Hey! Where’d everyone go?

I’m thinking just about everyone has given up on Xooglers and deleted it from their feed list. I’m okay with that. Frankly, expectations were starting to exceed my willingness to meet them. I’m happy to keep posting on my own schedule, which is arbitrary and inconsistent (as any of my former supervisors would likely confirm), and I can live with the lonely echoes coming back from all corners of cyberspace.

Not that you asked, but, where have I been?

When my computer crashed, I started engaging in activities that didn’t involve sitting in front of a screen. To my surprise, the number and diversity of distractions the world offers appears to be unlimited. When you’ve been focused very intently on a single enterprise for a long while and then step away from it, the variety of options open to you can be almost paralyzing.

As I started looking into some of these options, I debated giving up on Xooglers altogether and making a clean break from all things Google. Several Xooglers I know appear to have done just that. Maybe this was the time to move on with a new phase of my life and bury the past.

But the thing is, I still I have stories I want to tell.

And while I’m sure the baristas at Starbucks would love to hear me spin my tales to the accompaniment of the ice crusher cranking away on my grande twice-blended coffee frappucino, I have a notion it would be better to keep writing them down.

Kevin Kelley had a nice piece in the Sunday New York Times on how the Internet is turning all knowledge into one big interlinked book. It got me thinking that it would be nice to make a few more contributions to the chapter on Google. It would be a shame if the company most likely to do the heavy lifting on digitizing the world’s information were to be represented only by outside perspectives on how it all came to be.

But it was really last Wednesday’s farewell to Paul that convinced me to pick up mouse and keyboard again.

Paul was one of the first engineers at Google. Among other things, he came up with the idea for PigeonRank. Oh yeah, and Gmail, which he largely built himself in the middle of the night. Paul liked to get to the office after noon or even at dinnertime, then work on into the next morning. After 7 long years of midnight coding, he’s leaving the company. Last week, I went to his sendoff in Palo Alto and ran into lots of Googlers and Xooglers.

Harry was there and I finally heard firsthand how he tried to shove a box back into its rack and succeeded in cutting through a cable at Exodus, almost electrocuting himself while bringing down large numbers of servers. Schwim reminded me that it was his idea to take the back off the server cage so they could squeeze in one more piece of equipment, not realizing that removing the wall meant there was no support for the overhead beam that followed it’s gravitational mandate to conk Jim on the head.

It was great to learn about the latest additions to Meng’s wall of celebrity photos. Meng manages to get a snapshot of himself with (almost) everyone of note who enters the GooglePlex, from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to Jane Goodall and Gwenneth Paltrow.

I got caught up with Salar, Amit, Peter, Val, Jane and Zain among others, and it reminded me what an interesting bunch of people I had once had as coworkers.

So, I’m gonna give it another go. I may spend less time compulsively polishing my prose (which really slows things down) and just post more stories in their raw form. And I’m going to post on items in the news related to Google as I see them from a Xoogler’s perspective. I’m sure you’ll let me know if that’s what you want to hear from me.

That is, if anyone's still around.