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.

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.

• setup new Shibboleth IdP at USC with updated version of Shibboleth and more important new policy. It’s been a rocky road, and will continue to be, since we’re running two different IdPs in parallel right now, but we’re slowly working on migrating everyone over to the new environment.
• developed a number of small patches and extensions for Shibboleth to customize it how we wanted it to work, two of which were committed upstream (ARP Constraints and Deny Anonymous) and included in the Shibboleth IdP release as of version 1.3.1.
• in October, was asked to join the core Shibboleth development team. That took a couple of months to work out the details with my management, but now a portion of my time at USC is spent helping to develop Shibboleth 2.0. My primary focus is the attribute resolver and the attribute release policy engine, which will be included in the IdP and the Java implementation of the SP.
• we’ve made significant updates to the meta-directory processes at USC that populate our LDAP directory. I’m currently working on fully taking over the development of those processes so the previous developer can take more of an architectural role, which is what he’s really good at.
• attended seven conferences across the US and Canada, giving a couple of sessions myself. I’m enjoying the conferences and seeing the cities, just not the actual act of traveling.
• not directly work related, but I’m finally getting a little more serious about working on OpenID stuff. It’s mainly just small implementations at this point, but there’s been talk for a while about trying to achieve some interoperability between OpenID and SAML. We’re already trying to make Shibboleth work with Cardspace, so who really knows.

So this next year should see moving to our new offices (probably in the next few weeks), the deployment of a new guest system at USC, the release of Shibboleth 2.0, working on Shibboleth 2.1, and who knows what else. So for those of you back home that have wondered if I’m actually doing anything out here on the west coast, the answer is yes (though not as much as I’d like).

I still don’t have a lot of free time to get online (no internet at home yet), but I wanted to at least let everyone know I’m doing well here in Los Angeles. The drive over was pretty uneventful, as was my first week of work — mostly paperwork and apartment hunting. I wound up finding a really great place in the Silver Lake area. I’m living in a guy’s pool house in a really nice gated community with a phenomenal view of the city. It’s a little small, but given the view, how close it is to USC, how safe the neighborhood is, and the price I’m getting it for, I’m certainly not complaining. Anyway, pictures of everything are posted over at flickr.

Life…

I’ve just recently accepted a position as a software developer at the University of Southern California. As much as I love working at the University of Memphis, there have been a number of contributing factors leading me toward something new. I first got in touch with USC last October when they were looking for a Shibboleth Administrator; of course, I’ve been working on Shibboleth for the last year and know the project very well. Things didn’t quite work out, but I didn’t worry about it too much as I had several other opportunites come up right at that time.

Over New Years, I spent two weeks in LA to go to a concert and see some friends, and while I was there I setup a lunch with the guys from USC. I was actually interested in just meeting the guys, but also figured I could poke a little more about any positions they had available. It was a good thing we did meet, as they had a new development position they wanted to create that I’d be a great fit for. It’s now about three weeks later, and I’m packing my bags for California.

…and Love…

About five years ago, I started working with Skillet to help build and organize a community website for their fans. A year or so into the project, I met Elisabeth who was administering another aspect of their fanbase, and we worked together in various capacities for the next couple of years. She was living in southern California, so I finally got to meet her in the Summer of 2002 when I took a trip with some friends out there to see Skillet and meet some of the CA panheads. There was always a mutual attraction between the two of us, but given the distance and unfortunate timing nothing really happened. Life went on, and we lost touch for about a year or so until my initial contact with USC in October. I got back in touch with her to let her know what was going on, and the timing was finally right — everything just clicked. Even though the job didn’t work out and it didn’t look like I would be moving to LA, the machine had already started and neither of us had any intention of slowing it down. When I was in LA for New Years, I stayed with her and her family and we hit it off really well.

…and Why

There’s one other detail that helps bring things into perspective a little bit. After the original position at USC didn’t look like it was going to work, my boss put me in touch with a colleague of his at a very prestigious university in Washington, DC. I don’t know how else to put it, but this was quite simply the greatest job opportunity I’ve ever had. I would have been continuing with the project I’ve been working on the last year, but using it in really unique ways in medical and government applications. I’d be contributing to cancer research projects, helping secure inter-departmental communication within the national government — it’s what I like to refer to as “saving the world” type of stuff. On top of that I love DC, love politics, and would only be a couple of hours away from my brother and his family in North Carolina.

This isn’t to say that I’m at all disappointed in the job at USC, quite the contrary in fact. I say all this now so that when I tell you that I’m moving to California for a girl, you can understand that this is not a whimsical, impulsive move. We’re certainly not picking out rings in the immediate future (not a big fan of really long engagements), but suffice it to say I wouldn’t be turning down the job in DC and moving across the country if this wasn’t serious. We’re being very deliberate to keep our friends, families, and churches involved every step of the way to make sure we do this right. Right now she’s in school at SDSU working on a bachelor’s degree in business. Hopefully she’ll be graduating Spring 2007, and after that… well, all in good time.

Current plans are for Elisabeth to fly to Memphis on February 9th, and then we’ll drive back to California that weekend. USC is putting me up in temporary housing for the time being until I can find a place to live in LA, which is a really nice relief. Most of my contact info won’t be changing anytime soon, but just know that my contact page will always have the latest. Several friends have suggested having a little send-off party (I’m thinking on the evening of the 9th, so everyone can meet Elisabeth), so I’ll have more details here for those Memphis folks that wish to attend.

(please leave any comments here as opposed to email if appropriate… makes it easier to keep everything together)

All of my life, I’ve been in hiding
Wishing there was someone just like.
Now that you’re here, now that I’ve found you,
I know that you’re the one to pull me through.

Deliver me.

No related posts.