Spent the past two days in California hacking on sparklab with Jason, Eugene, Diane, Prat, Aaron, and Kathayoon, who quickly embraced me as one of the crew. It's been wonderful spending the past two days getting to know them, the team dynamics, the project, feeling out where I fit in -- and I'm very much looking forward to spending nearly 2 weeks here hacking with them again in May. I'll write more about this here when I can; right now I'm mocking up the new project site (as of this writing, that link goes to a terrible kludge with no visual design whatsoever) in preparation for our Big Road Trip Announcement and figuring out exactly what's going to be involved on each tour stop (how much do we need to budget in materials costs, how much in gas, what sorts of contacts and people and arrangements do we need in each location beforehand, etc?) so there's no shortage of things to do.
My other projects and conversations are fantastic as well. The conversation on Eucalyptus values made me laugh out loud, as did Jacinta Richardson's posting of the rules of optimization to the C Programming course run on the Linuxchix list. And the Craft of Electronics crew continues to grow with people I am very much looking forward to meeting in person in Kentucky in a few months.
It occurs to me that I'm on teams and building projects and relationships everywhere except the place I live. That seems to be a pattern. Trying to work on that one, too. I'm not... very good at building a home base where I am; the grass always looks greener other places, I suppose. It's something I need to think about a little more.