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.

A couple of people have called me in the last couple of days checking to see if Elisabeth and I were okay. She drove up to Los Angeles last night (just in time too) and we’re doing fine. Her parents are much closer in Aguanga, CA… about 12 miles northeast of the Poomacha fire. I believe that fire is still 0% contained, but it looks like the wind is blowing off-shore, away from her parents.

Rather than just reply with a big fat arrow pointing to the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every list message, I decided to try a more personal touch. First I googled Joe’s name which he provided in the email along with the company name shown in the From header just to make sure this was a legitimate person (those spammers and phishers are getting pretty crafty these days). I found that his company indeed existed in Australia and had a couple of domains that pointed to his website. Now I could have tried the contact number on the website itself, but I decided to dig a little deeper. Checking the whois entries on two of the domains, I found one registered to Joe with the same PO Box and phone number as the website, but the other had a Tasmanian residential address (thanks Google Maps), a different phone number, and was registered in a female’s name. A little more googling and I found someone by that name listed as a 2006 graduate of a Tasmanian high school not 9 km from the listed residence. Figuring this must be the right one, I decided to try the number.

I was down to $0.04 from my Skype trial, so I added some time to my account and dialed the number. The gentleman who answered had an obvious Australian accent, as did the voices on the television I could hear in the background. I asked for Joe but was told he wasn’t at this number. I asked if he knew who Joe was, and he confirmed that he was Joe’s father-in-law. I explained that I was calling from Los Angeles and asked if he had a number where I could reach Joe. He provided me the number, but before hanging up inquired as to how I had gotten his name. When I explained to him that a website domain was registered to this number, I learned that the female name listed was his granddaughter (presumably Joe’s daughter). Having to learn a little about Australian phone numbers (replace the leading zero with +61 when calling internationally), I discovered that this new number was most likely a cell phone. I dialed the number, waited some time for the call to connect, and then finally, I had reached Joe.

Not surprisingly, he sounded a little confused at first. The colorful epithets had been replaced by embarrassment and repeated apologies. I told him it was quite alright and that I understood he wasn’t really angry with me, but rather was frustrated with the fact that his continual requests to be unsubscribed proved fruitless. I then directed his attention back to my email and the the auto-attached footer which contained the link for unsubscribing. A couple more apologies and “it’s okay, I understand“‘s and we were bidding each other “Cheerio!” (that’s England isn’t it, not Australia… nevermind, then).

So first, it’s kinda cool that I was able to find this guy and call him within just a few minutes to help solve his problem. All the tools are right there to do the research, and technology like Skype makes international calling affordable (if not free). Depending on how you want to look at it though, you could also say it’s rather scary that I was able to find this guy and call him within just a few minutes. Not only that, I discovered his (presumed) daughter’s name, approximate age, and high school, as well as his father-in-law’s phone number and home address (along with a nice satellite photo courtesy of Google Earth). Were I not the nice guy that I am, I might have taken offense to his reply and sought to do unkindly things to him and his family. But then again, I put myself right out there on the web, so I guess the same could be done to me. (Although for me, it kinda comes with the territory.)

You know, I learned something today. I learned that people on the Internet… they’re just people, like you and me. They may say hurtful things in an email, but it may just be that they’re frustrated with technology. I’ve learned that sometimes they just need a helping hand to get off that email list, and that they really didn’t mean for those hurtful words to be directed at you personally. But I’ve also learned that if they did, it’s really easy to find their family and cause them some real grief! (Just kidding, Joe) :)

So about four weeks after we already secured the venue for our wedding, we are now officially engaged. I proposed in the same photobooth where we had our pictures taken on our first official date 18 months ago.

Don’t you just love those days when your boss comes by your desk and says, “Go to my office and get yourself a 24” monitor.” The end of the fiscal year is always a fun time of year. :)

If you are in fact interested in tracking updates to this site, please use my main feed URL directly. I think most of the people that subscribe through LJ are personal friends and so aren’t too interested in the tech stuff, so you could also just subscribe to my personal posts if you prefer. Again, sorry for all that, but LJ really sucks in this regard.