So I’m on the phone in my home office and the window starts to rattle. Normally this means one of the neighbors is running to the laundry room to put in the fabric softener. But then the rooms starts to rattle. And the walls shake. The guy I’m talking to asks what’s going on. Another earthquake. The second 5.2 quake in less than a week for Los Angeles.
Well I think this is a sign that it’s time for me to move. Not that earthquakes scare me so much. I grew up in Boston during the years when the region was hit by monster blizzards and vicious hurricanes at a pretty regular clip.
But when I moved back from San Francisco to Boston in ’89, it was the week of the Loma Prieta quake. I mean, I was unpacking and watching the World Series back in Massachussetts when the thing hit. When I moved to Texas in ’97, there was…
So I moved to Los Angeles a year and a half ago for business. Bad enough that that didn’t go well. Went horrible, in fact.
But the time has come for me to get the hell out of this city. The only positive things I can say about El Lay right now are that it’s less expensive than Silicon Valley, and you can walk to things like the post office and the grocery store. It’s a city instead of a suburb on steroids. But …
2003 was a seemingly endless toilet flush of doom and despair …
31.December.2003
As bad as 2000 (when the tech sector died), 2001 (9/11), and 2002 (Afghanistan, recession) were – 2003 was, for me, the worst. Yeah, the U.S. took down Iraq, and we even found Saddam, but on the home front – at the personal level – 2003 was a seemingly endless toilet flush of doom and despair.
Around mid-summer it became clear that I would not be able to stay in the Bay Area. The place, and the house, I thought would be “home” for the next decade or two was not to be. I moved to the Bay Area partly because I figured as a high-powered technologist I could always find work there. Not in the Bush economy, though. Nothing. After sacrificing mind, body, and spirit to Technology for 20 years, I wasn’t even able to get an interview. That kind of dedication is about as valuable…
Mark Kaiser passed away during the night of Friday the 29th of November, 2003. For those familiar with the development of WarBirds, Mark was the art director at ICI. A heart attack is the suspected cause, but no precise determination has been made as of yet. Mark was in his early 40′s.
Mark and I first ran into each other in the early 90′s in Air Warrior. Later on when he went to ICI I was consulting there a little and we had another chance to talk briefly. It wasn’t until we both ended up at Motorsims that we really got to work together and know each other. Motorsims was a nightmare overall, but there were some good times. Three of ‘em, I think. One was our Age of Empires binge. Mark, Random, and I really got into that game. The three of us would team up against the AI on max difficulty and get massacred about a third of…
Skipping over the scum-puddle of despair
The “bubble” didn’t just burst on me. It was like some atomic mutation of swine burst it’s innards all over my life. After over twenty years in high tech – doing everything from assembling high-end stereo equipment to being a CTO – I can’t even get interviewed in Silicon Valley. Where the jobs are supposed to be. At least that’s why I moved here.
So, true to GonZo fashion, I am picking up and moving to Los Angeles to start a different life. I have my own start-up export company to work on, and two friends have ventures I’ll be helping with, plus my little web design consultancy may be able to find some fertile soil in LA. The place I thought would be “home” for the next twenty years has turned into a wasteland. I will be online via dial-up for email during the move, and should be back to broadband connectivity by…
