Yesterday (Saturday, May 8th), I accepted a position with vmware's new Cambridge, Massachusetts office, as technical employee # 2. One of their in-house recruiters saw the words "Virtual Machine" on my resume and decided that there must be a match. I'll probably start on Monday, May 23rd. So, after almost sixteen years away, I have finally returned to Cambridge.

I also had a competing offer from Mazu Networks, another fine firm with its headquarters in Cambridge. Where was either of these offers when I really wanted one in Los Angeles three years ago?

Thursday, March 31st was my last day as a contractor at IBM's T. J. Watson research center in Hawthorne, New York. I didn't properly set up new infrastructure outside of IBM for myself to use, and so I am only now back to having a Linux workstation that I can build Jikes RVM on! I still don't have a permanently connected server that I can run some of the Jikes RVM nightly tasks on in places where I can get to the results.

Since April 4th, I have been in Massachusetts, consulting on an (unfree) Personal Digital Video Recorder product that is implemented in real-time Java on top of Embedded Linux. Pretty cool, except for the proprietary software aspect of it. I like the people at Motorola's UCentric division, and I like what I'm learning there; I'll be sorry to say goodbye to them. But I'd be a fool to turn down VMware, which is offering me more money, better benefits, a better location, and more interesting work.

I sent in my resignation letter today. Tomorrow I'm driving in from home in New York to work in Maynard, Massachusetts. I don't know if they're going to want to keep me on for two weeks or to end the contract immediately; either way would be fair.