Record parties and better things

Today I started a new phase of my life. As if I needed another new phase after the wedding bells, maternity wards, moving boxes, etc of the fairly recent past, but when they show up, you can’t really turn these new phases away. They are insistent.

This one involved moving on from a company I really enjoyed working at — and in which I strongly believe — in order to devote my brainpower to building what is now just a small website into a real living business (happily it looks like I will be able to stay involved in the company). To help make ends meet I have taken a temporary contract at a not so small software company in Redmond, where I’ll be working on ridiculously large SEM campaigns. Fun.

Highlights!

• Today, of all days, every spambot in the world discovered our site, helpfully informing us of really compelling deals in insurance and telling us about innovative new treatments for very specific medical conditions. Thanks!
  
• Lined up behind the spambots were the classier search engine crawl-bots. All of them. Google had been politely swinging by every day or so to check in, then today it was like “oh, hi, great to see you AGAIN. No, that article is the same as the first four times you looked at it, but feel free to go check in on it. And oh, look, you brought your friend Yahoo! (who totally ignored us for a three weeks, but never mind) and who are those guys from Russia and China? “
  
• I learned that it takes well over an hour to take the bus to the above mentioned software company in Redmond. Ouch.
  
• I have a lot to learn about search engine marketing.
  
• I have a lot to learn about keeping a database intensive web application stable and happy