Moving to Sacramento

Last week, I interviewed for a position at Cal State University, Sacramento, or Sacramento State University. They quickly made me an offer and I accepted. So I will be moving to the position of Associate Vice President for Administrative Computing at Sac State. I am very excited - the job plays to my strengths, focusing on Peoplesoft, Data Warehousing and other administrative initiatives, and gives me a great opportunity for change without a very dramatic move. Even though we will move to Sacramento, we will still be in very close proximity to Dara, Zach and Aidan and to Nan. I was obviously interested in the job when I applied, but became even more swayed when I got to Sac State. Some of the things I liked: Seems like there's a focus on students, the campus is very nice and very walkable (i.e. flat), the IT organization seems to have a very positive energy, and the budget issues seem more manageable.

On a personal level, I will likely commute from the bay area to Sacramento starting in January until about June, when Aisling gets out of school, planning to move then. We need to meet with realtors and mortgage agents to figure out if we can maintain our two homes here, renting them out, while buying something in Sacramento. Aisling is very excited about the move. Her top priority seems to be to get us to buy a house with a pool. Gordon's top priority for a house is the garage, and of course, mine is closet space! And air conditioning. It's way hotter in Sacramento than it is here. It'll really be interesting to see how the cats do when we move them, especially Saki. That cat is loony! I can't even imagine being in the car with him for the hour and a half drive to Sacramento, let alone keeping him in a new house for a couple of days while he acclimates to the area.

So stay tuned! As plans unfold, I will update my blog.

Halloween Photos

Friday was Halloween, always one of my favorite holidays. This year, of course, the holiday comes close to what is certainly the most exciting election since I've been in the U.S. Exciting and important and also with interesting characters. So it's not a surprise that the candidates and other election-related people (i.e. Joe the Plumber) showed up at Halloween parties. At my job, I planned with several of my colleagues to have multiple Sarah Palins show up, and we did. There were four of us. See photos here.

So now to my story about the photos. I have been using flickr for a long time now. I love flickr. And I like it even more because I get a flickr pro account for free, somehow related to my home internet account. So I use flickr not just so share photos, but basically I upload all my digital photos to flickr as a way to have them backed up. So I am constantly uploading photos to flickr, because I am sort of obsessive about making sure they're backed up. Then a few months ago, my colleague and friend David Greenbaum showed me a feature on flickr that I didn't know about, the statistics. If you're a flickr user and don't know about the stats, I highly recommend that you get to know them! Basically, you can click on your statistics and see how many people have viewed which photos, both for the previous day and for all time. I think you get to your statistics under the "You" link. Since David showed me this feature, I have been absolutely obsessed with my stats on flickr. I view them daily, actually sometimes more than daily. I view them on my phone on the bus on the way home. My kids tease me about it unmercifully. But I like to see which of my photos are popular!

Also, over the last couple of years, a few of my photos have been "discovered" by random people on flickr, who then email me and ask me if I can add my photo to their group. For example, the American Red Cross added a photo of my daughter at the annual Red Cross run in San Francisco to their American Red Cross group. Now I'm friends with the American Red Cross and see new photos of disasters as soon as they post them, which is kind of cool. I've also had a photo added to the International Talk Like a Pirate Day group, an Oakland Coliseum group and a Canadian Flag group.

So what does all of this have to do with Halloween? Well, I came home from work and immediately posted my Sarah Palin lookalike photos to flickr. (Another obsession of mine, the photos usually get published as soon as I have access to a computer). Within an hour, I got a request to add them to a "Sarah Palin on Halloween" group, which I of course accepted. You can see the whole group here, it's pretty funny. Then I started to notice something. I started to see an incredible number of views of my Halloween photos! By the end of the day, I had over 700 views of my photos. My top 10 most viewed photos on flickr over time now includes 9 Sarah Palin photos and one old one, a large man wearing a thong at the Bay to Breakers. That one has thousands of hits. It somehow got posted on a site that shows naked people at the Bay to Breakers. But I was just amazed at the popularity of these photos! Flickr is amazing.