ryan kennedy’s blog

2006 had a pretty rough ending for me. I moved from Folsom back to the Bay Area only to have my cats get into a huge fight (a result of move stress and misdirected aggression). It took months to get them back together so we could return to a semi-normal life. I took over as Yahoo! Mail Beta evangelist. That sounds like a good thing, but it wasn’t. It was fun, don’t get me wrong. But the added responsibility and personal investment simply weren’t worth it. I managed to come down with shingles, merely the first in a long string of ailments to come over the next several months.

So when 2006 was coming to an end 12 months ago, I was happy. I was ecstatic. A clean slate. So, did everything go as planned? Yes…and no. Mostly no.

January 2007

January picked up where December left off, with me in questionable health. I caught a cold and discovered (the hard way) that I have sinusitis. As it turns out, sinusitis can cause you to faint. I woke up one morning, walked into the kitchen, began preparing breakfast, became light-headed and passed out right there in the kitchen. Fortunately, Lisa was there and quickly pulled over a chair before I went down. I sat in the chair and went lights out. Good fun…wait, no…it wasn’t.

March 2007

I enjoy traveling for work. Yahoo! picks up the tab and I get to go different places. In March, Yahoo! sent me to San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. I wasn’t there to sit in sessions, however. I was there for the official launch of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. The culmination of my 2+ years at Yahoo!, releasing the web service to the public was a great personal and professional moment. Years of hard work and patience finally paying off.

April 2007

Every high must be countered by a low. It’s a law of physics…or something. A short month after releasing the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, I was sitting in a meeting. The agenda was a feature. A feature that exists in Yahoo! Mail Classic but doesn’t exist in the new Yahoo! Mail. I was there with several other people, trying to convince the powers that be that the feature belongs in the new Mail. I won’t get into what the feature is (it’s unimportant), but suffice it to say that many find the feature incredibly useful. It was shocking that we were spending any time at all in a meeting trying to convince someone that the feature belonged in the product.

As I said, however, the feature itself wasn’t important. We went into the meeting, armed with every reason in the world for why the feature belonged in the product. The opposition went into the meeting, armed with…nothing. In the end, we were struck down by the opposition. Not because they thought the idea was dumb or because they simply didn’t want the feature in the product. The one-line reason for not implementing the feature was that our competition (specifically citing a well-known competitor just up the road) didn’t provide it, so we didn’t have to either.

Frustration. Anger. Outrage. That sums up the range of emotions I went through.

June 2007

June was a pretty great month, the peak of 2007, I’d say. It started with a trip to London. I’d been dying to visit London. Yahoo! was already picking up the tab to fly me out there for work, so I took a week off and visited the sites. I spent the week crisscrossing London doing as much as I could. It was one of the best trips ever. London’s an amazing place and I can’t wait to go back and see the rest of the UK.

As I said, Yahoo! paid to send me to London. June marked the second Yahoo! Open Hack Day. It was a great event…an epic event. One of those times you’ll remember for the rest of your life. The perfect combination of people and places.

When I returned, it was time to move again. Back in April, Lisa and I found a new house in Santa Clara. The week after returning from London it was time to move into the new house. This move went much smoother than the move from Folsom down to the Bay Area. We knew what to do in order to keep the cats (relatively) calm.

August 2007

I officially transferred off of Yahoo! Mail in August. It was fueled partly by the desire to work on a new project, but mostly it was a desire to distance myself from Mail after what happened in April.

It may seem petty to let something like that affect me so badly, but oh well. It pissed me off. I didn’t come to Yahoo! to keep pace with the competition. I went to Yahoo! to bury them.

September 2007

September started out slow…too slow. Slow enough that I had time to think about it (big mistake) and write about it (bigger mistake).

In the end, I pulled myself together, reminded myself why I was at Yahoo! and put out my call to arms for fellow Yahoo!’s.

October 2007

October started with a trip to Chicago to speak at Adobe MAX. It was an interesting experience. I’m not sure how much people got out of my talk. My material seemed a little out of place given the topics in some of the other talks I attended.

Chicago itself was nothing to write home about. I was in the south side, which was a pretty “interesting” part of town to walk around in. Maybe my view is skewed because I was accosted on the streets by a drunk man in search of money to help pay his wife’s hospital bills. Money he later used to pay a woman for sexual favors, right after he offered to have her perform said acts for me.

October ended with a bang…or a shake. On October 30th there was a sizable earthquake centered within 10 miles of our house. The quake shook our house pretty good, knocked a few things down, but did no structural damage. However, it did scare the hell out of the cats. Ricky took it the worst, reverting to his misdirected aggression. He went after Lisa, more aggressively than when we moved from Folsom. He sunk his teeth into her leg and pinned her against the wall, refusing to let her leave. We finally managed to get him into a room all by himself and left him there to calm down.

November 2007

Unfortunately, Ricky didn’t calm down. Lisa couldn’t go into the room without Ricky growling, hissing and taking more swipes at her. We went through a lot of scenarios, trying to figure out what to do. A vet gave us some medication that we could give to Ricky, stuff that would calm him down. Even if we could get him to take it (we couldn’t), we couldn’t leave him on the medication forever. His aggression was getting worse with each episode he had. We were starting to get concerned that he might really hurt our other cat (Lucy), one of us or one of our guests.

It was the most difficult decision either of us has either made, but we decided to put him down. It’s been difficult since then. Ricky and Lucy were kittens when we picked them out in 2000. They’re like children to us. Having to give up Ricky so soon wasn’t something we ever saw coming. Having to put him down when he was in perfect physical health has been hard on the conscious, to say the least.

Around the same time, I hit my 3 year anniversary with Yahoo!. Having that coincide so closely with putting Ricky down is difficult. Yahoo! is the reason I moved back to the Bay Area in the first place, so I feel like my career is partly to blame for what happened to Ricky.

Near the end of the month I was moved to another project, marking the shortest stint I’ve had on any project (3 months). The new project came with a new title: local architect. I’m still figuring out what exactly that means and whether or not I like it. The verdict is still out on that one.

Looking forward to 2008

I find myself ending 2007 the same way I ended 2006, looking forward to the next year. I don’t mean to imply that 2007 was all bad. There were some great moments to be sure. Unfortunately, they’re largely overshadowed by some really bad moments.

And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last

-Counting Crows - A Long December

See you in 12 months…hopefully with better news to report.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.