My Left Arm for a Teleporter

Moving Day has come. In approximately six-and-one-half hours, movers will show up at my front door to take my crap – which seems to have multiplied, making me wonder if dark closets are particularly romantic environments for inanimate objects – and haul it down to Virginia. How did we accumulate so much crap? Why can we put a man on the moon, and a monkey into space, and yet we still can’t teleport matter? But I digress.

As excited as I am about working at LC, deciding to leave Princeton and the New Jersey area was not easy. New Jersey’s my home state, where most of my friends and family still live, and though I keep moving away, I’ve wound up coming back each time. (Insert obligatory Godfather “pull me back in” impression.) I was completely comfortable and very happy working at Princeton, where we were making real headway on building out the digital library. I’ll miss my colleagues greatly – the people I met at Princeton were all friendly and created a laidback workplace. I will miss our semi-regular lunches at Triumph brewery.

I have to thank Kevin Clarke specifically for making my time a real joy. He sheltered me and my colleague, Parmit, from a lot of administrivia and committees and meetings (oh my!), allowing us to concentrate on the job at hand, and was always supportive of our technology choices – I’m glad I’ve left a legacy at Princeton, namely saddling my replacement with a bunch of Ruby code and a couple Rails apps. I was especially thankful that Kevin and our administrators were fully behind my decision to release much of the software I wrote as open source (MIT/X11 license). They made the procedure an absolute snap, allowed me to retain copyright, and were flexible with regard to the choice of license. As an open source neophyte, I appreciated the flexibility.

Time to hit the hay, and hope that tomorrow’s move goes smoothly. We’ll have ten days to unpack and settle in, and I start at LC on the 29th of this month. I noticed today that one of the big projects my team has been working on got a write-up in the NY Times today (hat tip: Ed). I can’t wait to jump on board and start wrapping my mind around these projects. I fully expect to be overwhelmed and challenged. I’m really looking forward to it and I’ve got a great team to work with. But for now, I’ve got to rest. The movers will be here before I know it and we have a long day/week ahead of us.