What I hear you saying is...

This morning I was driving north up Middlefield Road trying to avoid @#%$ 101 traffic, and was passing the old Netscape campus, when I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. The place is now mostly gonzo - with some remnants of AOL still clinging on for dear-life somewhere off Ellis St. -- but any vestige of the once mighty, pulsing armageddon "N" logo is long since gone.

Now it's Verisign and Mercury Interactive and other sundry tech companies you probably use on a daily basis and don't even think or care about. Then I crossed Whisman and drove past the now-empty lot that was once The Wagon Wheel . How many deals were brokered in that place? It was the Buck's of Mt. View in its time. And this got me to thinking about how we age in dog-years here in the Valley. Suddenly 10 years seems like an eternity. I've been here *forever*.

Back when I started my tech career, fresh out of grad-school as a QA lackey for Apple's FileMaker database group, I had a lot of questions about large company life. I didn't understand why my salary was so crappy, or that getting laid-off might work to my benefit. I had no idea what a matrixed org was, or what it meant when an exec took "time off to be with family". I wasn't sure if my boss was any good, or how to tell.

And Silicon Valley was a pretty strange landscape. I mean, just look at El Camino Real -- at first blush, a tawdry blight on humanity; but with closer inspection, hidden gems of strip-mall pleasure were abundant. Where could I find good kabobs? Was there a decent dry-cleaner? Could I trust that the tacqueria next to the CalTrain in Mt View was ecoli-free?

If only there had been some sort of guide, nay oracle, nay ALL SEEING EYE that could have helped me as I groped through years of turmoil, angst and indecision.

Well suck it up, gentle reader, 'cause there's a new sherriff in town -- and what he hears you saying is that you need to read this blog :-)