What exactly am I doing here?!
This image speaks for itself. You may need to click the image to get the full effect. It’s April in Dallas, Texas, and it’s !@#$!@# 100 degrees outside today. This is insane. The only thing that’s keeping me sane is that I have the air conditioning in my house set to 68 degrees.
I include Portland in the image as a comparison as I’lll be there for the rest of the week. Why? Portland, as of late, has been claiming (or rather, planning) to be the the “open source capital of the world”. I’m up there for meetings with a bunch of organizations to see what makes the Portland open source tech economy tick. Many thanks to Scott Kveton of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab for making a bunch of introductions for me for this trip.
So why am I in Dallas, exactly? Well, I came up in 2001 after the tech economy in Austin dried up. Unemployed after a 3-year stint with excite.com during the boom, I took a job with a brick-and-mortor firm, La Quinta Inns, where I helped relaunch their ecommerce system. After leaving La Quinta in mid-2005, and having recently joined The 451 Group, it’s time for a reassessment. Portland may be my new home, if things look promising on this trip.
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