I'm spending about a week in California, on a visit to my day job, Citrix Systems. At one point I was flying to California every week (which was exhausting!) but tight budgets have kept me at home for nearly two years!

That's left me more disconnected than is good for my work -- I write the user documentation and kibitz on improvements in our super-spiffy network accelerator, Branch Repeater (and if you were wondering, no, I didn't write the product description the link points to).

Actually, I've spent my whole career in something of a stealth mode — a computer engineer by training, technical writer (or writing manager) by job title, general guru and architect by inclination. When I was at Activision back during its glory days, my job was discovering all our game designers' design secrets, duplicating them, and distributing what I'd learned to our other designers. Heaven! Pretty soon I wasn't just writing up what had already happened, but was making things happen. And it's been like that ever since.

(Trivia note: I wrote the last piece of code for the Atari 2600 game system ever shipped by Activision.)

Karen will be holding down the fort while I'm gone. I used to live in the Bay Area, where Citrix is, and I'm sure I'll be hooking up with some old friends.