As I mentioned in The End of an Era, this past Friday was my last day as a Starbucks partner. I am now a proud Starbucks retiree, but my working days are not over quite yet. This morning I’ll log into my work laptop for the first time and officially start my new role as a Chief Technology Advisor with World Wide Technology (WWT). I’ve been working with WWT for well over a dozen years as a customer, starting way back in 2011 when I was a freshly minted director running infrastructure services at...

After nearly 17 years as a Starbucks partner (Starbucks employees are considered partners because we all have equity in the company), the time has come for me to move on. Since the first week of June last year (‘23), I’ve been on what is called in Starbucks parlance a “Career Coffee Break” AKA sabbatical. If you’ve been a partner for at least ten continuous years you become eligible for a CCB of up to 12 months. It’s an unpaid leave, but you otherwise retain active status for the purposes of...

I’ve been on Twitter for close to fifteen years. For most of that time I’ve predominantly chosen to consume rather than produce. Given the recent developments and ownership, I simply can’t participate any longer. This isn’t going to affect Twitter in the slightest, but for me it’s a major step since Twitter has been my primary source of connection to news, events, fellow technology travelers, and like-minded enthusiasts for quite a long time. It assumed an especially large role when I...

For years and years I’ve been in the habit of “keeping my workspace clean” by closing apps when I’m not actively using them. This started way back in the early Windows days when RAM was precious and OS crashes we far more frequent than they are today. Fast forward a few decades and I’m still in the habit, both on Windows as well as macOS, despite the fact that every machine I interact with on a regular basis has plenty of CPU and RAM. I’m going to work on breaking that habit. I’ve just received...

After several false starts and and lots of procrastination, this blog may actually stick around for a while. I’ve dabbled with blogging off and on, but recently I’ve decided that I really need to start writing some things down and make an attempt to share. So here we are. First up, a few words on my choices of platform are in order. As I thought through how I’d go about doing this a handful of principles rose to the top: I want to have complete control over my content and how it’s presented I do...