Having lived in Louisiana my whole life, I never got a chance to see real snow until this summer at the Firefox Summit in Canada. That’s why it was so unexpected for my routine 6-7 hour trip from Baton Rouge to San Jose to turn into a 20 hour ordeal because of snow delays in Houston.
I can’t bear to type out all of the details, but I was supposed to arrive in San Jose at 8:12pm on Wednesday and instead arrived in San Francisco at 6:30am on Thursday, after which I immediately had to attend Add-on-Con without sleeping.
A breakdown of the trip:
- Hours waiting in airport: 6.5
- Hours waiting in airplane on ground: 6.5
- Hours actually flying: 4.75
- Hours of sleep on the plane: 2
And to top it off, the same snow that made my trip miserable on Wednesday brought fun and joy to everyone back home in Baton Rouge.
I’ll be in Mountain View next week to attend Add-on-Con, a conference all about add-ons with Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and of course add-on developers. It will be a great chance to talk with developers firsthand and take in some interesting sessions.
From Mozilla, Mark Finkle will be giving a presentation on leveraging third party APIs to create mashups with add-ons. Having Mark in attendance is great for both myself and add-on developers: I get to send all technical questions to Mark, and add-on developers don’t get incorrect technical answers from me! It’s a win-win.
Mike Shaver will be taking part in a panel on the future of the web browser, along with representatives from Microsoft and Google to wrap up the sessions. As former Director of Ecosystem Development (loosely translated: “add-ons”), Mike has a long history of working with add-on developers and improving extension support in Firefox. Plus, he’s kinda funny.
On the business track, Brian King will be exploring the state of the Mozilla Add-ons universe. You can read more details in Rey Bango’s post on the Add-ons blog.
Additionally, Mozilla will be hosting an add-ons open house the night before, so if you’re interested, you can find the details on the wiki. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the open house as my flight gets in later.
I’m also very happy to announce that I’ve accepted a full-time position with Mozilla after graduation in a few weeks, and will be moving to the San Francisco Bay Area very soon. It’s been a great 2-3 years being immersed in add-ons at Mozilla and I’m very excited for what’s coming in 2009.
As you may (not) know, I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, home to swamps, pet alligators, Mardi Gras, cannibalization, Britney Spears, oil companies, and the rest of the world’s evil. And last week, the temporary home of a horrible guest, Hurricane Gustav. The media pretty much stopped reporting on it as soon as it hit (admittedly, there are more important things, like Sarah Palin), but half of Louisiana had no power for days. Baton Rouge was devastated and other areas of the state won’t get power for 4-6 weeks.
If you’ve ever been to Louisiana during the summer (or anytime, really), you know that it is extremely hot and humid and that when the power and air conditioning goes out, older people and others have a lot of trouble breathing. Fortunately I’m not one of them, and I got my power back 2 days ago, 8 days after the storm. Most traffic lights in town are still out and traffic is a nightmare, although the parish curfew ended this morning.
After a few days of being without power and getting very behind in work projects, I headed to Mountain View for a few days to be productive. Things are slowly getting back to normal. Classes started again on Monday because we can’t miss anymore — we’re already having to go on a few Saturdays to make up last week.
I gave a presentation on Web Analytics this morning. When I told the class that I’d be talking about Web Analytics, before I even mentioned Mozilla, someone immediately raised their hand and asked if I know the “analytics pioneer” Ken Kovash. I lied and said no, because frankly I’m tired of everyone asking me to get his autograph, strands of hair, chewing gum, etc. for them. You’ll have to wait in line like everyone else.
Ever since I started working with AMO in 2006, in addition to primarily working on the development of the site and Developer Tools, I’ve been interested and involved in the direction and administration of AMO and Firefox Add-ons in general. As of today, I’ve switched roles to follow my interests, and will be working with Basil on Add-ons Product Management instead of being a part of Mozilla Web Development. I’ll be working on a number of new projects and continuing to help AMO from a different perspective. I’ll also be helping out with community management until the AMO Community Manager position is filled.
I’ll be finishing up development of the AMO 3.5 Developer Tools Revamp milestone before I make myself forget CakePHP, but I’ve already started working on a couple of exciting new projects that I hope to share with everyone soon.
I’m looking forward to working with everyone in the coming months in my new role.
I was killing time in a hallway until my next class started when I decided to visit the College of Business office to see an advisor about something. I ended up leaving checked out for graduation with 33 hours left. My graduation date is set for December 2008.
The courses I have left to take are:
- FIN 3715 – Business Finance
- MKT 3401 – Principles of Marketing
- MGT 3830 – Strategically Managing Organizations
- ISDS 3200 – Advanced Business Programming
- ISDS 4120 – Business Data Communications
- ISDS 4125 – Analysis and Design of Management Information Systems
- 3 hours Gen. Ed Humanities
- 6 hours ISDS electives
- 6 hours business electives
