Went to the coast today to surf Florence, OR. The air was 37 degrees, and the water relatively balmy at 52. It seems crazy to get in the water when you have to scrape ice of the windshield, there are high tide warnings about huge logs floating off the beach, and great whites prowl the river mouth. But the waves were double overhead with light off-shore breezes. It was hard to catch many rides with the high tides, but the ones we caught were a lot of fun. I went with Clark, who I met last year at the same spot. He's a great guy and hoping this will be an annual tradition.

 

And oh yeah...Happy Thanksgiving

 

 

Here's a collection of the company's offices around the world.

My laptop found what has got to be my favorite wireless network ever: HOLYLAN. Of course, it was security encrypted (LAN is geek for Local Area Network).

Forgot to post: Ryan married his girlfriend Monica Sacks October 27th in Los Angeles. I flew done a bit early and took him out to dinner and bowling with crowd of friends, and then to the penthouse suite at Sunset Hotel where we drank scotch on the veranda overlooking the city. The wedding was fun, and got to hang out with Phil and Chris some too. My Dad was funny: he told Phil that since we were all married he probably wouldn't be seeing him again for a while. A bit sad, though, how even though we're all on the west coast it's pretty wide distances between us. Ryan and Monica looked very happy, and took off for Paris and Italy for their honeymoon.

 

Check out the video of the kids' toast:

 

 

I ran along the beach today and was surprised to see overhead waves. I guess I thought that since the Med wasn't an ocean it couldn't get a real swell going, but I suppose there's enough fetch to the west of Israel to build up some sizeable wind driven waves. It was closed out and choppy, but that didn't stop 10 locals from charging anyhow. Made me wish I could go find a good river mouth beach break that I'm sure was somewhere on the coast.

I was in Canada last week, and everyone on TV - politicians, news anchors, talk show hosts, sportscasters - was wearing a small red carnation in honor of what they call Remembrance Day, which is the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, when the armistice was signed to end the first world war. There were even government commercials - called public service announcements - reminding people of the sacrifices of Canadian veterans throughout their history. I'm in Israel today and on the way into the office saw a stooped retiree wearing gray slacks, large wrap around sunglasses popular with geriatrics, and a dark blue blazer festooned with medals earned in the many conflicts since this country's founding. Both the carnations and the jacket reminded me to stop this morning for a moment and give thanks to the many service members serving around the world that make it possible for us to live with peace, freedom and democracy.

I've been on the new job 5 weeks already, so it's about time to give an update. I joined Zango, a 200 person, privately held company in Bellevue, WA, as VP of Business Development. It's a bit of a strange title for what I do. I'm in the biz dev org, but I run the outbound marketing function managing our display and search advertising campaigns across the world. They didn't want to call me VP of Marketing, though, because there's someone (she's really good) in charge of Products and Marketing (product management and public relations). But my job is pretty similar to what I was doing at Microsoft, only for a different product.

 

It's been a great experience so far. I'm learning a ton of detail about digital marketing. There's a perception that people who stay too long and get too high at Microsoft can't leave because they don't really know how to get anything done anymore. That could have been me - I was at Ad:tech in NYC last week and was amazed to see how much activity there is in online advertising, and how much work goes on between companies. I'm sure I've learned more in the last month than I would have in 6 months if I had stayed at Microsoft. I'm also really enjoying having direct impact on the senior leadership, helping for example to define our 2008 strategy. I feel very lucky to have this job and look forward to it each day.

 

Right now I'm on the road. In addition to NYC, I visited Montreal last week to introduce myself to our teams there, and am currently sitting in a little apartment in Tel Aviv. I took a quick swim in the Mediterranean today, and will go into the office tomorrow (Sunday since Fri and Sat are the weekend in Israel) to meet the 10 people on my team who are based here.