This place is SO amazingly, refreshingly, awesomely, mind-bogglingly, ground-breakingly (yes, that’s a new word), life-changingly (write that one down), career rejuvenatingly, totally, totally cool.

I am seeing the world through new eyes, truly. I am in awe. I am absolutely having the time of my life.

Maybe some of it is due to the “having been hitting one’s head against the cement wall for so long, anything else feels downright wonderful” syndrome, but I think it’s more than that. VMware actually gets Open Source. The movement, the power, the people, the world-wide community, the whole thing. For the last three days, I’ve constantly been thinking how refreshing it is to not have to fight my employer every step of the way, trying to introduce Open Source solutions, getting permission to use Linux, getting support for it, etc. I’ve been fighting that uphill corporate battle with little support and few victories for so long that I’ve not fully realized how tiring it is before just now. But here, to not only not have to fight policy, culture, etc., but to even be encouraged and supported in using Open Source and Linux… it is wonderful. Like coming home to a family that you never knew you had (see paragraph 1).

Thus far, (3 days into it, all brand-spanking new, wet behind the ears, and what-not), I’ve managed to uncover a small inconvenience in our gtk24 wrapper script that shows up when you don’t have libgtkmm installed at the system level, as I do not being that I am infinitely more comfortable using KDE with a small smattering of GTK-based apps (xchat (hi Thiago! please fix the SOCKS proxy issue so we can get app-specific settings! =;)) and pidgin mainly). So I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to poke enough at that one to be productive on my first week at work. =:)

But I digress…

Oh, by the way, San Diego (my home until 9 years ago) is on fire. Film at 11.

VMware is beyond uber-cool. Unspeakably so. I love it here.