Kathy Lin

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Kathy Lin's personal website — so it's mainly about nothing.

Happy Holidays!

Another year has gone by, and I just wanted to say, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!  What did 2009 bring for me?

  1. New job. This is at the top of the list because I left a long and pretty good career at Booz Allen Hamilton. I was looking for something new, and do not regret my decision.
  2. New degree. In May 2009 I graduated from the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce MS in MIT program.  I received a Master of Science in the Management of I.T.  It was a really awesome experience and I met a lot of really fantastic, smart people. It was definitely the push for me to take the leap and do #1 (new job).
  3. New commute. Unfortunately, with the new job comes a long long commute to Richmond, VA. At least I know more people in Richmond, now.
  4. Been engaged for a year.  Depending on what time zone you are in, Aaron and I got engaged on July 30th or July 31st.  Still planning that wedding!
  5. First blizzard. After living in SC for a good chunk of my life, I’ve not been part of any major snowstorms. Even living up in DC didn’t produce the kind of snow we had last week in Charlottesville — about 20 inches!  It was a lot of fun, but also majorly inconvenient. :) Still pretty neat though.
  6. Completed my next gen gaming console collection. From my humble beginning as a Wii-only owner, I’ve rounded out my frivolous collection with a PS3. I had been waiting for years for the “thin” version to come out and in August, it finally did. Of course, the amount of time I’ve had for any gaming in recent months has gone down substantially.

WordPress and the Twitter API

WordPress announced recently the ability to post and read via the Twitter API.  This is kind of interesting to me because it manages to blur the line between a blog and a micro-blog. If your Twitter feed is supposed to be what you are doing in 140 characters or less, your blog entry should at least have more meat, yes? I think so.

But perhaps in this day and age with short attention spans, maybe not.  Just skimming this page shows I don’t blog very often.  Of course, my last tweet (over two years ago) is evidence I use Twitter even less frequently.  Maybe one of these days I’ll go back — once someone manages to convince me that it’s not 99.9% noise.

Needs More Content

This site could really use some more contents or updates, or something. Well, let’s just go with the most “recent” update. I started to work a SnagAJob.com on Sept 14th as a Product Manager.  I’m in Bizarro-Land. It’s commercial vs. government, 2-week sprints vs. one month, .Net vs. Java (NAnt? NHibernate? c’mon — these names aren’t very original), and in general, requirements and user story creation vs. build-it-run-it-test-it-deploy-it.

I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet. It is very very different from what I used to do, so let’s just leave it at that.

Aaron, Xandy and Neely are doing great. I’m still living in Charlottesville, VA.  The commute isn’t the best, but others at work have a long commute, and they don’t complain so I don’t want to too much either.

My wedding site is up in a skeleton form, the big day is November 6th. I am gladly taking recommendations for photographers, but venue, caterer, and cupcake-maker are pretty much nailed down.

I Never Update

This post is for Matt Derby, who says I never update.  I don’t.  It’ll always be the dream, though.

McKenzie/Phelps Wedding

Aaron and KathyThis past weekend was Wedding #1 in my Two Weeks Two Weddings extravaganza. Tim and Robin were married on 3rd November, 2007 at the Elkridge Furnace Inn in Maryland. Pictures can be found here.

Aaron was best man — his speech was, shall we say, ‘short and sweet.’ The Inn was pretty nice, and I’ll have to say it was really awesome that the weather cooperated since this was (unknown to me!) an outdoor wedding! We stayed at the BWI Hilton, which was a nice hotel. An extra plus was that one of the channels on the TV was ESPN HD. This amused me greatly, as College Gameday was at Oregon and I swear you could see every bead of fog in the air.

Oh, right the wedding. :) It was really nice. Congratulations Tim and Robin!