A New Schedule
I’m sitting here on a BART train rolling past a complete traffic backup on I-280 south, continuing to prefer the hour of predictable/productive time on the train to an unpredictable/unproductive forty minutes of driving. The beginning of this year I started a great new job at IronPort Systems, the leading creator of advanced email security appliances (think easy-to-use hardware firewall for email) and Internet-wide reputation services to help people accept and process their incoming email. I made the switch because with the direction that email is going due to the changes made possible by authentication, being able to determine the historical behavior of a sender will be a most critical part of how email systems work going forward, and IronPort has the people, the footprint, and the resources to make that work.
Starting a demanding new job with a reasonable commute should be enough to keep me busy, but of course that’s not enough; I’ve started a couple of evening course through UC Extension. Nothing too exciting, just a Calculus refresher course and a Statistics intro; which is actually pretty interesting. (These are all part of a larger project which I’m hoping will work out later this year).
Now what I have to figure out is how keep the balance in my life. This was nothing to stress about when my job was ten minutes away and I had very flexible hours, but now I’ve got to plan ahead in order to be able to even just eat properly! Add in the need for time with the wife, regular exercise, and continuing work on the house, its a new juggling act. But really, I thrive on that kind of challenge. Ever since college it always made me really happy to be operating at 120% time-wise, and coming up with creative solutions to fit things in. It may make me extremely tired (I usually end up sleeping about one full day during the weekend then spending the other day getting ready for the next week), and I may have to put aside some activities that I used to enjoy (cooking, home remodeling, some blogging), but if the activities that are keeping you so engrossed are worth it, then you’ll delight in the challenge to make everything work rather than feel overwhelmed by them.
