So with the departure of Caterina and Stewart from Yahoo, I don't think much of anyone from the gang of pirates, as Caterina dubbed the ADD team back in 2005/6, is left.

This is a large turn-over of the social media experts, not that anyone in the main product teams ever tapped any of their knowledge much, anyway, and it says a lot about how the Y! culture is heavily focused on things other than product innovation (getting people to land on their "start pages" and the ad platform for the newspaper partners and small business people would be where I'd guess all the efforts are going right now--in other words, a replay of the equally successful Knight Ridder and AOL schemes of 2003-06.)

When I joined Yahoo! in  2006, it was to the highly meat and potatoes Personals, but I was so excited at the chance to work in parallel, and learn from, the brilliant people who'd developed flickr, upcoming,  delicious and so on.

I did learn, but not because I recall Yahoo! packaging up their expertise across the org in any way, more because I sought them out--and very little of what I learned actually made it into our product, truth be told--we had to push so hard to rebuild a 2004 platform and tired interface to make our numbers that the virtual gifting, identity badging and other possibly game-changing stuff we hoped to release never happened.

And now Stewart and Caterina are gone, too.

 There are tons of other bright, talented people I know who are still at Yahoo! but those two had a special light I hope the company is sad to miss.

So I spent three days on the road to Northern Michigan, in a house with no wireless, reuniting with the BF and friends and..hiking...and sleeping. The whole time, my Blackberry kept me posted on the world: email, NYTimes, twitter, friendfeed, techmeme, and so on. The fact I could, even while I was on the road and in transition, do what I think of as continuous partial attention monitoring--ie looking at data more than I was contributing--is why I consider my mobile device as attached to my person forever (of course, as I write this, I then realize I left it in the car. Dooh!)

On the other hand, I've missed blogging...terribly. For me, blogging is part of a process of thinking, communicating, articulating, observing...just stopping would be a real shocker, so it feel so good to get back to the machine, coffee beside me, and start writing again.

For the next week or so, I am going to be in juggling mode--balancing working remotely on two projects--with taking a long-planned, long-awaited vacation by a lake with family and friends.  If I had no wireless, no mobile devices, no laptop--I couldn't have made this trip, even if we'd been planning this for a year (as we have.). Even now, I feel like its the strength and support of the teams I am working with that got me here. And I am grateful. For the colleagues and friends I have--and for those mobile, portable devices.

So, let's see. Woke up at 4:45 today, birds singing, dog snoring, temptation to head out into the cool Boulder dawn on  the walk path. Then I remembered all the things I was supposed to do tonight, and turned over and went back to bed.

6:30 awake. Reading email, drinking coffee. 7 am, finishing specs. 8-9 walk dog and hang out outside. 9-11, conference calls (very productive ones).  11:30, head down to TechStars, aka The Bunker.

1 PM Meeting with Mile Culver, Amazon Web Services preso. 4 PM call with prospective tech lead. 5PM Lost on UC campus, heading for Shelfari talk with Josh Hug.  Late. Call from prospective tech lead; uh, maybe not, not sure yet.

Okay. Back to the Bunker, 6:15 PM. Work some more.
9:30, head for home.
9:40, cleaning the kitchen and moving the owner's schmutz into a closet (yea!), smacking the moths in the cereal in the closet.

10 pm, Diana Krall, wine, blogging before the last cool walk in the night with the dog
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Need to remember that if the moths are in the kitchen, I can smack them. If they are in my head, need to coax them out.