A very long, strange week (and an even longer post)

The last few weeks have been very strange. We've been working on something big for a while and a couple weeks ago, news of what we are working on reached the public. I'm not going to comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of what has been written, I'll leave that up to you to decide for yourself. What I will do is tell you that my team has been running around on a cloud for a week now and it feels great.

The counter to this is that in the same amount of time, I received two pieces of bad news in my personal life. First, my sister called and told me that she "found a lump" and was going into surgery (she is doing well). Second, a very good friend recently decided that she would stop treatment for the cancer she has.

My friend is in the medical field, and has been in treatment for some time, so I trust her judgment that this is the best path for her - But nonetheless, it's hard to hear. So I spent last weekend and the early part of this week in Omaha visiting my sister and my friend being depressed by that news and oddly elated by work.

A little background: My family has a history of cancer. My father died of brain cancer after a lifetime of *never* being sick or hospitalized, my mother had cancer and the effects of it more or less her whole life. My first loss to cancer and coincidentally my first experience with death was my grandfather who died of lung cancer when I was 8. I've grown numb to the emotional aspects of losing someone to cancer and I have a pretty good idea of what is going to kill me.

So what is happening with work? With the exception of the last couple weeks, work has largely been a bit of a pain in my butt. Something about 16 hour days, needing to work miracles on a shoestring, and having to daily defend every idea we have from being screwed up by people who really should know better. In short, work has been sucking of late. (That being said, we barely spend a dime, miracles are being worked every day, and I never get tired of arguing a good idea.)

The articles that were written about the product that we are working on, "TheSpringBox" were fantastic reviews when you consider that our product is still very beta and is not supposed to be public at this time.

Better yet, the feedback that was written in those articles was just glowing and indicates that "real" people might really like what we have built. Even the very critical Digg crowd had a couple nice things to say and the criticisms are all things that I completely understand given the view they have had of the product. (Although we did find out some insights that are being addressed as I write this)

No need to take my word for it, take a look at the clock in the upper right of this blog - that is one of our widgets, the RSS reader is ours as well.

So the next few weeks will be both interesting and challenging. I'm sure that work will return to being a pain, but for the time being I will enjoy the break. In the meantime, I just wanted to thank everyone that I work with for doing such fantastic work.

As to my personal life, well, that's harder. I wish that I could fix everything for my sister and my friend, but I know that I can't do that. I wish both of them my best and I'll try and do whatever I can whenever I can.

Lets talk about old friends

We all have friends that we have known over time. Sometimes these friends seem like the best ones in the world when we are around them, often, it seems like they will always be around.

Friends are transient.

I don't mean that in a bad way. Friends just come and go. Often, not by your or their choosing. Things just add up one day to a parting of ways. The really sad thing about this is that sometimes, with friends that aren't best friends... Friends that are just good friends - they can go away without even so much as a goodbye. You never say goodbye because you don't intend that last time you saw them to be "the" last time you would ever see them.

They move... You move... You get busy.

That last one was my excuse. I've been so busy over the last three years that pure exhaustion prevented me from keeping up the friendships that I really should not have left in the weeds.

So now I have a lot of work to do. I've got a ton of friends in Omaha that I do keep up with, but not as well as I should.

I've also got some people down here that I should follow up with... some that I don't even know how to get hold of.

How does one get hold of someone when you don't know where they are and their last known email and phone numbers are all dead?

Suggestions?