Blogging Roller

I haven't had as much fun watching the hits roll since when Weblogger.com threatened to sue me. Yesterday was much much more fun, of course. Thanks to all who commented, linked, welcomed and trackbacked me. One thing is for sure, you made my mom and dad feel a whole lot better about my leaving the seemingly safe sanctuary of SAS.

I'm venturing into new territory as a blogger. I have always kept my employer a secret. I never wanted anybody to google for HAHT or SAS and end up on my blog. I was a little worried about getting fired for blogging. It still happens even to those who try to be careful. Now, everybody knows who I work for and that changes things for me. On the positive side, blogging about my work with Roller, blogging technologies, Sun, and Java will give me lots of interesting material to work with - and then there's that evangelism thing. On the negative side, there are probably some topics that I had better avoid. Even with a company with a clueful policy on public discourse, you can still screw up and do damage to your career.

I'm confident that I'll do just fine in this new territory. I tend to be conservative in my output, perhaps too conservative. I'm also biased in favor of Sun and always have been. I'm a shareholder too. There's my full disclosure for you. I've been working with Sun hardware and software since the Sun3 timeframe. In fact, I proposed to the woman who became my wife as a direct result of a SPARCstation sale. I went down to Jamaica in '91 to install a SPARCstation-based system and to do a training workshop on the open source GRASS GIS software, got a great job offer at the Univ. of the West Indies, came home and asked Andi to marry me. We had a great honeymoon in Jamaica that lasted about a year and a half. I hope my honeymoon at Sun will last a lot longer than that.