E's musings on life, tech and whatnot

Holiday Letter 2010

Dear Friends and Family,

It’s hard to believe another year has gone by.  It seems like just yesterday that we were spending our days in that lovely cell in Africa. Oh, we can’t thank you enough for all your kind letters and offers of cash. You know, after our guards saw that outpouring of support they got the idea that our friends could help out their cousin the Nigerian prince. I’m sure you all got the emails. Thanks to the hundreds of credit card numbers you sent along, our captors made a small fortune and in a fit of generosity decided to let us go. Can you believe it?

So, there we were all alone stranded in Africa. Luckily, we met up with a group of angry young men on their way to Kismabutti, a small village at the base of the Nile. They kept chattering on about liberating some friends from militant stenographers. I had no idea what they were saying but Tim somehow managed to strike up a conversation with their commander. He was so impressed with Tim’s knowledge of obscure Amish typography that he immediately made him a general in the Esoteric People’s Liberation Army. Wasn’t that incredible?

Tim’s first mission was to capture a warehouse of black-market beauty supplies. Everything was going well until clumsy me tripped over a case of false eyelashes and tumbled into a vat of overnight mud masks, dragging poor Tim with me. I don’t know how long we sat there trapped by the dried mud, but the next thing we knew we woke up in a museum in Egypt. It seems that some archeologists mistook us for ancient statues and shipped us off to be catalogued. It sounds ridiculous but that’s really what happened.

Imagine, an entire team of Ukrainian archeologists mistaking us for ancient artifacts. Why, Tim just turned 40! As an apology, they offered to take us along on their expedition up the Nile. Turns out I was a born archeologist. Honestly, who would be better at digging up old ruins than someone obsessed with dusting?  Within weeks they asked me to lead an expedition to Turkey to hunt for Greco-Roman dental hygiene equipment. It was all so unexpected. I felt like we were living in some preposterous fantasy.

Sadly, our expedition was not very successful. On our first day in Istanbul we visited an ancient underground cistern where Tim turned some knob he shouldn’t have and the next thing we knew we were sucked up into a pipe. When we came up for air we found ourselves in the catacombs of Paris. Somehow Tim had accidentally discovered an ancient toilet system that spanned all of Europe. Seriously, if I didn’t have the soggy underwear to prove it, I would have said it was a ludicrous lie too.

I quickly contacted my archeology colleagues, and they insisted we travel to Kiev so Tim could present his findings at the annual Archeological Symposium on Toilets and Bidets. His lecture was so impressive that the head of the Sam Houston Institute of Technology immediately offered him a fellowship to study pre-Columbian sewage treatment in South America. We couldn’t believe it. I had to confirm the offer twice to make sure it wasn’t a bold-face lie.

Unfortunately, we never made it to our dig in Bogotá. Due to a slight spelling error we ended up on a freighter headed to Greenland. Happily, we soon discovered that our Russian captain was the second cousin twice removed of the commander of the Esoteric People’s Liberation Army. Wasn’t that an impossible coincidence?

After discovering our deep connection, the captain took us into his confidence. Apparently, he’d uncovered a subterranean passage that connected the Frasier Asoff islands to the men’s room of the Newark airport.  As I write this we’re preparing an expedition. If we succeed, we’ll be the first ex-freedom fighting archeologists specializing in pre-Columbian waste management and Greco-Roman dental hygiene to travel from Greenland to Newark by dog sled. I know, I know it all sounds completely unbelievable. But really, who would make
this stuff up?

Tim and Erick

Holiday Letter 2009

Dear friends and family,

Has it been a whole year already? Well, my oh my it has certainly been a year of change around the Vera-Smith household. Where to begin?

The year started off with a bang, or more accurately an explosion. Yes, our little pottery side business didn’t quite work out. A word of advice, when someone sells you slightly-used kiln, make sure you ask what they were firing. Let’s just say it was not pottery. The hole in the foundation wasn’t that big and really the structural damage was minor. We had too many rooms anyway. Oh and the police were ever so kind about the mysterious cloud of white powder emanating from our little fire. Really, not to worry. The lawyers cleared it all up. We only received a small fine and just a few short years of community service. No really it’s fine.

Well, after that little incident we were so ready for a vacation. Seeing as how the house was red-tagged as “Not Habitable,” we took it as a sign to pack up the car and see America! You know, it’s amazing how little you really need on a road trip. I mean, we only had a few dollars between us and just one change of clothes but we did fine. No really, we did just fine. You will not believe all the lovely people we met along the road. Everyone was so kind. One group of healthy youths even took care of our car while we were stopped by road. It seems that they took a real shine to our convertible and well, they really needed it more than we did. I just wish I had gotten their names so we could thank them for introducing us to the joys of hiking. While it would have been nice to have a t-shirt or two, Tim and I got marvelous tans from our days of walking. “Exposure” really isn’t as awful as everyone says. 3wks in the hospital and we were right as rain. In fact, it was a blessing in disguise. Just as we were discharged, we got word that the house was all repaired. See? We were so happy to save on hotel bills. It all worked out just fine. No really, it was fine.

We moved back just in just as the summer was ending. The contractors we hired were real salt-of-the-earth types. They did an almost perfect job. You hardly miss the front door, or downstairs bathroom. Cooking in the master bathroom is just like camping. It was really kind of fun. And you won’t believe how much we saved on water bills. I mean with all the water pouring in through the roof, Tim and I could take refreshing showers every morning courtesy of mother nature. I highly recommend it. It does wonders for the skin.

With winter fast approaching it seemed like a good idea to start thinking about generating a little income. It seems that Tim’s firm was not all that understanding about our mix up with the law. After a short court discussion Tim was ready for new opportunities! I on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised to find out that my firm was quite progressive. Why they went as far as to offer me an exciting position in a satellite office in Zimbabwe. While it would have done wonders for my resume, I decided I just couldn’t part with our little house and all those pesky debts. So now, I too am ready for new opportunities.  I can’t tell you how exciting it is to be completely unfettered by our old life. We are absolutely fine. No, really we’re fine.

Well, with all this free time Tim decided to get even more involved in his church. You can’t believe how overjoyed they were to have someone of Tim’s caliber available to lead a mission. It turns out they were just desperately looking for someone to travel to Africa to convert some Scientologist pygmies. What luck! We just jumped at the chance to help out our fellow man. Unfortunately, with so little time to prepare we had to leave in the dead of night without notifying anyone. I do hope we didn’t worry you. I’m sure the house is fine. The bank was kind enough to take it off our hands just days before we left. You could even say this was our “community service,” . I‘m sure the courts would see it that way.

Sadly, we ran into a tiny snag on our trip to the mission. Well, you know how much I love to travel and international travel just gets me all excited so you can see how I could have forgotten our passports somewhere along the way.  Really, I don’t see why it was such an issue for the customs people in Africa. I think we could have worked it all out if Tim hadn’t brought along some pots for the pygmy families. For some reason the security dogs went wild for those pots. I’m sure I don’t know what it could have been. I mean, I did use some clay that came with that darn kiln, but I’m sure that couldn’t be the problem. In any case, they shipped us off to Zimbabwe to await our chat with the local authorities. So we made it to Zimbabwe after all. Isn’t that a riot! If my chums from work could see me now.

I’m sure there’s no reason to worry. I can’t believe this will take more than a few months to work out. You’ll see, my next letter will be full of all the amazing sights we’ve seen here in Africa. For now, we’re in a rather small windowless room, but really it’s not that big an inconvenience. It’s fine really. No really we’re fine.

Much love,

Erick and Tim.

And the beat goes on…

I’m baaaack. Yes, you can’t keep a good community manager down. So where have I been you ask? I know you’ve all been just dying to know. Well, about nine months ago I started as the Content and Community manager at a start-up working in the exciting field of API development and management. Apigee, whose motto is I <3 APIs, is a groovy provider of API management tools and app services in Palo Alto, CA. 

Ok, so when I started I did not <3 APIs, I really had no use for them other than creating reams and reams of API docs for Flash development. Turns out APIs are everywhere and everyone is using them and if they’re not, they will be. The dawn of the app economy has made APIs a neccesisty for any kind of modern company. You know how everyone these days has an app on you phone from Amazon to Zappos? Well, those apps all call APIs to get and send information to the mother-ship or backend. That’s a real simplification, but you get the picture. So, the point is that with all those cool APIs floating around companies need someone to help them develop and manage their APIs and that’s where Apigee comes in.

Ok before this post starts sounding like a sales pitch let me tell you where I come in. I was hired to write docs. That lasted like 5min. It became pretty clear that we needed a doc team to not just create docs but do community-driven content.  We’re on the ground floor here. We just released our first self-serve product and with it a brand new Doc site my team created. 

It wasn’t easy. In nine months I had learn how to program Drupal, talk intelligently about RESTful APIs and remember how to use Illustrator. We’re a small team so I was art director, editor, designer, developer and manager. It’s been super fun and nerve-racking. In any case, I can now proudly point the world at our site and open it up to real users. We’re live now so this is where the community part kicks in. Once again, my team is venturing out in the forums, twitter-land and blog-o-sphere. We just getting started but it’ll be cool to see if the learnings I gained over at the big Adobe machine can be applied to API developers and enterprises.  

Should be interesting at least. The tales continues over on the Apigee Doc team blog.