Posted 15:58 by Evan

Hello America!

Hi, my name's Evan Hunt, I live in Santa Cruz, and apparently I have an ego the size of a planet. I can't think of any other reason I'd imagine people were interested in reading an online journal of mine, and yet here I am, starting one up. Life is full of little mysteries like this.

Here's some stuff to know about me: I'm married, for eleven and a half years now, to the scintillating Wendy, my first girlfriend, love of my life, and coolest person on earth. I'm daddy to Ben, eighteen months old, best baby ever, don't even get me started, just suffice it to say there's never been another child as cute, smart, funny, strong, or generally and in all ways admirable as mine, and what do you mean "biased"?!

Fatherhood has taken the place of most of my other hobbies; there's just no time these days. But in other years, I enjoyed writing and directing plays, acting and singing, playing music (guitar, harmonica, some piano), writing songs (mostly parodies but some originals), bicycling, flying small airplanes, serving on the board of a local community theatre, and teaching and performing improvisational comedy.

I am passionate about politics, of the strident-liberal variety, guilt and all. Also about intentional community and cohousing, though I don't live in such a community myself (yet), renewable energy and conservation, technology of all sorts, film, theatre, and architecture, principally so I can complain about it, because good God, American architecture sucks, but I digress.

What do I do for a living? Well, that's an interesting question, right there.

I'm a software engineer. A system programmer. I work on the UNIX kernel, the TCP/IP stack, network utilities. Give me an RFC and I'll implement it for you. I've worked for the past fifteen years for SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation, later acquired by Caldera Systems, later renamed to The SCO Group). I know you linux geeks out there are a little ticked off at SCO right now, but it's been a very good place to work.

I'm on a closeknit little team of about six to eight engineers (depending on how you count) and we're responsible for every aspect of the SCO OpenServer 5 operating system. There just aren't enough of us to specialize in anything, so the job is endlessly various. In addition to the things I described above, I handle packaging and integration software and system administration middleware and user interfaces, I port open source packages, I fix bugs in the X server or the compiler, I maintain all the web browsers and make sure in-place upgrades work from one release to the next. Lately I taught the OS how to deal with USB floppy disks, PCI parallel adapters, and Mozilla. It's a fun job.

And I just got canned, y'see.

Well, I mean, maybe. We'll see about that; yesterday I had a two-week transition before my job ended, and today they asked me if I could stay for the rest of the month. Next week, who knows, they may decide that laying me off was a bad idea in the first place and let me stay (I can hope). If not, I may still end up working here as a contractor, like a dozen or more other former employees who somehow still come to work every day. Or I may find a dream job somewhere else! Or I may be out of work for months. Or years. I really don't know with any certanty what's going to happen. Hence the name of this blog.

And it's weird for me to be processing this. I've been here for fifteen years. I was twenty years old when I started. It's been my whole adult life. It's not every day you let go of a fifteen year job and go do something else; maybe I should write about it as it happens and see if it emerges as an interesting story. Hence the existence of this blog.

No doubt I'll spend a lot of time ranting about politics or enthusing about solar power or drooling about how adorable my son is, too, but the reason I'm sitting here typing this right now is that I want to keep some record of this period of freaked-out uncertainty dropped into the middle of a life previously notable for a fairly unusual degree of stability. I'll try not to whine too much; I'm well aware that people in Baghdad have it a lot worse than I do right now. But it's the story I have to tell today.

Hope it's not too dull for my legions of reader. Toodleoo, now.

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