We're back from our Irish and British voyage! Actually, we've been back for about 4 weeks now and have been trying to slow down in some things and speed up in other areas.

So, let's dispense with the vacation talk. Yes, it was great. You can see photos from Ireland here and our photos from the UK here. I think the photos speak for themselves when we way that we had a really wonderful time.

Now, that being said, we're glad as heck to be home. I think we're both not only vacationed out, but we're also very very Europe'd out. We've just had too much Europe in the past twelve month-we've spend about 6 weeks there! This is nothing against Europe. I mean, I've seen some really cool places and may even consider moving to London or Rome someday if I had cause. I think this feeling is just the fact that we've been spending quite a bit of time worrying about being in other places rather than worrying about living life at home. It's fun and all, but I think it's time to come back to reality.

So what's reality? Well, we'll start with the two usual buzzkills that take down many post vacation highs Time and Money. Yep...these two guys are back to wreak havoc in our lives.

As for money, we're not doing too badly. I mean with Zing being purchased by Dell, the stock payouts have begun for me and this has given us a little breathing room (not much mind you...just a tiny bit). We were also able to take advantage of some tax rules for a p-h-phat refund on the taxes. Not to mention our nice little $1200 bonus from the W himself that will promptly go into our savings account. I think the issue is that we have some big plans on the horizon that involves buying some form of real estate to build/rent out/live in. So our little nest egg is looking more like a quail's egg rather than a nice healthy chicken sized egg. I'd love for an ostrich egg, of course, but you can't wait around till everything is perfect right?

Time is the other little bugger that is in rather short supply. With Bubbanotes.com up and running, there's a bit to do. I must admit that Hongyun is a natural at managing teams of volunteers in China who do everything from recruiting new users across the vast swatch of the Chinese interwebs to answering questions on our forum. It's amazing what sorts of resources one can call in from overseas at no cost! Even still, it takes time to add features and manage the team. So much so, in fact, that we've stopped posting on any of our blogs! Crazy, I know! Well, organizing our trip photos and videos have taken a while too (you'll notice that the UK ones are not labeled or properly ordered by any means--a project for the spare moments this week).

Not only that, I've been given some pretty cool work tasks that involve infrastructure work for automation so our test teams can get more done faster. It plays directly to my strengths of database and query design, statistics gathering, and hacking together websites that put that data to good use. I hope to get the "ooohh pretty colors" comment very soon. Seems to work very well for the upper echelons for any company.

The cherry on top is that I have a little voice in my ear (my wife) telling me that I should probably keep my options open as far as work goes. While I totally agree, I don't think I want to actively "look" for a job and start submitting my resume around as I have no intention of leaving for quite some time. I mean, if the right gig came along, I'd probably give it a go, but I'm just not sure I'm at that point where I'm really ready to go yet. However, I did read somewhere that when searching for a job, one really should divide up the prospects into three different categories:

1. Jobs that are about the same level or one level up from where you are now.
2. Jobs that are in the same field but quite possibly out of your league.
3. Jobs that are just out of left field. For me, things that sound interesting in this category would be working for a major blog house reviewing usb powered rocket launchers (pew pew), working at a brewery, finally going back to school for some reason or another, going back to consulting (ugh but pays some decent scratch), among other things.

Anyway, this process sounds quite involved and is a departure from how I landed my last two jobs at Microsoft and Zing. They basically amounted to a friend asking me, "hey dude, we got some openings, you wanna come try it out?" And then I would say, "ummm, ok, couldn't hurt." Then I go through the interviewing process and end up getting offers and then I deliberate for a few days and finally say, "ok."

Come to think of it, both of these job moves started with me getting to the point where I was totally not liking my job for one reason or another. For my MS job, I left my previous company because they threw me to the virtual wolves where I was some old guys query monkey day and night. I mean I learned to cut some serious sql from that crazy dude, but he would send me, a consultant who billed them $160 and hour on wild goose chases to find inconsistencies that totaled under $12 per year!! I mean, if it took me a day to figure it out, guess what? It'd take them a century to recover their cost of fixing that $12 inconsistency. I know, I know...it could have ballooned way over $12 very quickly but let's just say that we had much bigger fish to fry (the database tracked billions of dollars worth of cash flow among disparate benefits databases within a large defense contractor). Anyway, I got tired of wild goose chases after a while and decided to bail. I guess the folks who managed me just figured I'd sit there and collect cash from the old coot until the cows came home.

At MS, I loved the people I worked with. The team was excellent, a great bunch of people. By the time I left, I was even working with a guy I consider to be a pretty good friend. We still have lunch every now and then. But the problem was the business team had no idea what to do with us. Eventually, we lost our best devs to Google and other companies since they had us spinning our wheels for quite some time. I mean it's no surprise I guess. Just look at Vista and you'll see that if they can severely bungle their numero uno premium cash cow, you'll realize how things go south very quickly in other divisions that are not so central to the company's survival. Anyway, after I saw the next strategy for our team (or lack thereof), I knew it was time to head out.

So I think I'll not do that this time and really think about what I want to do and go ahead and do it. Sounds like a "duh Tommy" moment, but I think it's more of a dawning than you think after you've worked for quite a while. I'll start with looking at brewmaster gigs, I suppose. The "research" will be quite interesting I'm sure. :)