrSWWa, a twitter account specifically for Comcast news and updates in Oregon and southwest Washington state. I sent them a direct messages with my address and phone number, and within a few minutes someone called asking if I would available for a technician to come by in a couple of hours. It took only 10-15 minutes and three short tweets to schedule a technician to come out the same day. I spent more time than that simply waiting on hold with the call center.

Update: So it looks like I gave Comcast a little too much credit here. Turns out that a certain influential someone I know in Portland saw my tweet and asked someone they knew at Comcast to help. That doesn’t change the fact that Comcast really was responsive and got the problem solved right away, but it doesn’t look like they were proactively monitoring Twitter for people having problems. Now I guess I’ll never know how much of the responsiveness was good customer service, and how much of it was because the right person happened to ask. (A person to whom I am now most appreciative)

When the technician arrived, it only took him a few minutes to diagnose the problem. Apparently, when the previous tenants of this house moved out, they requested that their service be turned off. This initiated a service request to disconnect the line, which was sent out to a local cable company which Comcast contracts with. Apparently, that service request didn’t actually get completed until this past weekend… five days AFTER we had our new service connected. When our new service was activated, the old disconnect order should have been cancelled, but it wasn’t.

Fixing Comcast systems

There are two big places Comcast could have done better here. First and foremost, our service never should have gotten disconnected in the first place. There’s really no reason why the disconnect order shouldn’t have been immediately cancelled as soon as a new customer at the same address sets up new service.

Secondly, I’m amazed at how Twitter resulted in a sooner service time than when I tried using the standard support channels. Well, actually I’m not all that surprised. When the call center schedules a service appointment, it’s all done on computer and uses some kind of scheduler to find open times. However, when I chatted with the local Portland Comcast folks on twitter, I imagine that they were able to look and see what technicians were already in my area that afternoon and might be able to squeeze in one more appointment. Logistically, you’re not always able to do this because you don’t know how long each job is going to take and such. But it would have been great if the call center could have done something similar… either through the same scheduling API they already have, or by picking up the phone and talking with someone from the local Portland office.

Credit where it’s due

The other big take-away here is that the local Comcast folks in Portland (and Theressa in particular) deserve a lot of credit for how they jumped on this. We’re seeing more and more companies setup “official” accounts on services like Twitter to interact with customers, but more often than not it’s the individual, local employees. I highly doubt that the ComcastOrSWWa twitter account was setup because someone at Comcast corporate instructed them to. Instead, it was employees within the company that actually “get it” and realize the power of using tools like this to reach out to customers. While there is always a danger with employees acting as “company spokesperson” in a way that has not been sanctioned by the company, they’re also the ones that are helping to save (or rebuild) the company’s reputation. They’re the ones helping build the company’s whuffie, and they certainly deserve to be recognized.

Moving to Portland

Neither Elisabeth nor I have fully adjusted to the way of life in San Francisco (we currently live in SoMa, right next to downtown). I’m sure we could find something quieter in other parts of the bay area, but for us it’s still not the same. I’ve found that I click much better with the Portland Tech scene personality-wise, and it’s really hard to beat the beautiful scenery of the Pacific northwest, so we’ll be moving to Portland at the end of next month. We have many new and old friends in the Portland area, and are terribly excited to reconnect with a few in particular and get grounded in a good church home. While I fully expect for my work to remain relatively fast paced, we’re just looking to slow down some of the other aspects of our life.

New Work

I am also in the process of looking for new work, starting immediately. As you can read in the official announcement, Vidoop was forced to layoff a considerable portion of the staff, myself included. Times are tough right now, and they’re doing what they need to do in order for the company to weather this current economic storm. Vidoop really was a dream job for me, in every sense of the term, and I will miss working alongside a bunch of really talented developers. Hopefully our move to Portland will mean I’ll have the chance to work with some of them again in the future.

At this point, I’m not entirely sure where I’ll end up after this. Ideally, I’d like to stay in the identity space, continuing to work on technologies like SAML, OpenID, OAuth, XRD, etc. That’s where both my interest and experience lie, and where I’d be most effective… I still have a lot I’d like to offer to that space. I do have a couple of opportunities I’m pursuing right now, but I’m also curious to see what else might be out there. I’ve posted an updated resume in case any one out there has my next dream job waiting for me, either on a full-time or contract basis.

And if you’ve got opportunities for some other awesome Portland-based developers, let me know. I know their expertise includes PHP, Python, Django, jQuery, C/C++/C#, PostreSQL and probably a bunch of other languages and technologies. We’ve setup an internal mailing list so if you’ve got a position or two open, please let me know and I’ll pass them along.

I’ve been considering consolidating these down into a single site, putting my activity stream on the front page and my blog under a sub-directory. Of course I’ll setup proper redirects and such so that no links will be broken. I can also update my OpenID at all of the services I use, so that’s not really a problem. .com as a TLD is certainly more familiar with people, but the .name is technically the “correct” TLD for individuals. So now I’m relying on others to give me input… which domain should I use?

What I Believe

Let’s start by framing the discussion a bit:

• My religious faith is an incredibly large part of my life. As a Christian, I believe that living a homosexual lifestyle is a sin against God. I do not, however, believe that any one sin is fundamentally worse than another. We live in a fallen world in which all people live in sin to some degree or another.

• In general, I do not believe that you can legislate morality. Passing Proposition 8 is not going to cause gay couples to change their lifestyles. If the Church wishes to witness to homosexuals in an attempt to save them from a believed sinful lifestyle, that is perfectly acceptable. The first amendment guarantees any religion the right to exist and express their belief system, and I don’t believe any level-headed person would disagree with the Church’s right to do so, whether they agree with them or not.

• I believe that marriage is an institution created by God to be between one man and one woman.

• Being a religious institution, I believe marriage has no place in government, either in being defined or performed. If governments wish to offer various rights and benefits to legally recognized family units, those rights should be equally extended without any kind of discrimination, whether based on age, race, sexual orientation, etc. I believe government should be involved only in the business of performing such civil unions, seperate from the institution of marriage.

The Ideal Scenario

As mentioned in my last point above, my ideal scenario is one in which governments perform only civil unions, which are equally available to straight and gay couples. Any and all rights and benefits currently afforded married couples are instead granted to these civil unions. Chris Messina and I completely agree on this point.

Where I do not completely agree with Chris is what we should do in our current non-ideal situation. Chris immediately jumps to the conclusion that if marriage must exist, then it should be non-discriminatory. While I agree with the sentiment, I think there’s more to it in this case.

Current Legislation

California domestic partnerships have quite a history. They were first established by the Domestic Partnership Act of 1999 and have continually been granted more rights in every session of congress since. At this point, nearly all of the state benefits available to married couples are also available to those in a domestic partnership. In fact, Equality California and the NCLR said in the introduction to their brochure for Gay couples explaining the law:

… registered domestic partners in California are provided with most of the rights and responsibilities of married couples under California law. However, registered domestic partners still do not receive any of the 1,138 rights and benefits of married couples under federal law. Registered domestic partners also continue to have less security than married couples when they travel or move outside of California.

In the absence of a recognized right to gay marriage, the state of California took the appropriate action of establishing another institution that would afford same-sex couples all the same rights (at the State level) as an opposite-sex couple. Now I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that no matter what happens with Proposition 8, same-sex couples will have no more or less rights than they do now within California.

Beyond California, the Defense of Marriage Act prevents the effects of Proposition 8 from having any effect in other states or the federal level. First, the act establishes that no state can be forced to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state:

No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.

Additionally, it defines marriage at the federal level as being between a man and a woman:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word “marriage” means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word “spouse” refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

While I most certainly do not agree with this act (especially the latter part) and believe that it should be repealed, it’s important to note what this law means for Proposition 8. I would love to hear an analysis from someone more familiar with these laws, but it seems to me that Proposition 8 (whether it passes or not) is likely to have little effect with regards to the actual rights and benefits available of same-sex couples.

Moving Forward

So if my understanding above is correct, then how do we move forward from here? My primary criteria at this point is to identify which vote on Proposition 8 is more likely to be a step in the direction of my ideal scenario.

On one hand, I’m concerned that if we do not pass Proposition 8 and the marriage is made available to same-sex couples, then it will be viewed as having won the war and no more effort will be spent in trying to disconnect marriage and government. If instead Proposition 8 does pass, then at the very least it protects the traditional religious definition of marriage. At most, it would emphasize the need to continue expanding the rights afforded domestic partnerships if there are any shortcomings. Over time, additional legislation could seek the removal of marriage from state law, to be replaced by domestic partnerships (or civil unions) for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples.

On the other hand, I’m generally in favor of small government and don’t like the idea of passing laws that are not really necessary. Even more, amending the constitution pretty firmly plants the institution of marriage within the state government, which is not what I want.

So like I said, I’m not really sure how I’ll be voting next month. I’ve got pretty clear ideas (I think) on the issue, but there’s just no way of knowing what chain reaction this proposition could set in motion in either direction. I welcome any thoughts or comments.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I started a new job at Vidoop a month or so ago which will have Elisabeth and I moving to San Francisco. We were both up there a couple of weeks ago and were able to find an absolutely perfect apartment. It took a little bit to convince the landlord that we really were planning to be in San Francisco for the long term, but it was well worth the extra trouble. The place we found is right in the heart of SOMA, about four buildings down from Chris who I’ll be working with at Vidoop. It’s a beautiful three story loft, hardwood floors throughout, 2 bedroom, 2 and half bath, washer and dryer in the unit, parking space included (which would otherwise cost upwards of $300 a month), 20 foot ceiling in the living room with windows all the way to the top (lots of natural light)… all in all about 1500 square feet. Like I said, it’s really perfect for us. The one major downside is that the kitchen is rather small, especially compared to what Elisabeth has been used to all her life, but we’ll manage.

We’ve also just about finished our post-wedding shopping for furniture and kitchen stuff to outfit our new home. We did our “registry completion” at Linens ‘N Things, where they let you buy everything left on your registry at 20% off. So we bought everything they had (including Elisabeth’s KitchenAid Mixer which will be the centerpiece of our kitchen) and a few additional things we saw. Somehow I think we got 20% off the things that weren’t on our registry as well, but oh well. We also made an “impulse buy” at World Market when we saw that we could get their entire Tao Collection of furniture for 60% off. We bought every piece they had with the exception of one table that we didn’t really know where to put, so we’re now good on furniture for the entire living room and office. We still need a bedroom suite, but that’s just gonna have to wait for the time being. We will be setting up the second bedroom as a guest room, so once we get settled I fully expect people to come over and visit. :-)

Pretty much everything is packed up and ready to move here. The moving company comes to load everything up on Monday, July 7th and plans to deliver it to the new place sometime between the 9th and the 14th. It depends on what other loads they can fit onto the same truck, but we should have a more definite delivery date in a few days. In the meantime I’m working wherever I can find high speed internet access, and we’re saying our goodbyes to local family and friends. Two weeks from now we’ll be in San Francisco setting up the new place. (Anyone in SOMA want to come and help assemble a LOT of furniture?)

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading all of our professional wedding photos to our Wedding Set on Flickr. Additionally, they can be seen as a slideshow or along with all the photos taken by our wedding guests in our Flickr Group. These are full resolution photos, primarily so that family and friends and can order very reasonably priced prints. Thanks go to Nic Dragomire of Tamarack Studios for such a wonderful job on our photos.

A note to non-Flickr users: You will need to have a Flickr account to order prints of any of the photos. I apologize for that, but the good news is that it’s the same as any existing Yahoo! account, which most people tend to already have anyway.

I’ve been working in the Identity Management space for a few years now. I started getting involved with the Shibboleth project while at the University of Memphis. After a year and a half, I moved to California and took a job at USC working in their middleware group. I’ve spent the last two years there helping to develop and manage various parts of the Identity Management cloud including the LDAP directories, meta-directory processes, and their Shibboleth environment. In October 2006 I formally joined the core Shibboleth development team, focusing on the Shibboleth 2.0 Identity Provider.

Meanwhile, I have also been toying with OpenID for a couple of years. In early 2007 or so, I sort of took over development of Alan Castonguay’s OpenID plugin for WordPress. I started with a couple of new features, then worked to add support for the latest OpenID protocol, lots of code refactoring, etc. I got to know characters like Chris Messina, Scott Kveton, and a host of others. I continued making updates to the WordPress plugin as I had time, but it never felt like enough. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly enjoyed the work I was doing at USC and with Shibboleth… I just would have liked to have had more time for everything else as well. Every now and then Chris or Scott would prod me about going to work at Google or somewhere to spend more time on OpenID and related technologies, but I wasn’t ready to leave my work at USC.

Late last year, Chris Messina and Steve Ivy announced the DiSo Project, initially based on my updated wp-openid plugin. Within the first week after it was announced, I sat down with Chris and Steve and we decided it would be best to officially move the wp-openid plugin under the DiSo umbrella to allow for tighter integration with the other planned work. Then a lot happened this last February in the social networking space — Google announced the Social Graph API and SGFoo really got people talking more about enriching the OpenID endpoint (among other things). Things were beginning to move pretty fast, and I felt like if I didn’t jump in now then I’d end up watching all the great new developments from the sidelines. I spent the next few months interviewing with a number of companies active in this space and made a couple of trips to San Francisco to talk with them in person.

In the end, a dinner conversation with Luke Sontag had me sold. I was quite familiar with Vidoop and their OpenID provider, knew they had a great development team, but had always been a little skeptical of the company. After Luke gave me a better picture of their overall vision and where technologies like DiSo fit into that picture, I knew that these guys really “get it”. They understand the importance of what DiSo is trying to do, and more importantly they are willing to do their part in making it a reality. I love Vidoop’s OpenID implementation and have been using it since before I took this job, but that’s not why I did. I took the job because the team at Vidoop know their shit, they know the kinds of problems we’re up against, and they are ready to take a shot at developing some real solutions. Well that and I really can’t wait to get started working with Chris a lot more. :)

Every marriage counseling book in the world would probably recommend otherwise, but I’m also taking a new job when we get back from the honeymoon. I resigned my position at USC early last week, and my last day will be next Friday April 25th, 2008. It is a bit bittersweet, as I really wish I would have had the time to wrap up more of the unfinished projects I’m leaving behind, but I trust that they are in good enough hands and will be well cared for. If things go as planned, I will continue on as part of the core Shibboleth development team, which I feel is very important. There are a few major additions to Shibboleth we’ve talked about adding, but simply haven’t had the time. The primary attraction to the new job is quite simply the work I’ll be doing and who I’ll be doing it with — I’ll finally be able to really dig in to some of the projects that haven’t received the level of attention I would have liked to give. Aside from that, I don’t think I’m ready to say too much else about the new job, only that it is in San Francisco and that we will be moving up there as soon as the wedding is over and we find a place.